I was in San Franciso last week with Stacey visiting Dad, cos he was
there for a conference. here are 9 things I noticed about San
Francisco.
- pretty much the first thing we did was the most
touristy thing we could, which was head to Fisherman's Wharf. The best
part about Fisherman's Wharf is all the carnie food they have .. Hot
dogs, chili dogs, popcorn, the works. I had some clam chowder in a
sour dough bread bowl, I don't know what clam chowder is but it was
pretty good. There is a homeless guy called 'bushman' who is kindof a
busker/street performer. He camoflages himself as a bush, and when
people walk past he jumps up & scares them, it was pretty
hilarious. People would pay him $5 to get their photo taken with him.
We got a ferry ride around the bay, the tour guide was telling us there
was a massive earthquake in the 1930s. Afterwards a woman tried to
make breakfast on her broken stove, it caused a massive fire which
eventually burned 70% of all the buildings in San Francisco. It's
known as the Great Bacon & Eggs fire of 1930. Going under the
Golden Gate bridge & looking up was phenomenal. It's massive, and
orange. In comparison I thought Alcatrez looked pretty small, it's
about the same size as our subdivision.
- I had one job
to do in San Francisco - I had to get a bag of sand for my liittle
brother cos hes studying geology. Pretty easy right, it's San
Francisco, I literally thought the hotel would be a 5 minute walk from
the nearest beach. Well apparently there aren't any beaches, theres
one really small beach near Fisherman's Wharf, and another beach on the
west side of the bay. So I never got any sand unfortunately, but to
be honest I wasn't too ecsatic about coming back into Canada with a bag
of sand anyway.
- On Wednesday morning we went for a walk down
Market Street & we saw a genuine anti-war protest rally, with real
hippies and anti-Bush posters. A lady in her 60s gave me a flyer saying
why the troops in Iraq should be brought home. the California police
don't mess around, there were probably 200 protesters, and about 50
policemen, with riot gear & big machine guns. and the police have
those kickass black and white police cars, they look a lot more
intimidating than the Toronto police.
- Afterwards we walked
around Chinatown and Japan Town for a bit, then we got the Bart train
to the Golden Gate bridge, we walked about a third of the way across …
it's too bad you can't walk across one way, and then get a train back.
We got Mexican for dinner, we must have chosen the cheesiest restaurant
possible, there were Mexican guys with somberos playing guantanamera,
but the food was grouse enough.
- we were watching the 10 oclock
news when the newsreader came on and said 'by the way, if you just felt
the ground move, you didn't imagine it, a earthquake measuring 2.4 was
just reported near san some-place.' I never felt it, but it seemed
pretty big, 2.4. Stacey goes 'thats on a scale of 1 to 5 right?', and I
said 'ahh ... yeh it is'.
- I did some shopping, I went to the
big Apple Store to check out the Apple TV, and I got a fancy tie &
shoes for prom from Macys. I also knicked into Borders to get a book
for the flight home, (I got Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut).
When I went to pay for it, it was $15.27, so I gave the guy a $20, 25c,
and 2 pennies. The guy gave me the pennies back and said 'you can have
these, do you have any American pennies' ... I'd given him Canadian
ones. I thought it was a bit cheeky to make a big deal about 2 pennies.
- I
was surprised at how short Californians are, I don't think I saw 5
people over 6 foot, most people were an inch or two taller than me, so
that was pretty sweet.
- The light bulbs in California are
bright!! The bulb in our hotel room was 250W (the light in my bedroom
is only 70W, though there are 3 of them). The lights were so bright,
it felt like the sun was shining.
- here in Canada you can
turn right on a red light (if you stop & give way). I don't think
they have that law in California, cos a few times we were waiting for
cars to turn & they just sat there. and the drivers in California
were WAY polite about giving way to pedestrians. it got to the point
we were waving drivers to go ahead, & they'd just shake their head
& wave for us to go ahead and cross.
So that’s about
it, I definitely want to go back to San Francisco, next time I'd
probably go for a week and try to visit San Jose and Berkley.
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