Day 14 - Last minute bargains

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This morning we walked around Fisherman’s Wharf again. It is a seafood-lover’s paradise, with loads of stalls selling freshly caught, freshly cooked seafood, particularly crab, lobster and prawns, and the very popular clam chowder in a bread bowl. Every stall has a huge vat of boiling water and they cook the crabs and lobsters to order (not one for the animal lovers) at very reasonable prices; £8 for half a lobster and £4 for a large bowl of crabmeat and prawns.

We also saw the Boudin sourdough bakery; the French family brought sourdough to San Francisco during the gold rush, and are still going strong now. The master baker gives a demonstration and cooks the bread into all sorts of shapes (he had a crocodile in the window when we visited).

I then persuaded Sam to go to the hotel pool for an hour as it would be our last opportunity. It’s funny, but after sunbathing in Palm Springs and Las Vegas, which were both much hotter, we both burned here after an hour.

After a late lunch we headed into town to do some last minute shopping. We stopped off at the Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill, which is one of the highest points in San Francisco, to take some panoramic views. In the lift up and down from the tower we had an elderly Chinese gentleman with a speech impediment trying to explain the history of the tower, but strangely we didn’t catch much of it!

We then went to Union Square and the surrounding area, including Chinatown, which is the main shopping area in the city. Sam had a couple of dollars burning a hole in his pocket and I was looking for a last few bargains. There is some stuff I’d love to buy (new Apple Mac and the new iPhone, which is fantastic, and both are hundreds of pounds cheaper than in UK) but I’d have worries about warranty and repair once back in England so I just went with jeans and tee shirts.

One thing that I have noticed here is the large number of old down-and-outs on the streets of the city. In the other cities we visited we saw the odd one or two but here there they seem to be on every street (although some did have signs asking for money to pay for drugs and beer so you have to admire the honesty).

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