San Francisco Part Two
Monday 21 March 2005
We awoke to dreariness outside. It was drizzling and everything looked grey and cold.
We went to Fisherman's Wharf first, in the hopes of getting a ticket for Alcatraz from one of the ticket booths lining the sidewalks. No luck. Earliest available date was on Sunday, and we'd be long gone by then. We did get offered a very attractive deal - a sail around the bay with the opportunity to check the sights out in all their various degrees of greyness for only US$15 each! Wow, whatta deal. We passed.
Hoping things would get better, we decided to walk around The Mission for the time being. According to the guide book, it was an "interesting and cool" neighborhood.
It lied.
What it was was depressing and kinda rundown. Of course, the constant drizzle didn't help at all. There were lots of Chinese stores selling cheap toys and household items, just like any shitty neighborhood in Asia. And a rather large number of shifty-looking young men offering girls if you so much as glanced at them.
The weather kinda prevented us from doing anything else we really wanted to do, like see the Golden Gate Bridge, so we called it a day at 4pm, feeling fucked up and depressed.
Tuesday 22 March 2005
Weisheng left for Tahoe in the morning, and from what I heard later, excelled at the snowboarding. Good for him. I take to snowboarding like an Eskimo does to firewalking.
Colin dropped us of at the Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) after we ate at a cheap Japanese place with a cute bear in its logo. Anyway the MOMA was cool, but not amazing. I suppose I felt that way because there were no exhibits that really grabbed me, not like in the Art Institute. There was also a featured exhibit on a Robert Bechtle who paints pictures of suburbia. It was rather horrifying, an entire exhibit filled with depictions of dull, depressing, dreary, disgusting suburbia. I can't imagine why anyone would enjoy that.
We walked around Union Square, checking out the expensive stores before taking a cable car ride down to Fisherman's Wharf (again! - There's no escaping it; it's a tourist trap through and through). The ones here are a lot more worthy of the name "cable car", since they actually have wheels, run on the road, and have steering capabilities and brakes. They're just like trolleys, but on a cable. The ones at Sentosa should really be called "cable boxes". Anyway the ride was alright, and kinda cool actually when the slopes got crazy steep at certain points.
From Fisherman's Wharf, we attempted to walk to the Golden Gate Bridge, but quickly realized it was simply too fucking far away. Colin, meanwhile, was still in Stanford, and kinda late and missing - no big surprise there. To top things off, it started to pour. Cold, wet and hungry, we dodged into a pizza place, where we looked at the rain go from a raging storm to a light drizzle and back again within the span of thirty seconds.
After the break, there wasn't much time left before nightfall, and we knew the only way we could make it to the bridge was by cab. We managed to hail one, although in the process I was almost run over by another cab, and hopped in. During the journey, we realized that the smartest (even though not necessarily most economical) thing to do would be for the cabbie to drive across the bridge to a lookout point, wait for us while we took pictures, then drive us back. It was gonna be somewhat impossible to hail a cab from the opposite side of the bridge, since it was all parkland around it.
So we got to the lookout point and it was near the end of magic hour and all pretty and made us happy.
The total cabfare back to Union Square came to US$50, including a US$5 toll (!) and tip. Which made us sad.
I got a huge atlas at Borders in preparation for our road trip, and Cameron picked us up from there. I told her They Might Be Giants was performing and signing at the Borders on Sunday, and she got real excited. She drove us across the Bridge to Sausalito, which was kinda dead at the hour, and we got slapped with another US$5 toll. Fuck. Then she drove us to Twin Peaks, which presented us with a gorgeous aerial view of nighttime San Francisco.
Colin picked us up from Cameron's at about 11pm. Oh well, I suppose 5 hours' difference isn't that long.
We awoke to dreariness outside. It was drizzling and everything looked grey and cold.
We went to Fisherman's Wharf first, in the hopes of getting a ticket for Alcatraz from one of the ticket booths lining the sidewalks. No luck. Earliest available date was on Sunday, and we'd be long gone by then. We did get offered a very attractive deal - a sail around the bay with the opportunity to check the sights out in all their various degrees of greyness for only US$15 each! Wow, whatta deal. We passed.
Hoping things would get better, we decided to walk around The Mission for the time being. According to the guide book, it was an "interesting and cool" neighborhood.
It lied.
What it was was depressing and kinda rundown. Of course, the constant drizzle didn't help at all. There were lots of Chinese stores selling cheap toys and household items, just like any shitty neighborhood in Asia. And a rather large number of shifty-looking young men offering girls if you so much as glanced at them.
The weather kinda prevented us from doing anything else we really wanted to do, like see the Golden Gate Bridge, so we called it a day at 4pm, feeling fucked up and depressed.
Tuesday 22 March 2005
Weisheng left for Tahoe in the morning, and from what I heard later, excelled at the snowboarding. Good for him. I take to snowboarding like an Eskimo does to firewalking.
Colin dropped us of at the Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) after we ate at a cheap Japanese place with a cute bear in its logo. Anyway the MOMA was cool, but not amazing. I suppose I felt that way because there were no exhibits that really grabbed me, not like in the Art Institute. There was also a featured exhibit on a Robert Bechtle who paints pictures of suburbia. It was rather horrifying, an entire exhibit filled with depictions of dull, depressing, dreary, disgusting suburbia. I can't imagine why anyone would enjoy that.
We walked around Union Square, checking out the expensive stores before taking a cable car ride down to Fisherman's Wharf (again! - There's no escaping it; it's a tourist trap through and through). The ones here are a lot more worthy of the name "cable car", since they actually have wheels, run on the road, and have steering capabilities and brakes. They're just like trolleys, but on a cable. The ones at Sentosa should really be called "cable boxes". Anyway the ride was alright, and kinda cool actually when the slopes got crazy steep at certain points.
From Fisherman's Wharf, we attempted to walk to the Golden Gate Bridge, but quickly realized it was simply too fucking far away. Colin, meanwhile, was still in Stanford, and kinda late and missing - no big surprise there. To top things off, it started to pour. Cold, wet and hungry, we dodged into a pizza place, where we looked at the rain go from a raging storm to a light drizzle and back again within the span of thirty seconds.
After the break, there wasn't much time left before nightfall, and we knew the only way we could make it to the bridge was by cab. We managed to hail one, although in the process I was almost run over by another cab, and hopped in. During the journey, we realized that the smartest (even though not necessarily most economical) thing to do would be for the cabbie to drive across the bridge to a lookout point, wait for us while we took pictures, then drive us back. It was gonna be somewhat impossible to hail a cab from the opposite side of the bridge, since it was all parkland around it.
So we got to the lookout point and it was near the end of magic hour and all pretty and made us happy.
The total cabfare back to Union Square came to US$50, including a US$5 toll (!) and tip. Which made us sad.
I got a huge atlas at Borders in preparation for our road trip, and Cameron picked us up from there. I told her They Might Be Giants was performing and signing at the Borders on Sunday, and she got real excited. She drove us across the Bridge to Sausalito, which was kinda dead at the hour, and we got slapped with another US$5 toll. Fuck. Then she drove us to Twin Peaks, which presented us with a gorgeous aerial view of nighttime San Francisco.
Colin picked us up from Cameron's at about 11pm. Oh well, I suppose 5 hours' difference isn't that long.
posted by cinewhore @ 8:55 AM
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gimme some mindfuckery
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