Days 181 to 189 - San Frantastic

Author - Grant

Based In - San Francisco, California

Photos - http://www.flickr.com/photos/32017704@N03/sets/72157617800750975/

First and foremost, I feel we should issue a public apology to the city of Santa Barbara.  I should have known that by declaring the place as our current favourite living venue in the country, it would befall a catastrophe of epic proportions and as I type this, it is still ablaze with 10% of the population currently sleeping in evacuation halls and nearly 100 homes resembling overflowing ashtrays.  From now on, if we like a place, I’ll keep it to myself although I am happy to endorse Anfield stadium, Liverpool as an ideal spot to settle down just in case I do possess mystical powers.

Still, we’ve spent the last week some 350 miles north of the disaster zone in a city that should rightly be awarded Philadelphia's nickname as the city of brotherly love.  I am, however, confident enough in my own sexuality to declare that I really like the feel of this city but as I don’t want to put a hex on the place I’ll not go overboard with the compliments.

In summary, we’ve had an awesome time here thanks, mainly, to the city’s world class tourist attractions.  Alcatraz alone is worth the trip, unless you live in Guantanamo.  The place strikes just the right balance of learning and mindless wandering and I would have happily spent the day there but I knew that some world-class clam chowder was waiting back in San Francisco hence we were back on a boat after just two hours.  Still, it’s an incredible place with a crazy history.  For instance, did you know that...it used to be a fort before it was a prison, it closed in 1963 as it was basically rotting away, most of the prison guards lived on the island with their families in accommodation just metres from the prison walls and that for 19 months after it closed as a penitentiary it was occupied by Indian Americans protesting about land rights?  Our photos might not quite get across just how small the cells are as I would struggle to lay down in anything other than the fetal position (but then again, I am a freak of nature) and the pitch black solitary confinement cells weren’t even fun to stand in for 3 seconds posing for a picture so a week would understandably drive you insane.  The dining hall was clearly the most dangerous room in the prison because plastic knives and forks either hadn’t been invented or this was a particularly eco-friendly prison so the ceiling was littered with pepper spray canisters that could be remotely detonated in the event of a riot.  But the most interesting stuff was, naturally, the escape stories which ranged from crude to genius.  Personally I like to think that the five inmates who made dummies of themselves sleeping using soap, tunneled out of their cells with spoons, spent a year escaping from their cells every night to build a raft on the prison roof made from dozens of stolen raincoats and finally escaped without harming a single guard made it to safety despite being some of America’s Most Wanted criminals.  Odds are they are either still giggling on a beach in Costa Rica or, more likely, running a hedge fund out of Bermuda.  Either way, such inventiveness deserves rewarding in my books.

The Golden Gate bridge and its surrounding parks have also entertained us almost daily during our stay.  We’re walked across it, driven across it, admired it from the city, gawped at it from the beach and taken pictures of it from every angle other than from above.  Exactly why a mile long bit of metal has provoked the kind of adoration I usually like to reserve from Maxim cover girls is still a mystery to me but it’s kept me strangely enthralled and that’s all that matters I guess.  Wandering around the vast Chinatown (and, of course, sampling its lip-smacking goodies such as my old daily staple of char siew pau - bbq pork filled steamed buns) was a nice Singapore throwback although our never-ending, lifelong search to find dumplings on a par with those served at Din Tai Fung once again proved fruitless.  Still, as always, it was bloody good fun trying.  And we had some surprisingly good meals local to us in South San Francisco (or, “the ghetto”, as “real” San Franciscans probably refer to it) as the otherwise dodgy, drug-addict filled high street contained a top Italian and a cracking sushi place.  Weird but true.

Despite all these good eats, it’s been a surprisingly healthy stop as I’ve reached the stage where I can only fit in clothes sold at speciality Sumo shops and hence I have dusted off my running outfits (which for the past couple of months have been used solely as buffet eating outfits thanks to the elastic waistbands and expanding lycra) and have resumed using them for their intended purposes.  We even got up early on the morning we left SF so that we could join in with a monthly event where they close the roads to traffic along a 4 mile stretch so that cyclists can potter about without the fear of being t-boned by an irate cabbie on the 17th hour of his shift.  Whilst you would think that having our photo taken with Barack Obama should have been the highlight of the day (ignore the fact that his pose doesn’t change one millimeter between photos), actually it was topped by running round the bases in AT&T Park, the home of MLB team the San Francisco Giants.  Admittedly sliding into home base was over the top but I’m sure that the scars won’t be permanent but the photos will last forever...

The bad news is that, as much as we love this diverse, fun, incredible place, our house hunting has revealed that we can’t really afford what we would want to live in.  We would have to either get a condo in the nice part of town (a no-no as the 14 floor round trip pee walks required by Molly at midnight and 7am are enough to drive a man crazy) or have the size house we want but in the ghetto (also a no-no as our bike ride took us through a huggie-bear infested ghetto where the N-word was thrown around like buns in a school canteen and I’m sure people were eyeing up my tooth fillings for their resale value).  Perhaps the outskirts will serve our purpose more appropriately - we’ll find out in the coming days as we head north to Napa and Sonoma.  I just hope we have a sober moment to check out the local realty agents...