Day 3: San Francisco

This is the chronicle of day three of our four days in San Francisco.
(Day one can be found here.
Day two can be found here.
Many, many photos of our trip can be found here.)

Ahhhh...Day three was our busiest day in San Francisco. What a day it was!

Again, we were up early. I always get up super early while I'm on vacation. I just hate for a single minute to not be filled. I like to go go go until my little pedis are ready to fall off.

We went back to Sears Fine Food for breakfast.


Of course.

And this happened: We were seated by the hostess and we sat. And sat. And sat. I got grumpier and grumpier as I watched people getting their food and sipping away at steaming cups of coffee. After a bit, I was ready to flag down our waitress and perhaps strangle her.

The hostess seated another table next to us, a middle-aged woman and her teenage daughter. The waitress came over and took their order and I told Dave I was going to have to kill the waitress and that I hated the two people sitting next to us, the woman and her daughter. When the waitress came back with their drinks, the woman said something like, "I think they were sat before us. Are you still waiting for your waitress?" and she motioned to me and Dave. The waitress tried to cop an attitude and said snottily, "Well, I just had four tables sit down!" and she walked away.

The woman turned to me and said, "Well, I guess my eggs are going to have spit on them." And I said, "And probably ours, too. But that's okay. I'm hungry enough that I'll eat them anyway." She wondered if she should have said anything and if she should have said something sooner. I told her that that always happens to me to. "Yeah," Dave said helpfully, pointing at me, "she has the same problem."

I don't think it's a problem to speak up. I think more people should do it. Anyway, the waitress came and took our order, still a little bit snotty, and then Dave watched her pour a couple of cups of coffee. (The coffee station was near our table.) He said that she was really not a very good waitress and you could see that her coworkers were a little bit exasperated with her for it.

God, I remember those awful waitressing days when nothing went right, so I was a bit sympathetic. But I would have been more sympathetic with a giant cup of coffee in front of me.

The food came to the table next to us. Well, half of it did anyway. (Was that on purpose?) The mom got her food but the daughter didn't. Our food came and I offered the daughter the pancakes that came with my breakfast and she declined. Then the rest of their food came and we were all happy. I ate my eggs and hashbrowns and corned beef and pancakes. Dave ate his omelet. The waitress lost her snotty attitude somewhere in there and refilled our coffee several times and even asked us how things were.

As we were finishing up, I quietly told Dave that I was going to buy breakfast for the two at the table next to us, the mouthy broad and her kid. I said more loudly that I was going to go to the bathroom and I got up, found the waitress, said, "This is for you. I know you're having a hard morning," and I slipped her a $20. Then I asked for the ticket for the table next to us and we tried to book it out of the restaurant.

We weren't quite fast enough because the woman caught us at the door and said, "Thank you! You didn't have to do that!" I said that I have to reward mouthy women and she laughed and said that she'd leave the waitress a really good tip. (Which I let her do because that waitress probably needed a pocketful of cash to turn her day around.)

That was how I turned my bad morning around, too. I've never actually done anything like that, bought breakfast for strangers. It was kind of a cool feeling.

After we left Sears, we rode the bus up to Golden Gate Park to visit the California Academy of Sciences. This place is awesome! The building has apparently undergone a ten year, $500 million renovation and it is just amazing. There's a planetarium, a four-story rainforest, an enormous aquarium, and a 2 1/2 acre "living roof" planted with native plants, and on and on. Yes, it's $25 to get in (though entry is included in the $59 dollar City Pass we bought, so yay), but you can spend all day here (if you have all day, which we didn't), and it's totally worth it.

We spent most of our few short hours looking at the exhibit about evolution and in the Steinhart Aquarium, which was really gorgeous. They had an octopus though, which was kind of thrilling, but kind of sad at the same time. (I didn't get a photo of the octopus because there were signs everywhere saying to please don't photograph the octopus because they are very sensitive creatures. Which is also why they shouldn't be in tanks in public aquariums, people.)

Anyway, we could photograph these strange little creatures:
Dave loved these strange little fishes. They were rotund, like puffed up puffer fish, but they weren't puffed up, that's just how they were. They were a few inches in length and they couldn't swim for anything. Their tiny little fins just whirred like wings on a bumble bee, but they hardly went anywhere. They often walked along the bottom of the tank on two little fins that also resembled little suckers and they sometimes stuck themselves to rocks like this little guy is doing. Strange but cute!

These waxy tree frogs were also strange and interesting. They looked as though they were carved from jade and they never moved. They never even blinked. They just sat there, staring, unmoving, like something out of Borges story. They were beautiful, but they kind of gave me the creeps, too.

From the aquarium, we went up to the living roof, the 2 1/2 acre roof that is covered with plants. It takes a moment for its impact to register. It is a strange and beautiful thing, though, to be standing four stories up and be surrounded by hills of strawberry plants and native grasses. Dave made a remark about how it was like something from a Miyazaki movie and that prompted two nerds, father and son, to launch a convo with us. They talked about what Miyazaki movie it was most like and whether it was cool to like Japanese anime and what was cool and what was not cool and so on and on. They were interesting to talk to, but probably only because I like nerds.

After, we had lunch in the Academy Cafe. It was a bit pricey ($38 + tip), but the food was excellent and we ate very, very well. I had Moroccan chicken made with preserved lemon, cous-cous with currants and dates. Dave had vegetarian spring rolls with peanut sauce and a sandwich made of fig and pears (it was supposed to have gorgonzola on it but didn't) on walnut bread. We split a chocolate pot de creme, which was excellent. We both had coffee as we were trying to fuel an afternoon walk in Chinatown.

Lunch!

MMMM!!!

It had taken so long to get to the Park on the bus that we had to cut our visit short to catch the bus back to Powell. From there we had to catch a cable car to Chinatown for our 1:30 City Guide Tour.

The line at the Powell St. cable car turnaround stretched down the block. I knew from riding the cable cars on the previous days that the drivers wouldn't fill up the car at the turnaround, they always left some space on the car to pick up passengers on the route. We bypassed the huge line and walked a few blocks to the second stop on the route and we waited. After a few minutes, a nearly empty cable car came by and I was, like, woo-hoo! Until I noticed the big sign on the side that said TRAINING CAR--NO PASSENGERS on the side.

The trainer said, "We're only going to Chinatown!" And I said, "Well, that's where we're going!" And we climbed aboard.


This was our driver, the guy being trained. Dave didn't want to spook him by taking a full on photo of him. The guy was kind of nervous, I think.

It was interesting watching the driver being trained. I learned that it is incredibly difficult to drive one of those cars. It actually takes two people to drive a cable car. One works the front brakes and cable mechanisms, stops the car at all the crosswalks, and rings the bell. One works the rear brake when it's needed to slow the car on steep descents, sells tickets and checks passes, acts as a rear-view lookout, and often calls out the stops. Stopping a car loaded down with thirty or forty people can't be an easy task. The timing of when to apply the brake to bring the car to a full stop is especially difficult on hills, where the car has to coast upwards to a stop at the flat intersection to let passengers on and off.

I hung off the car, of course, and Dave took a few photos.

We made it safely to Chinatown anyway, and we hopped off the car and hurried to our City Guide meeting point at Portsmouth Square.

An enormous number of people turned up for the tour, not all of them very polite. I really, really hate when people treat some place like it's Disneyland. Chinatown is home to many, many Chinese immigrants and Chinese-Americans who live and work there everyday. Of course, they're very tolerant of the tourists, upon whom many livelihoods depend, but I wish I could say that every tourist was aware and respectful in return. I think, for example, that it's rude to take people's pictures without asking, or to videotape someone without asking, especially if they're just going about their daily lives and not working in a tourist-oriented venue. But none of that matters to many tourists who come to gawk at the natives and take their pictures. It's such an ignorant approach to the world and it drives me nuts and you see it time and time again with groups of tourists. And it's not just American tourists either. There were plenty of European tourists who were equally clueless or outright rude.

And that is me, on my soapbox. And this is me, off my soapbox:

Our tour guide, Warren Lee, is Chinese-American. His father was Chinese, from China. The tour leaned very heavily on the history of the people and the area and it turns out that not many people are interested in the history, so though our tour began with about fifty people, there were perhaps fifteen by the time the donation envelope went around.


Warren Lee, our guide for the Chinatown tour.

The tour was almost two hours long, which is long enough when you're standing in the sun listening to a series of history lectures.




At the end, the guide handed out a map of Chinatown and we doubled back to buy fortune cookies at the Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory in Ross alley. I bought two bags of fortune cookies and two waters and the total was $11. The little old Chinese man who sold us the cookies exclaimed, "Very lucky!" (Double numbers are very lucky in China.)

We also returned to the funky little Eastern Bakery for egg custard tarts (which I first had in Singapore and which I love), a bowtie pastry for me, and a vegetable bao-tse for Dave. We stood around the corner and ate some of our treats standing in the street. They were fabulous. I love the super sweet eggy custard in those tarts.


Our little tarts, nestled together in a brown paper bag.


Dave chowin' down on some bao-tse.

We also bought these souvenirs for ourselves, to put on the garden altar, our little altar/alter egos:

Dave picked out the orange one and I picked out the yellow one.

By the time we left Chinatown, it was almost dinnertime, but we both needed a breather back at the hotel. We caught an enormously packed cable car back down the hill and rode it until we were quite near our hotel. We walked the rest of the way. I was exhausted!

After a nap at the hotel, we went out again, of course.

I wanted to return to LUSH, the fabulous bath shop in Union Square on Powell Street. LUSH is a chain, growing by leaps and bounds, but not to be found in New Mexico. I first encountered them ten years ago in Australia and still remember my first experience with a LUSH bath bomb that exploded leaving me sitting in a pink bath full of rose petals. Awesome. The next night I found myself sitting in a pale green bath filled with little bits of seaweed. I felt like a mermaid! (There is a LUSH shop in Tokyo--or maybe it's in Odaiba--but the products are so strongly scented that when I pulled Kazu into one, he wrinkled his nose up, the proper Japanese response to strong scents, so I didn't buy anything that day.)

Well, here we were, in a LUSH shop. I spent quite a bit on little treats for myself and as little gifts to bring home. Dave called it my birthday present (though he got me some fabulous gifts) and encouraged me to spend more. So I did. I came home with about a third of my suitcase devoted to LUSH swag.



LUSH swag! Powder, bath bombs, bath melts, shower melts, shampoo bars...just a bit of what came home with me.

After LUSH, we walked to another shop, Alessi, near Union Square. They were closed. Then we went to Borders because Dave needed a new book for the plane. They had nothing he wanted. I bought a couple of pairs of earrings from a street vendor in Union Square, a pair of red hearts with the Chinese character for "longevity" on them, and a pair of orange and blue dangling earrings.


(The turquoise pair I bought yesterday at the Ferry Building.)

Then it was time to collapse, but first we needed dinner.

Around the corner from our hotel was a small cafe-type restaurant. I forget the name. Cafe Maison or some such nonsense and we went in and had a nondescript meal, a burger and fries for me and a gorgonzola pasta for Dave. We split a salad and I had iced tea and Dave had a beer. Then we went back to the hotel and collapsed.

Only one more half day left of our short little vacation!