Driving over the Golden Gate Bridge, which suddenly appeared after the Robin Williams tunnel, was simply amazing. It’s such a robust monument, and the ride over it went by entirely too quickly. Fortunately, the slower traffic afterwards gave me a chance to look at the city streetscapes as we continued on in search of our hotel, Hotel Zephyr. The hotel was well-located, near Fisherman’s Wharf, and had a funky decor, but our room was probably the smallest one we’ve ever stayed in (not surprising given how tightly-packed the city felt overall).
We took a stroll through Fisherman’s wharf that evening, and discovered the Musée Mécanique, an arcade full of working, antique, coin-operated games, fortune tellers and puppet shows. It was unusual and carnivalesque.
We explored San Francisco as much as we could, given how disinterested the boys were in most of the attractions, over the full three days we were there. We took a ride on a cable car to the city centre, and found the steepness of the hills to be quite incredible, if at times daunting (when we rode the city bus especially).
We had a look at various shops, rode the streetcar a few times to and from our hotel, went to the Haight-Ashbury district (more on that a bit later), and had lunch in Chinatown.
The one thing that really surprised Eric and me was the number of homeless people everywhere, especially considering the wealth of the city. One time, at a McDonald’s, there was a security guard (as there were in many downtown businesses) whose job was to keep homeless people out of the washrooms. That was just sad, for everyone involved. And it’s not that I felt unsafe walking around San Francisco – because I didn’t – it’s that the issue of homelessness seemed to be largely ignored, which is kind of needless and futile, at least from an outsider’s point of view.
Near the end of our visit we took a city bus to the Haight-Ashbury neighbourhood, and got quite the insider’s perspective on San Franciscans. Shortly after we got on the bus and found four seats together at the back, along the side, a young man rooting through a backpack handed Fisher an unopened pack of comic books that, according to the label, had been purchased at a comic book store in Georgia. I thanked him but didn’t think much of it because someone else saw our map and struck up a conversation with us about how best to get to where we were going. He told us that there were better maps at the bus stops, that we could take this bus to the south entrance of the Golden Gate Park, and then he started talking about natural disasters, and how humans are responsible for them with our urban development and water dams, and he told us about how James Cameron discovered some giant, brain-like being deep in the ocean that’s really controlling things… and so it went. While we were having this trippy talk, a burly, drunk guy came to the back of the bus and sat down in the middle seat of the back row, spreading his legs and arms out, his right hand touching a young woman sitting by the window. She turned to him, and, in no uncertain terms, told him not to touch her, repeating herself louder when he appeared confused. He then passively put his hands on his knees, and I thought to myself what a hero that woman was. And all of this stuff was happening while we were going up and down the crazy-steep hills of San Francisco! Afterwards, Eric told me that the pack of comic books that that guy had given to Fisher was probably from a stolen backpack, which is why the guy was rummaging through it the whole time he was on the bus…
And when we finally got off the bus and started walking towards the park, an air siren came on, and I thought, “Oh my god, it’s the Big One!!” But no, they were just testing the system…
Good times!
I honestly don’t miss city life much, but I was sorry to say goodbye to San Francisco, and all its quirkiness, as we drove away on the Bay Bridge towards Oakhurst, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada…