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Published: July 17th 2009
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Arriving in San Fransisco we went to the luggage claim area to get our bags. When we spotted Helen’s on the carousel, it didn’t look much like when we’d left it. The lock had been ripped off the top, exposing lots of sharp bits of metal. Inside the case was a note left by US customs saying that they had checked the bag.
Now, I can understand that sometimes customs have to get into a bag to check what’s inside, but our bag wasn’t even locked! In fact, it was no where near locked, the zips (that you were suppose to put in the lock to keep it secure) were on the opposite side of the bag…
Not that it mattered too much, this suitcase in question - which we had bought for £20 in Sydney as we now had too much to carry - had already started to fall apart. On its first journey on a plane the handle had broken and soon afterwards the button (that lets you pull the handle up and down) had also stopped working. As we had found out many times on the trip, you get what you pay for.
Having collected
the bags we then went and got a packed shuttle to our hotel. First stop, was a Marriott, second was also a Marriott and then the van started to drift away from the town centre and towards a rather glum looking part of town. 5 minutes later and having passed several people you wouldn’t want to run into on a dark night (or even in the middle of the day I suppose) we arrived at our ‘hotel’. Needless to say, the area wasn’t great and this was nicely illustrated by the fact that the hotel manager was stuck behind several inches of bulletproof glass, handing things to and from us through a small slit at the bottom.
Despite the iffy start to our trip to mainland America, we had a good few days in San Francisco. On the first day we met up with an old school friend of mine named Ben who moved to live there nearly one year ago. He showed us around his local area, took us to some great restaurants and we even packed in a few of the main sites in the city. As always, it was great to have a ‘local’ around to
tell us where we should be going. A good day was rounded off with an evening at Ben’s flat where we played the game ‘rockband’. It turns out that I can’t play the drums, guitar or bass but my singing kicked arse! At least that’s what I’d assume. After each song there would be stunned silence, shortly followed by lots of offers from Helen and Ben to sing instead (I guess they wanted to see if they could do as well).
Day two was the finale of the gay pride festival and I think I can safely say that I’ve now seen enough men wearing nothing but pants to last me a while. After watching the parade for a while we went for a wander about, going to some of the piers and seeing loads of seals sleeping happily only a few metres from crowds of tourists. That evening we met up with Ben again and he took us to another great restaurant, this time a German one.
On our final day we had hoped to go to Alcatraz, but all the tickets had sold out, meaning we were at a bit of a loss as to what
to do with ourselves. So we did what any normal person would do in the same situation: stay in bed until late.
Our 3 days had been excellent, but San Francisco also showed one of the major downsides of America. Despite only being there 3 days we’d seen:
1) A man swearing at a lamppost
2) A different man totally unconscious on the street
3) A fight in the middle of the road
4) A woman screaming at a homeless man ‘Where’s My Bike!!’
Not the sort of things that you’d seen on an average day in England. Well, unless it was a Friday night. Or you live in Stoke.
It wasn’t all bad, though. I had a homeless person tell me I had ‘good taste’ (referring to Helen) and someone actually called me ‘dog’, which made me happy for the rest of the day.
Anyway, that was San Francisco. As we’re a little behind with the blogs we’re going to try and get them up quickly and frequently, so stay tuned for more soon!
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Nick
non-member comment
Street talk
It's not 'dog', it's 'dawg'!