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.
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