San Francisco – Day 1
This city rocks. It’s colourful, flavoursome, beautiful and exciting. If that’s my summary after spending a day walking around it straight after a 13 hour flight, then it can only get better.
Our first move was to head out of the CBD seeing I’ll be confined to it for the next few days of conferencing. We caught a bus out to The Mission area which is the Latino neighbourhood. There were tacquerias on every corner so we thought we better have lunch in one of them. Good thing we remembered how huge serves are in the US and so even with ordering the smallest things (a taco), I still couldn’t quite finish it. The accents of the people working there, and the level of assumed knowledge when it came to ordering made us feel like, not only were we in a foreign country, but that we were almost in a non-English speaking country!
Mission St isn’t all that exciting if you’re looking for shops, but it’s certainly an interesting street to wander down and look at. Valencia St is the one with the cool record store, bookstores and lots of vintage clothing stores (if only I had the patience and the skill for seeking out some fine vintage threads).
Needless to say, catching public transport to and from this area was an experience in itself – that’s where all the real colourful people hang out.
After The Mission we went across to the Haight area. It’s the hippy area from way back. The main street is a place where people stop their cars to let you cross the road, while people on the street try to sell you incense sticks and sometimes even burst out in rhyme. As tiredness took over we started to head back to the bus but on the way I spotted a cool little shop with stuff by local designers. One cute skirt later, my energy had returned and we were on a bus back to the city.
There was no time for the afternoon nap we’d planned on having as we were meeting Karen, a Sydney friend of Peter’s now living in SF, for dinner. Cable cars are really fun – and quite necessary (for tourists, at least) given the tremendous hills on certain streets. We took the Powell one all the way up the hill and then down a bit before meeting Karen at her office past Chinatown. From there (after giving us an Atlas she recently edited and ghost-wrote) we checked out a local institution, City Lights Books, where as well as having plenty of excellent books (and lots of places where you’re encouraged to sit and read them), they also have a whole wall of hand-made, self-published zine-type stuff.
We ended up in the Italian part of town for dinner and a lovely bistro with tasty woodfire pizza and great Californian house wine. Later on we stopped at a the San Francisco equivalent of Leichhardt’s Bar Italia for coffee and hot chocolate. And then, finally, sleep.