#I found ONE shop in SF that had a similar dish but I live a thousand miles away from SF so

[lindoig4]

San Francisco

5 July

Having arrived in San Fran yesterday, just a few hours before we left home, we were dead beat and slept late, albeit somewhat fitfully.  We bought breakfast in the hotel, just as they were closing the kitchen at 10am – then went back to bed and slept until 3.15! A very weird day for us!!

We then walked the kilometre or two to Downtown, exploring a little as we went, and called in at several places trying to buy a bigger backpack. The one I was using was filled to capacity so we decided to invest in a bigger one.  We finally found a place with a suitable range just a few doors from the Aida Hotel where we will be staying on our way back to Melbourne in a couple of months’ time.  The first time we came to San Fran in 1995, we stayed at Aida and bought a new suitcase at the very same luggage shop we bought the backpack.  On that occasion, we had broken the wheels off our case getting it down the stairs in Richmond before we even left home on that trip so we had to replace it in San Fran after struggling with it at the Tullamarine and SF airports and then the Shuttle and hotel.

We needed to buy a few comestibles – mainly tea, sugar and coffee – interesting that the instant coffee was under lock and key and we had to get a staff member to free it from its prison so we could buy it. Apparently, coffee is one of the things that is commonly stolen (lots of other very basic things were also locked up) but I can’t see how locking it up protects it.  We were still free to walk around with it and presumably hide it in our backpack before approaching the checkout.

Shopping for olives?  Large, mild and nutty!

It was great to see and hear the trolley buses (in my view far and away the best, quietest, most comfortable, cheapest and cleanest form of mass transport – as well as being very traffic-friendly) as well as the streetcars (trams).  I have long advocated removal of trams and all their overblown infrastructure from Melbourne to be replaced with trolleys.  The streetcars have been purchased from all over the world and retain their original livery and branding.  There is even a W-class Melbourne tram here – apparently recently acquired and still under test when we saw it.

The clanging of the streetcars, the police sirens and the mournful wail of the Amtrak locos are all very nostalgic reminders of our previous trips here, and particularly of San Fran.  It always fascinates me how sounds and smells in particular can transport us instantly to another time and place.  Things we have seen and heard in movies come alive when they are triggered by the merest hint of something similar that we experience in real life.

There are so many different forms of transport here.  The car is king of course, and there are lots of pickups, more and mostly quite a bit bigger than those common in Oz, but there are several types of buses (hybrids, traditional, double-deckers, very loooong articulateds) – and several more personal moving machines.  I have seen hundreds of powered and unpowered scooters and numerous variations of Segways – upright ones, simple wheels with foot rests side to side or fore and aft, all manner of 2-, 3- and 4-wheeled bikes and very cute bright yellow 2-seater, 3-wheeled motorbikes rented to tourists.  And of course, there are the iconic cable cars.  No place for pedestrians like us.

There are many hundred homeless people, mostly but not only, black and they all have their little cache of belongings, but some quite large collections that are transported in a range of trolleys.  Some have their own patches, sometimes quite complex.  I have seen mini tent cities, some small homeless colonies, tiny compounds barricaded with wheelie bins or discarded sheets of iron, plastic and so on.  It is sad to see but it is America, Land of the Free, after all.

We bought a pizza on our way back to the hotel and ate it in our room – and promptly went back to sleep.  Alas another fitful night, broken by a series of midnight messages back and forth to Australia about Heather’s SIM – a little more about that later.

6 July

We purchased tickets for the Hop On Hop Off Big Bus from the hotel and walked the mile or so to Union Square, the closest stop to the hotel. We only went about 3 stops on the bus to Fisherman’s Wharf before they made us all get off and join a long queue to join a different bus - no explanations, but being a holiday weekend and short of drivers who weren’t enjoying their holiday BBQs, we queued for about an hour before we managed to get on our way again.  They seemed hopelessly disorganised but off we went on what was about a 3½ half hour trip around the city, out past the huge Golden Gate Park, across the Golden Gate Bridge then back along the beach and Presidio and eventually back to Fisherman’s Wharf where we alighted in time for a late lunch.

The Big Bus was not quite up to scratch really.  Commentary was light on and a bit trivial, but passable.  Some parts of the route were very slow, almost gridlocked in one stretch approaching the Golden Gate Bridge.  As they said, it was a holiday weekend, every man and his dog (and cat and horse) were out and things were chaotic.  At least we got to see a lot more of SF than we otherwise would have and we got a better perspective of places we might visit at the end of our trip.

The crowds along the wharves were overwhelming, but we checked out the sea-lion colony and the birdlife in one partially enclosed area before heading for lunch.  (We had been thinking of doing a Bay Cruise, but seeing the queues for that, we decided that a couple more hours queueing and getting sunburnt BEFORE boarding wasn’t really desirable.).  We eventually settled on Aliotos Restaurant (partly to avoid the long queues of people waiting to use the public toilets).  Heather had her heart set on clam chowder in a big crusty bun - the signature dish for the wharf area.  We enjoyed them immensely when here 24 years ago, but they seem to have lost the recipe in the meantime (or maybe the clams just weren’t biting) but it was a bit disappointing, mainly vegetarian with very few clams!  I had the Fisherman’s Basket and we helped each other with our respective orders but couldn’t finish either of them anyway.

An interesting thing we heard about the sea-lions on the bus (we were on the bus, not the sea-lions!) was that the whole colony lived out on the beach for as long as anyone could remember – until 1987 when for reasons unknown, they migrated up-Bay to Pier 39 and they (and their squealing pong) have been there for the tourists to ogle ever since.  We saw, heard and smelled them when we were here in ’95 and imagined that they had always been there.

We then caught a grossly overcrowded streetcar back to near our hotel and walked home.  Called in at the local shop for a very small snack and brekky fare, still bloated from our 3pm lunch.

7 July

Heather has spent many hours (mainly in the very early hours of the morning) conversing with people in Australia and New York trying to get the data component of her phone contract working.  She bought some SIMs in Australia to be activated along the way and although the voice component worked, the data wouldn’t and she has spent hours virtually rebuilding her phone in consultation with the phone company, but she finally got it working late morning - thanks to a very helpful guy in New York, and absolutely no thanks to the Cretans in Australia.

We then walked to the Bus Transit Station, a few blocks down the hill, to suss out what we had to do to transit to our train tomorrow.  All pretty easy so we walked down to the Embarcadero and the edge of the Bay.  It was a beautiful summer’s day and there were plenty of strollers out, most with dogs.  We walked a kilometre or so to a market in the huge Ferry Terminal and wandered around that for a while before returning to a bayside restaurant for a late lunch and to watch the world go by.  One wonderful thing happened over lunch when an Anna’s Hummingbird visited a row of WA kangaroo paws right next to our al fresco table.  We managed to get a few photos and had a good look as it hovered around several of the flowers before heading off to places unknown.

That was Bird 13 for me, having seen American robins, American crows, Brewer’s blackbirds, Californian gulls, vultures and hawks, night-herons, cormorants, starlings, sparrows and so on.  The gulls are everywhere, but they are well outnumbered by hordes of the dirtiest scungiest pigeons imaginable.  Some of the many homeless people here look very sad and bedraggled, but the pigeons look a whole lot worse.

We went to an Indian restaurant for dinner and over-ordered as usual.  I thought it was a really good meal and a little cheaper than many places we have looked at.  They boast more than 3000 restaurants in San Fran (I imagine Melbourne has as many!) but competition is so fierce that the average lifespan of each establishment is only a few months.