San Francisco, Day 2
I met people from Maui on the train inbound on Tuesday morning. I have been thinking
about the way we travel; for the most part, people do not really talk to each
other. If they’ve come with groups, that’s one thing, but saying hello to the
person you sit next to on the train in the morning isn’t really done. The only
reason I talked to the woman from Maui is because she was wondering what time
we would be getting in to San Francisco, and was asking the group member in
front of her, who ended up being a senior in high school. We talked for a while
about the state of public education in the United States, and how we want
college to be cheaper, and how you get out of education what you put into
education. We talked about the time it took to get to Maui. We talked about how
sheltered the kids from the island were. We talked about fog and vog (volcano
fog) and fog delays and rain. It was nice.
Remember, though, the guy who was talking about his ten
dollars on the bus? I wouldn’t have wanted to talk to him. So I have to wonder
what the difference between it all is. Or if it is just kind of the way it
goes; sometimes you get cool people, like the man on the train in Sacramento,
and sometimes you get the guy who licks the coffee cup.
So anyway, I was going to the Golden Gate Park. I had
originally planned to go there on Friday, but my friend Sean, who lives in
Washington DC, was going to be in San Francisco on Monday and Tuesday. We made
plans to meet up on Tuesday, so I canceled Friday in the interest of saving some
money. It takes $16 or more—I forget—to get to San Francisco from Rachel’s
house, and then $2.00 each way for Golden Gate Park. Doing that three times is
expensive! Originally, I was going to make Sean meet me around the top of the
Park, but we ended up meeting by the Bison. Yes. There are Bison. They were
ugly and smelly. I walked about 20 blocks to get there, since my original
directions had me getting off that early for the original meet. It was misting
in the morning, but I finally had a reason to use the London Fog coat I dragged
along, so I was OK with that. I also got to walk through some really nice Asian
neighborhoods. I saw a lot of Budda gardens with very well kept flowers. There
were few people, since it wasn’t central downtown and it was raining, so I
ended up having a very peaceful walk.
Sean was staying with his friend Richard, who I met in DC
two years ago; he’d been in California for a while, so he acted as official
tour guide. After looking at the bison for all of two minutes, we decided to
walk to the Pacific Ocean. Sean had ventured in the day before, but I made it
clear that I did not do wet sand, and would not be leaving the concrete. The
Pacific Ocean was obviously on the Ocean side of Golden Gate Park; after there,
we decided we wanted to go to the Bay Side, which isn’t actually on the Bay.
That’d be insane.
Golden Gate Park is the largest Green Space in any city in
the United States. I’m not sure of the actual mileage, but according to Sean,
it is 40 blocks long, and every 10 blocks is 1000 yards, I guess because the
average city block is a 1000x1000 square, so we walked 40000 yards. Again, this
is according to Sean. I think we maybe walked three miles, tops, although I
technically walked the length twice. EDIT: According to Wikipedia: Configured as a rectangle, it is similar in shape but 20 percent larger thanCentral Park in New York, to which it is often compared. It is over three miles (5 km) long east to west, and about half a mile north to south.
Richard kept saying that we were going to Hate Street, and I
was rather confused, since I thought that San Francisco was the city of
brotherly love and all, and the way he was talking about it implied it was
where all the hippies hung out. So why was it called Hate Street? I finally
asked him this, and he laughed and said “H-a-i-t-e. Haite Street.”
While we were doing our walking, we were detouring a bit to
look at pretty flowers or some of the attractions of the park. At one point, we
were walking around the Japanese Tea Garden, and a young kid came out of the
foliage to our right, carrying a stick of bamboo the length of my torso and the
thickness of my thighs. We were all taken aback, but tried to ignore it because
that’s what you do in situations like that. However, as we got closer, he
dipped down and crouched to our left, directly behind some bushes, so that
people coming up the path wouldn’t be able to see him.
Now, we were in the middle of a crowded park. We were right
off the main road, about 85% sheltered from sight by trees and shrubs and the
like. There were three of us, and one of him. And he had crouched down to tie
his shoe, which I clearly watched him do. This did not stop me from clenching
and worrying that he was going to attack us from behind once we had passed,
since he wasn’t quite in position right as we walked by. There wasn’t an
attack, of course, but once we were passed and out of earshot, even Richard
said “Ok, did anyone else think that was weird? Like, what was that kid gonna
do, attack us? What was with the big stick?” So I was glad that I wasn’t the
only one.
We went to a delicious burger place on or near Haight
street, the name of which I unfortunately forget. If anyone is interested, I
can look up my receipts. My clipper card—my ticket for the in-town
trains—was denied on the way home, but
the conductor just told me to go ahead and sit down and then call clipper, so
that was a nice break, as I (once again) had no cash on me. I tried to do
laundry at Rachel’s, which lead first to a frantic search for cash, then a
frantic search for ones, then a frantic search for 3.50 in quarters because the
pop machine from which I was going to get change was broken or unplugged, then
a frantic search for the laundry room because I was trying to get into a
storage closet, not the laundry room itself, and I didn’t bother to go around
the corner to see the other door with the sign that said “Laundry Room.”
Because I didn’t plan well, the only thing I had to wear while I was doing
laundry was my bathing suit, so I was cold, but Rachel and I sat out at the
pool and had a nice night just talking. When we went inside, we found out about
the Texas Legislature and #standwithwendy, so we spent the next few hours
watching that and Leverage while we caught up on the day. Rachel had been
trying to get her car registered with the DMV, so her day was like my Monday.
We were both pretty much dead to the world, brain-wise.
If it seems like I’m short changing my last day in San
Francisco, I apologize. There was a lot of catching up with Sean that 95% of
you won’t find really interesting. And a lot of walking. I saw my first
hummingbird, and at first I thought it
was an overly fat bug. I forgot to charge my camera, so I don’t have many
pictures, and my cell phone camera doesn’t like to work consistently. Tuesday
was originally supposed to be my catch-up day, and I kind of feel like I needed
it to be.
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