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Published: September 29th 2012
Been a long day
It ain't easy throwing passengers bags full of crap around all day!The flight to San Francisco went without any issues. We flew with Virgin and had possibly the newest airplane we've ever seen. Everything was shiny and un-worn. A bit of a change from some of the sad looking planes we've been on.
We had to do a transfer across to the international terminal and then catch the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transport) to our destination. It was easy to tell we were in San Francisco with organic food places even in the airport and lots of information on the airport attempting to become carbon neutral. On the train we chatted to a guy from Portland, Oregon who was really friendly and helpfully letting us know which train to catch and places to see up in Oregon. Nena's cousin Perdi and her partner Jake met us at the train station and we went out for a late dinner of Japanese noodles.
After a great sleep in an amazing feather bed (kinda like sleeping on top of and underneath a feather quilt), we went down to the Lakeshore farmer's markets to look around and pickup some food. It's a great market with a lot of good quality foods, and stalls that
Redhead in Redwoods
And Jake taking a snap are more than willing to feed you large amounts of testers. In the afternoon we went for a wander amongst the Redwoods, Poison Oaks, and Huckleberries in the hills around Oakland, going ooh, ouch, and yum as required (actually, thanks to Jake we avoided all of the Poison Oaks). We chatted and relaxed at home in the evening, and attempted to get an early night.
Sunday morning the four of us got up early(ish) and went to check out a local street parade and market. The parade wasn't that special - seemed to be a lot of politicians attempting to get us to vote for them. There were some cool bits though including an alternative energy group and a few amusing school groups. The various stalls in the market were more interesting and we found a bike shop to stick our noses into (happy Chris). From there we all jumped in the car and made the traffic infused drive into San Francisco to meet Jake's mum Joni and a couple of other friends for a Shakespeare in the Park performance of Henry V (which they did in the form of a WWII battle, and included various musical pieces including
Redwoods
Sequoia sempervirens "Oh What a Lovely War"). It was pretty entertaining, and even though neither of us had ever studied the story it wasn't hard to figure out what was going on. By coincidence there were a couple from Melbourne sitting in front of us so we had a chat to them too (not during the performance of course!). Afterwards some other friends of Jake and Perdi's (Sam and Sam and their baby who wasn't called Sam) came with us to a nearby cafe for some hot drinks and a chat before heading home.
We allowed ourselves a bit of a sleep in on Monday and then crammed down a pancake breakfast which was superb. Jake demonstrated that you could cook pancakes in cheese which was tasty if a little rich! We then packed our bags up and Jake and Perdi took us to an old friend of Chris's (Zoe and Dom) place in Berkeley. Before we got there we went via some shoe shops, and a huge sports/camping shop (REI) and a few others. By the time we got to Zoe's is was late in the evening. Dom was currently away overseas at a conference, but we got to meet
Curly bark
Love the colours their two children Zara and Beatrix who were really sweet.
Tuesday morning and we caught the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transport - not a yellow skinned annoying delinquent) into the city. We wandered around the streets, found some giant sushi, some "Iced Coffee Milk Tea" (which actually was tea AND coffee), had a Safeway lunch and then caught the ferry across to Alcatraz for the audio tour. Chris had done it before but was happy to do it again. It's pretty interesting to hear from prisoners and guards how it ran and what happenned. The use of sound effects and audio grabs in stereo while you are walking around is really impressive and creates a definite atmosphere. Hearing about the various escape attempts, the violence, and the life of the guards was fascinating. It was an extremely windy day and we were happy to get off of The Rock and back to SF where we ambled along the docks back to the BART station to head home.
The next day we spent the morning wandering around Berkeley as there are plenty of cool shops and places to eat. We had a delicious Thai meal for lunch ($7 for
a tofu satay, two spring rolls and a Pad Thai), and then caught the train into SF to go the Museum of Modern Art which turned out to be closed, so we walked to Haight Ashbury instead. This is a pretty long walk, but we were entertained along the way by the sheer number of erm... "characters" that San Francisco has. Lots of people yelling or singing at the world or just mumbling away to themselves or riding bikes no hands through crowded footpaths. The Haight is always an interesting place to visit and the highlight is Amoeba Music which is a HUGE music store right at the end of the street. It has a massive range of cheap second hand stuff and you'll find things there you never see anywhere else. We managed to escape after an hour or two and only bought 6 or so CDs. Pretty good self control we reckon (no room in our packs to carry any more!).
Thursday we attempted to get going a bit earlier and went in to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. After the obligatory queue, the first thing we noticed on entry was the three dimensional matrix
Poison Oak
Toxicodendron diversilobum of white LEDs hanging from wires just inside the door. They were computer controlled and there were shadows and patterns flickering through them. When we went up to the second floor it was clear the shadows were actually humans running through a white space. It's hard to explain - just watch the video below. There was also some great photography in the museum, including some weird pieces by Cindy Sherman which are all self portraits of her made up to look like different archetypes of people (especially older women trying too hard to look young and beautiful - looked a bit like Vegas really).
After MoMA we found a nearby Mexican restaurant which was awesome. Good value and REALLY good Mexican. We then went to wander around some shops including a couple of camping stores to go ooh and ahh at the sleeping bags (we had gotten pretty cold in Redwoods and decided we needed better bags). No purchases were made though and we then went back to a shop that Nena had excitedly noticed next door to the Mexican restaurant. It's called Pappa Beard and sells cream puff thingies which we had previously got in Japan and never
Penis Slug
Sorry - don't know the binomial. erm... Arion phallus? :) thought we'd see again. By then it was getting pretty late having spent much longer in MoMA than we expected so we caught the train back out to Berkeley where Zoe and Dom met us to drive us back up to their house. Dom had been over in Amsterdam on a conference and had just got home. We chatted over dinner and caught up on each other's lives (it's been over ten years since Chris had seen Zoe or Dom) before retiring for the night.
Friday morning and we said farewell to Dom as he went off to work, and then we went back upstairs and started trying to repack everything into our gradually exploding backpacks. Zoe kindly drove us to the car rental place, and along the way we dropped into a Chinese supermarket for a bit of shopping. Zoe treated us to a pack of jackfruit chips which were really sweet and tasted a lot like (surprisingly) jackfruit. When we got the car we were dissapointed to find that it didn't have a GPS in it (not that we'd paid for it - but we managed to get a freebie one in Vegas), and even worse Hertz
Huckleberry Park
And we thought it was just the name of Tom Sawyer's mate. were unable to supply us with any maps (the Las Vegas branch gave us two different maps of Vegas and the whole state). They gave us some rough directions on how to get onto freeway 101 and away we went. Once over the super-long bridge from Richmond to San Rafael we dropped in to some shops to get a few more items (and had the usual fun trying to find cooking fuel) and then we continued north towards the Redwoods.
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nancic123
Nanci and David Curry
Love this Blog!
I hope you don't mind, but I've become a follower. I especially like a visitor's viewpoint on my 'City by the Bay', as it's my adopted home (I live 40 miles north of San Fran). Can't wait to read your next blog!