Paul:
My first impressions of SF are that 3 languages dominate: English, Spanish and Chinese. Men around our hotel speak in a lisping theatrically loud camp way and women dressed in Prada carry small dogs on their shoulder just as a brickie carries a hod. The cable cars cling clang up and down the extremely steep gradients, not one is less than 1:5 and most are 1:4 and 1:3!
We have several recommendations for eating. Breakfast at Cafe de Presse was superb. Some diners were provided with meals they didn't ask for creating wonderful opportunities for aggrieved parties to perform some ham acting. The rest of morning is devoted to a 3 hour movie tour of the town. We starred in our own thriller chasing the tour bus on foot along Geary Street towards Nob Hill after it failed to stop for us. Some tense minutes pass when a character called Brian used satellite technology to target the tour bus and guided us in on Post Street. Amanda says it will cost me $25 for my call. An excitable woman called AJ sang, danced and flounced her way through 80 films and their SF locations. Touring the city like this was fun for me but I sensed Amanda was still fuming about our bus chase earlier. The Bullit car chase was not nearly so dramatic.
After a superb lunch at Boudin, another recommendation, we headed for a cable car. My two pints of Anchor Steam beer with lunch began filling my bladder to capacity and I started to get crotchety until Amanda spotted a MacDonalds. The long queue for unisex toilets snaked through to the serving area and I just about hung on. Somewhere further back the queue had mutinied when an attendant said he needed to clean the toilet. He was beaten back and the queue whooped in victory.
The cable car ride back along Powell St was $6.00 each and quick. It got very crowded and a hapless Chinaman in his 40s was continually barracked by the car driver for stepping into the driver's space, even though Chinaman was simply letting people pass to leave the cable car. "Just stay outta my office man", the driver shouted at him between Union St and Post St where Amanda and I got off. "Don't get shouted again", I said to Chinaman as he stepped aside to let us off. "Man I keep tellin you stay outta my way or WILL throw you off the car", is what I hear walking into the hotel.
Before dinner Amanda and I head for Murphy's bar in Kearny St for a Moose Drool beer and G&T. TV baseball dominates the room. Carl the bar man says he hasn't been allowed to drink on the premises for 14 years when I offer to buy him a drink.
The recommended Tony's Pizzeria didn't look far on the map nor did it show the 1:4 gradients. Amanda and puff our way up hills further away from the glittering lights of shops and bars into the semi dark streets of China town; small Chinese men and women darting around very fast pushing trolleys of food into metal shuttered lock ups. We are the only white folk and we're reminded of our walk through Harlem up Malcom X Boulevard jw 125 W St to Sylvia's.
The Pizza was easily worth the trek we agreed and the Zin/Syrah wine was a fabulous choice. Three camp sounding men next to our table shouted to each other about the men in their lives in a whiny sing song voice; one of them had a Californian Leeds accent. Too late to walk we hailed a yellow cab home driven by a Soviet refugee in his 60s. After I told him I'd visited Moscow and Leningrad in 1974 he became quite chatty. He is very suspicious of Putin's motives he says just he was suspicious of Andopov when he left the USSR as we leave his cab feeling lucky to be back.
Amanda:
I love San Francisco! Looking down from the view across the city, colourful Victorian houses in the foreground and modern skyscrapers behind, I feel I could live here in a way I could never feel about New York. The film tour is an interesting prism for me to explore the areas as I have not seen the vast majority of the films. I'm just glad we got on the bus after it sailed past our designated meeting point with us in hot pursuit - and ignored. The tour shows well over 50 clips on a videos screen but I'd rather see what is actually outside. We then have a fabulous lunch in Boudin on the harbour with the best Virgin Mary that I am ever likely to have.
Not much time for shopping - I have an unsuccessful look for an emergency pair of back-up jeans (since I've lived in mine and they need washing) but buying jeans is hard enough when you know where you are and where you're going and I console myself with one of the mind-boggling array of frappuccino flavours from Starbucks; they have a Starbucks approximately every 100 yards, it's quite peculiar.
For dinner we schlep up many hills of extraordinary gradient and I feel a burgeoning blister growing under my gladiator sandals. By the time we reach the famous Tony's I feel we have earned our pizza. We tell the waiter that we have been sent by friends from Birmingham - and hastily qualify that we mean the UK, not Alabama. It's great pizza and worth the blister but we take a cab back just the same. Paul startles the driver by hopping in next to him and then speaking Russian. I suspect the fare reflects this.
No comments:
Post a Comment