Leaving San Francisco

We woke up early and headed by train (or rather: by BART) with our bags to the car rental place adjacent to the airport. The people at the counter were very taken with the fact that we actually spoke English, and proceeded to talk to us about car driving exams, German food... all sorts of stuff. We knocked out three working stations worth of car rental people. Eventually they processed us and pointed us to the parking lot, where we were told to pick out our car. I managed to force a Dodge Avenger over Gosia's Corolla, and we're very happy with it so far. It actually looks like a proper car, and it seemed more fitting to go with something thoroughly American.

At first Gosia was a very nervous driver and kept up a constant monologue about the situation on the road, actually talking to almost every passing car. It wasn't exactly non-annoying. I would try to figure out a better way to say that, but I'm kind of in a hurry.

Inner California is very pretty - green rolling hills with vast expanses of pink flowers, on account of the peach orchards (at least I'm guessing they were peaches). After you pass those you get into uneventful desert land. Uneventful desert land is uneventful, except for the car shadows strobing across the grass, which at 75 mph look kind of jittery, as if you set your graphics settings too high.

We drove hungry, because it was a long drive and we figured we'd just hit a buffet once we reach Vegas, but we got there several hours after sundown, and by the time we left our hotel room most restaurants were closed. That took me by surprise, because I didn't think Vegas EVER closed, but there you go.

I should probably mention that we stayed at the Luxor, which I call the Pyramid of Power (though our room was actually in a tower adjacent to the pyramid). The hotel was vast and had a sickly sweet vanilla scent. The room - clean and comfortable. We dressed in our weary finest and headed out.

Las Vegas itself... well, you can't really describe it. It's just as tacky as you'd expect from seeing all the movies, etc. We went up and down the entire Strip, and wandered into several hotels/casinos (though I only remember the Bellagio and Ceasar's Palace). There's an absolutely insane musical fountain show in front of the Bellagio that goes on for several blocks. There's a weirdly stocky Statue of Liberty. There's madness all around.

We eventually found a restaurant that was open around the clock and went in to celebrate having made it through our first day of driving. I wanted to have a lobster burger, but they no longer served those, so I settled for crab. Gosia got a disapointing shrimp cocktail. It wasn't cheap, and on top of that I miscalculated and overtipped, but hey - Vegas, right? We got slightly tipsy and they played Pink's "Glitter in the Air" from the speakers, so I settled into contentment.

I was ready to head to the hotel and run myself a bubble bath - the thing I was most looking forward to on this stop of our tour, actually - but I promised Gosia we'd gamble for a moment, so we found some slot machines. Gosia lost two dollars and we decided to call it a night. As we were walking out, I figured what the hell, popped 25 cents into one of the machines and pulled the lever. Some symbols locked in place, and the meter started counting my win. Around a minute later it stopped at 120 dollars. We cashed the ticket in at the machine, I gave Gosia 20 bucks to reimburse her for the disappointing shrimp, and we got the hell out of there.

At the hotel I ran myself a bubble bath, but it was so late, and I was so exhausted, that I only clocked in around 30 minutes of soaking.

The bed was soft. There was a "Do Not Disturb - Getting Our Lux On" card on the door. The whole day seemed - and still seems - like a blur.

Day Four: Mission and Castro

By day four my feet still hurt, so for the first time, we made use of public transport and took the bus to Mission. Unfortunately, I don't remember too much from the district on account of the pain. We did begin the day with a breakfast at some super hip place Gosia found online (we actually had to wait for a table, and stuff). The hip element was provided by a pair of young people who played cards over their meal. The surprise element was provided by tofu. Gosia ordered some complicated pile of food that starred said ingredient, and I had something containing chorizo and hash browns and generally everything fat and delicious. To my shock and horror Gosia's plate tasted better. I'm not exactly mending my wicked ways yet, but it made me reconsider tofu. For a short while.

Mission is mostly Spanish. That's all I can say about it. And Castro is mostly gay. Major bombshells, I know. It's not that big though, which was a bit surprising to me, given its fame. Rainbow flags everywhere, names with puns, but it was just several streets. Then again, I don't know what I expected.

All this time, we kept walking into every bookstore (second-hand or otherwise) we came across, because I was looking for a particular book - the second part of a SF trilogy. I bought the first part for 1 pound in Birmingham on a semi-whim, devoured it in record time, and have been looking for the next installments ever since. I finally found the book in a seemingly SF-oriented bookstore called Borderlands and learned that it had actually gone out of print in the US. And I paid 17 bucks for it. Go whims.

After Castro, I realized that there was simply no way I could take any more walking, so I bid Gosia good luck and went home by subway. Going home by subway unfortunately entailed climbing 70 more hills. I literally contemplated just sitting down in the middle of the street at some point. I was beyond caring.

But I did manage to get back to the hotel, and after my feet rested, I was even able to go out for a Thai dinner with Gosia. The food was good, though often unrecognizable (the running phrase became "Again, I don't know what I'm eating"). Then another nightcap at another bar - once again manned by a very friendly 30+ woman - and off we went to sleep.

Day 3: Haight-Ashbury, Golden Gate Park

A little note on scheduling: thanks to jetlag management, we get up at around 8 a.m. (and are sort of awake from 6 a.m. onwards), and we go to sleep around 9 p.m. It feels a bit weird, but we cram so much into these waking hours that I can't stay up any later even if I wanted to.

Day 3 was the day my feet broke. I already started feeling some weird pain in the outer arch of my left foot towards the end of Day 2, so I decided to try to take out my orthopedic insoles for a day and see how that would work out.

It did not work out. At all. We don't use any form of public transport, and have seen almost the entire city by now. That's a lot of walking. And so my recollections of Day 3 are a bit of a blur - I mostly just remember the pain and the frustration about it happening when I really needed my fucking feet to work.

Anyway, we started with Haight-Ashbery, which looks pretty much like a hip Berlin neighbourhood, except with more hippies. At one point a possibly homeless guy who was washing bookstore windows struck up a conversation with me. I didn't understand half of what he said, but it all sounded very poetic, so I alternated between Bemused and Appreciative, until I finally realized that he was basically lamenting the stupidity of "my generation". He ended his monologue by expressing his hope that "China would take over all these businesses."

We ate a late breakfast in a big, dilapidated diner that smelled of mildew and gave off a very peculiar vibe. Neighborhood diner meets Turkish bath/opium den. It was really quite spacious, with tiles on the floor and painted walls. Everyone seemed to know each other. Both the waitresses were in jeans and looked like they should have had dreadlocks (none of them did). One flirted with a young all-American guy who seemed to be writing code on his laptop. Two tables down two middle-aged tattooed lesbians were chatting away over breakfast. The place had everything.

Quick note on cafe/diner/restaurant demographics: all the places we've been to had a full cross-section. People with little kids next to hipsters next to middle-aged couples next to white-haired ladies. I have to say it's awesome.

The breakfast was insane. Gosia ordered a breakfast burrito - and I can honestly say that I'm 100% behind that particular idea. I had eggs benedict with hash browns and... God, I don't even remember anymore. So much food.

We left Haigh-Ashbury and went straight into the Golden Gate Park, which is really a neighborhood in its own right. There's an Academy of Sciences, a Botanical Garden, some museum, an island, a small marina, a Japanese garden, an AIDS memorial grove - it's enormous. Me, I mostly remember how much my feet hurt walking around it.

After the park the plan was for Gosia to get a bike in Richmond (the area between the Golden Gate Park and the actual Golden Gate Bridge) and ride across the bridge and back, while I busied myself with the Internet at some cafe. Unfortunately, Richmond proved to be relentlessly residential - at least to the uninitiated. After Gosia took off, I spent over half an hour looking for ANY place to sit down. At one point I just plopped down on someone's front steps and gave into despair. Eventually I figured out that I had to get to a big street (luckily I had a map), and managed to find a cafe that would have me. The world seemed beautiful once again. The barista was really nice and complimented me on my Dr. Zoidberg t-shirt. And at one point, as I raised my eyes from my laptop to look outside, an African-American girl crossing the street gave me a big smile and waved at me. I was relieved to find I immediately smiled and waved back, despite being raised in a place where that NEVER happens. And then they played this song:



Things were good.

Eventually Gosia came back, very happy with her ride, and I managed to persuade her to go eat at a Korean BBQ restaurant that was just down the street. She wanted to go to something called the Stinking Rose that prides itself on only serving things that contain garlic - which is an admirable venture in its own right - but I promised myself I would try this legendary Korean grill food, and we even researched the best places in SF, so we knew one was nearby. We still weren't hungry after that ridiculous breakfast from 6 hours ago, but oh well.

Thank God I won. It was amazing. The place was pretty bare-bones - PCV on the floor, cafeteria tables, and charcoal smoke hanging in the air - but the food was incredible. I had short ribs marinated in... something, and Gosia actually ordered tripe with vegetables. (Yes, grilled tripe. And it was good.) We had to grill all the stuff ourselves, using a grill built into our table, and while I don't really find that sort of DIY stuff appealing, the food was so good that I didn't really mind. Aside from the actual stuff we ordered, we also got rice, a pot of spicy tofu soup (on the house), and a gazillion bowls of various side dishes. My favorite were some sort of dried anchovies with... something. Honestly, I've no idea what we ate, but it was divine.

And then we went back home. On foot. From the Westernmost district of San Francisco to one of its Easternmost ones. With me barely being able to walk. I think we passed through Japantown on our way - I vaguely recall seeing a rather cool-looking, very modern building with a huge red circle - but I mostly just remember the pain. Thankfully there was a pharmacy near our hotel, so I as able to buy some pain-relieving cream, blister patches and a bandage/support thing for my foot. American pharmacies are ridiculously well-stocked, and it's all self-service. Finger splints, wound dressing, something called GOODNIGHT BUNION... I swear, in a couple years they'll have limb-restoring gel and replacement eyeballs.

By the time we finally got back to our room, I didn't even have the strength to make bulletpoint notes for this recap. I just prayed the pain would go away, because on the next day we were supposed to go to Castro and Mission - i.e. the places I was most curious about. Spoiler alert: as I'm writing this, my feet still hurt.

Day Two: So Much Pretty

Yesterday we started out early to catch a free tour of Chinatown that Gosia found on the web. We arrived at a tiny park whose name eludes me now 10 minutes before time, but found only a shitload of Chinese senior citizens there. No young, hip and beautiful free tour guides in sight. Eventually a middle-aged Chinese lady holding a CHINATOWN TOUR sign arrived with a whole bunch of little kids in tow, and we fell in behind her. That's how we were treated to a brief history of Chinese immigration at the 2nd grade level. After that was done, the Chinese lady declared that I would become her assistant in wrangling the children - at which point one of the school teachers explained that me and Gosia were actually not part of the children's group. This was when we realized that it was actually a special tour for some private school - and were promptly kicked out. Oopsie.

And so, we made our own tour with the help of Lonely Planet. I'd say it ended up being pretty OK. San Francisco is absolutely beautiful. I imagine the hill-after-hill aspect might get tedious really quickly if you live here, but when you're just visiting the whole city changes into a sequence of  Places You Want to Live. Downtown is like New York convulsed into skyscraper canyons shrouded in fog. Simply beautiful. My favorite places are Russian Hill and Telegraph Hill - both pretty steep, and both looking very... pricy. Like the sort of places where you really want one of your friends to have a house or something, so you can visit, but don't have to actually pay for it.

Telegraph Hill is very green, with some buildings covered in flowering vines, and lots of various nooks and crannies. At the apex there's a tower that I took for a lighthouse (it's not, some eccentric lady donated it to the city to pretty it up. It worked). We didn't go inside, and instead plopped down on a nearby lawn, took in the sights, and ate our ginormous gourmet sandwiches from an Italian deli. 

(Side note about food: we're finding it very difficult to eat more than one meal per day. The portions are simply enormous. And the things we do eat are delicious.)

Russian Hill is more Scandinavian dark wood tiered houses (you know, like the ones you see in those glossy design magazines) and an air of record exec opulence. We got to the top after sundown, and were treated to an amazing vista of the bay and the downtown area glimmering with lights, with the Bay Bridge actually shimmering because of some atmospheric thing that I probably should know an explanation for. And atop that hill stood a 30-floor high-riser with floor-to-ceiling windows. I can't even begin to imagine what the view must be from there.

We also went to the waterfront again. Visited a museum filled with old coin-operated arcade games, watched a whole bunch of sea lions lounging next to Pier 39, and finally took a nap in a small park right by the water, with a splendid view of the Golden Gate Bridge. There was a mounted police lady texting someone on her phone, a bunch of twenty-somethings lounging about, and even some people swimming in the bay. It was perfect. And so sunny that I actually got my face and neck burned a bit.

After that bit of downtime we went into a really cool coffee shop nearby to do Work Things using free Internet. Nothing spectacular happened there, but I'm writing it down so it (hopefully) jogs my memory somewhere down the line, because I felt really happy there. The barista was very nice in a laid back sort of way, there was a very hot guy sitting right outside, and I was filled with sunshine.

On our way back (after Russian Hill, I got a bit achronological there for a moment) we decided to pop into a bar for a nightcap. And yes, the bar was great. Small-ish, nicely underlit, with a 30-something friendly bartender lady in a simple black t-shirt, and just beginning to fill up, so we had a nice little bay window table, and then moved to sit at the bar. I honestly don't know why I don't sit at the bar more often, it makes everything better. We had drinks, got very excited when The XX's Intro came on, as we both love it, and felt really good in each other's company (at least so I assume). It was a perfect ending to a perfect day. As stupid as it sounds after just 4 days, I can't imagine anything else topping it.

The Grand Opening

Ok, let's do this. I remember hating reconstructing stuff from notes later during the NYC/Washington trip, so I'll try to keep this more or less up to date.

We arrived in San Francisco yesterday, at 1 p.m., having spent over 15 hours in transit. The flight was pretty uneventful apart from Smelly Foot Gate. Before I go any deeper into that, I should point out that I was sitting a row behind Gosia, and so couldn't really hear any of the actual conversations, so I only have body language and her subsequent account to draw upon. Smelly Foot Gate began with Gosia taking off her shoes. This encouraged an Italian lady sitting next to her to take off hers as well - but unfortunately, there was some serious odour involved, so she quickly put them back on again. The odour, however, persisted. 10 minutes later a stewardess came and asked Gosia to put her shoes back on. Gosia started arguing that it wasn't her odour, and eventually the stewardess left. 20 minutes later a stately gentleman sitting in front of Gosia turned around and asked her to put her shoes back on. Gosia started arguing again. This time the ripples spread - more and more people started turning around and asking what was going on. Finally, Gosia relented and very resentfully put her shoes back on (she claims that in the meantime she actually went into the bathroom to smell her socks and shoes and make sure that her feet didn't smell). For my part, I was happy to be watching from the sidelines and not hearing what was actually being said.

The other slightly interesting thing about the flight was the flight map - as we were nearing our destination, I saw things like Klamath Falls and Redding pop up. Until then, these were purely Fallout names to me.

The journey to our hotel was pretty uneventful as well, unless you count lugging suitcases up a series of hills. Apparently San Francisco is more vertical than it is horizontal.

Our hotel is located on Bush Street in a district called Knob Hill, so there's that. The actual name is Nob Hill, but I refuse to acknowledge that, and you can't tell the difference in speech anyway, so I just pretend I'm saying Knob whenever I talk about it.

We miraculously avoided getting jetlagged - despite only having slept around 4 hours total over the past 48 hours, I wasn't sleepy at all when we landed, and convinced Gosia to go and see the ocean. We arrived around sundown, and... well, it was pretty. Obviously. Chasing the high, we went into one of the gazillion seafood restaurants clustered around Pier 39, and gorged on crab, shrimp and mussels (seafood - check). It as pretty awesome, even if the tip alone ended up being worth as much as a good meal + service in Warsaw.

On our way back, a very friendly- and somewhat homeless-looking older man stopped us and asked if we spoke English (he must have heard us speaking Polish, or something). I followed my first instinct and defensively said "barely". He said he's a comedian and that he'd like to tell us a joke - and if we liked it, he wouldn't mind if we gave him a buck or two. We got into a short conversation, which was a bit awkward because I forgot I supposedly barely spoke English at all. Finally, he told us an "atheist joke".

- Knock knock.

- Who's there?

- Nobody.

I liked it.