Happy Halloween! Unfortunately this post is about a week late, so I won’t actually be writing about what we did on the Halloween night. This night we spent in the plane from Vancouver to New York.

Day 47.

By the crack of ten a clock, we met David and his car by the Asian Arts museum. He had very kindly promised to drive us around the bay area, which turned out to be an excellent idea. The day was particularly gorgeous – almost no clouds on the sky. We popped by to see a wall painting by Frida Kahlo’s husband, on our way to Lombart Street, the 45 degrees street which you can only drive down in zigzag.

David took us to see the telegraph hill with Coit tower, which now a days, it’s known for the wild Parrots that have taken residence in the trees of the hill… There is a statue of Columbus by the tower, looking at the sea. Of course Columbus never reached the West Coast, but who cares…

After a short trip to the harbor and a second-hand bookstore there, we popped into a Chinese Post Office. We somehow managed to spend an hour sending two boxes home, thanks to the fact that there had been a change of regulations, which meant that we needed a residential address in San Francisco to send out the package… And the woman needed to type everything up to her machine as well. The American post will change this regulation by Christmas or they’ll definitely just die in the holidays post.

David showed us the area of the Palace of Fine Arts which I had seen on Monday, but of course it was much more impressive now, when it wasn’t pouring down rain. We fed the ducks in the pond with some white bread, but didn’t see the swans again. David then drove us by the shore enough to sneak gorgeous pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge, ending the tour to one of the three Chinatowns, behind the Golden Gate Park.

We had a whole Crab for lunch, from a local, Vietnamese restaurant. David said that when he was a boy (and crew up in the area), crabs could be fished by the bay area by children… he price of one was a dollar(!). Now a days the waters are too polluted, but you can get crabs outside the bay area apparently. This was a seriously good meal, all garlicy and wonderful. Certainly the best crab, I’ve ever eaten. Huge amounts of meat inside as well…

In the evening we had a date with our lovely hosts Fred and Fia, to see the Astroboy remake, which has just been out in the cinema. My husband is a Japanese Animation expert and so is Fred, so this was a must-see-film for the foursome of us. I haven’t actually seen the original one, I am shamed to admit – but that perhaps gave me the opportunity to look at this one objectively as a child of 2009. Of course I am 28 years old woman, which doesn’t exactly make me the target audience.

I thought that Astroboy was quite moving – specially the relationship with his father, who first makes him like Frankenstein, but then abandons him. However, I did think that for this piece being released this year – there has been a lot of competition in the animation lately… And Wall-E is not that different, but it is globally recognized as the cutest Anime that has been out lately… So the bar is high. Never the less, I was entertained – would I watch it again? Well, probably if I had kids who demanded it to be in the dvd player all the time. Certainly not voluntarily on my own.

After cinema, Fred and Fia took us to an amazing Chinese restaurant, which served the most incredible garlic beans as well as fried chicken that I have tasted. We were really lucky to get a table or to get served at all since they were just going to close the kitchen in the next two minutes. However, we were once again not home to mr. Cock-up and left happily with our stomachs filled with Chinese goodness. This was our last night in San Francisco as well, so we reluctantly said goodbyes to our wonderful friends. I will certainly be missing these two a lot.

Day 46

After hopping onto the tram from Carl Street to downtown, I decided it was a good idea to get coffee. We stopped at a takeaway shop in the tram tunnel of Embarcadero. This was probably the worst coffee experience I ever had. I ordered two regulars with milk, but never received them… After fifteen minutes of standing by, I went to ask for them and got a surprised woman, who had seen me stand there for fifteen minutes without the coffee which she happily had taken money from. The coffee tasted really awful and I spilled it when walking around the harbor. Not the best morning ever.

At Pier 33, I realized that our tickets were for Friday and not Thursday, which didn’t really improve my day. I was convinced that we couldn’t get on, since they seemed to be very strict that the next ferry free was the next day. However the woman at the counter was nice enough to change the tickets for a half-an-hour later than the one we should have taken, so we only missed a little time.

It was a great mist in the crispy California air that morning, even with a sun shining through it. Once we were on board the ferry, we couldn’t see infront of us… While we were on the ferry back, two hours later though, we had brilliant visibility. That’s San Francisco weather for you.

Alcatraz is an island that has a long history, but of course it’s most famous for the thirty or so years when it served as the maximum security prison. It was also the only one of its kind back then in the time of Gangsters – 30’s to 60’s. The prison was determined at 1963 for being too expensive.

Visiting the prison is a spooky, but great experience. They have come up with an award-winning audio tour, which includes inmates talking of the time they served in Alcatraz, and they demonstrate and visualize the places where the most famous events happened. They show you where the Battle of Alcatraz started – where the inmates killed the guards, where the marines came in with hand grandees (see the holes in the floors) and where the three inmates climbed through the ventilation pipes to freedom.

Of course you’ve seen bunch of the films about this place, and at least the Sean Connery one… It’s great to stand there and feel how it must have been for these men… Alcatraz clearly was no way the place where you wanted to be. It must have been constantly cold and damp, with wind blowing through the bars, without the possibility to ever be warm. The prison was also built in a way that the inmates could see the city from their outdoors area – perhaps even hear the voices of the city. It must have been so close, yet so far.

They believe that no one ever successfully escaped the Rock. 36 prisoners were involved in 14 attempts, two men trying twice; 23 were caught, six were shot and killed during their escape, and three were lost at sea and never found. So technically, three of them might have survived, but the chances are minimal. It’s not only that the water around is so cold that it kills your body temperature in only five minutes, but there is also loads of sharks, so the chances were very small indeed. But who knows, if you are an optimist, you can always think they did escape.

After reaching San Francisco again, we took the historic tram to Embarcadero and then went back to the corner of Carl & Cole, to look for a post office. We’ve now posted out so many packages from this trip, that we’ve lost the count of them. Some are on airmail, some on sea mail, some on surface. It’ll be a treat to get them while the long winter evenings start flying by in Finland. Our quest of the mail lead us to the hippie movement area, in Height Ashbury, which even by San Francisco standards, is a free and flower power area even now. There is plenty of small shops to buy clothes (the most weirdest clothes you might ever want), books, dvds and whatnot.

Halloween is coming and in America they take that very seriously. There is at least one costume shop in every block. There are areas to carv pumpkins in. All the weird inflatable witches that you’ve seen in the tv-series… well, they are all true. Halloween is at least a two week event for Americans… We think we’ve inherited it in Finland, but it’s no way near as mad as in here. I mean, our houses are not covered in spider webs three weeks before the actual date on the 31^st of October. Luckily my husband and I will spend that night in a plane from Vancouver to New York, so there is no trick-or-treating threat… Or is there?

We were early in Civic Centre, wouldn’t want to miss our appointment with our Asia specialist at ten. So I suggested we’ll have some coffee, which lead us into stumbling to him by the corner of the museum. The Asian Art Museum of San Francisco is opening a new exhibit today: The art of Siam and Burma. It all came from a private collection of Doris Day who had spent her honeymoon in that area, collecting artifacts that would have now been eaten by the climate had they been there… Instead she brought them to US and had an indoors tennis court filled with these wonderful and mystic things.

We went through the whole museum though, with our better than excellent guide. It starts off with India, Cambodia, and such and moves through China, eventually reaching Japan. Beautiful things, some of which I hadn’t seen anywhere else. For example the jug made of human skull was particularly appealing to me.

We then managed to somehow keep the interest of David, who took us for dim sum in Chinatown. This is where he crew up in, on the times when the Chinese wouldn’t be allowed to leave the area. San Francisco Chinatown is on a great place in the middle of downtown, placed on the up and down hills as can be expected. They had wanted their doors not to open to the big streets so there is a lot of alleyways, which no one cleans apparently. It was much more clean than I had ever seen in China though…

We visited a couple of temples and popped into a fortune cookie factory, in which I optimistically bought a bag of fortune cookies. The idea for those was invented in San Francisco, I bet you didn’t know that… Finally, the last item that David showed us was the god of Democracy.

China town is also filled with great shopping opportunities. My husband bought himself some t-shirts while I put my eye on a Chinese jacket, which they had in my size – this is America! I then had to drag my husband along lovely tat flee markets where I would have happily spent hours browsing all the weird and cheap stuff. The historic California line took us to Embarcadero, from where we then walked throughout the harbor area and its 50 piers.

Alcatraz cruises start from Pier 32, which is where we booked tickets for tomorrow. You can’t get them for the same day, not that I would have had any energy to go today anyways. Asian Art, Chinatown and shopping completely weared us both out and we decided to take sushi back to the flat for dinner. Sometimes it’s good to have a night in…

Day 44

We decided to check out the park next to our residence. Our friend told us that it’s a good ride if we want to experience some fun and exercise as well. It turned into a three hour walk in zig-zag. The Golden Gate park is not exactly small… It’s 20% larger than Central Park, but as you can imagine, it’s often used in similar purposes. My husband refused to go into the public toilet there… Perhaps that was for the best. We also stumbled on many needle sights as well as forests with good bushes for shagging, which clearly had taken place only hours before. Btw, those who think Golden Gate is the name of the bridge – think again, it was first the name of the whole bay…

We walked through a huge Children’s playground, a granny art house name ‘Sharon’, and came into a Shakespeare Garden. This particular part of the park was filled with benches dedicated to dead actresses. We fastly skipped the museum of Absolutely Everything, which had a Tuthankamun exhibition going on. We can see the mummies back home in London.

The park gave all kinds of experiences. There is a set of lakes with wild birds, including geese around. There is a water wall and a Japanese Tea Garden, which we also skipped because we’ve really been in Japan for almost a month and not into tea anyways. There is a huge area for Bisons, which we first thought had been taken away, but then spotted over the hill. Huge animals… There was a guy in Finland, who tried to have a Bison farm around where I used to live. I don’t think it did very well, even though the Bison can tolerate cold pretty well.

After we finally reached the Ocean Beach, we sat down to have a Thai Curry for lunch and got the tram back uphill to Carl Street. We had a dinner engagement with Fia, on the other side of the bay, which we got by taking a very exciting route with a tram and a bus over the Bay Bridge (not the Golden Gate) and its new and controversial S-curve. This bridge took something like three years to build, but they have realized that if there is an earthquake, like the 1906 anytime soon, only half of the bridge is going to survive. This means that they have a 30-year process of enforce it…

Fia and Fred have an incredible house on the other side of the bay. It’s very elegantly decorated with lovely Chinese things meeting the modern world. She had also cooked us a wonderful meal, completed with a home-made lemon jella. We also got to meet Linda and David, who are Chinese immigrants, but lived most of their lives in San Francisco. We had such fun together that David, who is now retired and one of the investors of the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, promised to take us around it tomorrow. What luck we have with such amazing people!

Day 44/63

My first San Francisco day begun by a lovely walk, up one of those hills that you’ve all seen on television… Fred took us for a tour with a view point over the whole town as well as the Golden Gate Bridge. His flat where we are staying is near the University of San Francisco, Medical campus, so we visited the hospital’s cafeteria, library and whatnot. I’ll say it again, Fred is an incredibly wonderful person and listened in very closely on me and Jonathan talk about Finland and history books that you can write in our smallish country, which doesn’t have one percent of San Francisco’s culture…

I then took the cable car or ‘Muni’ to the city, to Powell Street, where the old street cars go to turn. I was meeting my friend from Finland there. He is travelling around the world vice versa way in comparison to us and by a non-planned chance at all, we shared one day in the same city. So today I spent with him.

Now the weather broadcast said: Heavy rain. But the weather looked alright, so we decided to go ahead with our original plan and rent bikes to ride for the Golden Gate. We got down to the harbor, the ferry docs and had a small look around there. It’s an incredible place as it is… And had a small lunch catching up with our travel lives. We then made it slightly further on, only to discover a huge down pour which we waited out by someone’s garage door. There was actually so much rain that the sewers completely blocked out and then had to push through rain like Geysers coming up in the middle of the road. That’s not something you expect to see every day… We have waited out the rain many times before, since we used to play outdoors tennis since we were kids back in high school. Waiting this one out was mainly just fun.

On a quest to dry out our socks, we stumbled on what happened to be the Palace of Fine Arts, originally constructed for the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition. It’s like a huge Roman sight with pillars and lakes – a breath taking place to visit. Without the rain, we would have definitely missed it.

We decided not to give up, even though it rained for an hour. We reached the Golden Gate at 4:45pm or so and right then it pissed down rain again. There was a gift shop but the problem was that we didn’t think anything would have made it through the rain even if we’d make any purchases. After the bridge, it’s pretty much down hill to Sausalito, which was a relief… The signs and maps are not the best in the world. But we made it and were happy to catch our 5:45pm ferry back to the city. The timing could not have been better, it was magic hour and we saw not only pelicans but a seal swimming by as well. Not to mention great city views, Alcatraz views and even Golden gate views. I pretty much have pictures looking like I’ve seen most of San Francisco in one day only.

Slightly freezing, but happy, we returned the bikes to our rental shop in 4^th street, only 20 minutes to spear before closing. Despite of the rain, I recommend this to everyone. Biking is a great way to see any city, to get to places where most tourists won’t go, get some new angles for the pictures. Besides, they say it never rains in San Francisco. I am sure you have better luck than us.

Just in one day, I can say that San Francisco is one of my favorite cities in the world – it’s so gay that the rainbow IS the color of it (plus you can see actual rainbows along with the rainbow flags). The culture seems rich, the way the hills crumble seems unique to me and the people are very, very multieveything. Not only multisexual, but multicultural, multinational, happy to help. This is as well, a city I would happily live in.