travel journal: san francisco

december 2003

This is Chris' blog entry describing our trip. I was too lazy to write one myself.

Photo gallery from San Francisco

I Left my Heart in San Francisco

This shot of our night stand drawer at our hotel captures California culture better than any other: A fusion of western and eastern cultures, mixed with a secret fear of being crushed by big buildings collapsing on you.

What a long strange trip it's been. San Francisco may very well be the strangest city in America. It's strangeness does not come from the usual weirdness that is inherent in a progressive and confident metropolis (as a long-jaded urbanite, not much shocks me anymore), but rather, from it being the most un-American city that I've ever been to. No far right-wing politics, no Orange Alert panic attacks, no foamy-mouthed patriotism. Just a confident and beautiful city-state on the edge of the Pacific Ocean, filled with life, art, vibrant communities and Howard Dean posters in every window.

Not surprisingly, Krista and I took a very strong liking to the city and filled each day by basking in its hipness. Some highlights of my favourite un-American city then, in no particular order, are:

The Castro
The Gay Megalopolis of the world, where one can let their inner queen (or king) let loose on ultra-tight fitting clothing stores, big n' beefy Macho Man burgers at the Hot n' Hunky restaurant or the all-gay paraphernalia store where you can buy a gigantic flag representing your favourite gay subculture. Centred around the world's hippest rep theatre (The Castro Theatre), the neighbourhood stretches on nearly forever in all directions, establishing the most confident and friendly gay neighbourhood I've ever seen. Like Church street here in Toronto, only if Church street was ten times its size and filled with ultra-friendly and loud Americans.

Hispanic culture helped bring mural art to every vertical surface in the center of the city, but unlike Amsterdam, it doesn't cause insanely stoned men to rub themselves against the murals for hours on end (another long travel story)

North Beach
The pseudo-Italian neighbourhood, located north of Chinatown and hosting some of the steepest bloody hills to walk up in the city, provides one of the best views of the city from the Coit Tower. [Krista and I spent the better part of the first morning snickering to ourselves at the very phallic looking Coitus Tower as it became known to us.] Of particular interest however was the murals painted at the base of the tower in the early 1930s by students of the very-late and very-communist Diego Rivera. The murals depicted a very grim view of the effects of unchecked American capitalism and promoted the ideology of communist revolution. And unlike Rivera's Man at the Crossroads, San Francisco was far more tolerant than the Rockefellers and thus the Coit Tower mural survived to allow me to initiate a rant on the Right's unjust historical censorship of the liberal media to a bored Krista for the remainder of the morning.

Haight / Ashbury
Miles after miles of head shops shouldn't impress anyone older than seventeen or who is horrified that a band like Phish could even exist, but there is an amazing huge collection of bongs, punk apparel and transsexual-friendly clothing shops. I'm not-so-secretly delighted that on the corner of Haight and Ashbury streets there's a Gap clothing store, a symbolic nail in the coffin of the hippie era. I am however a little disappointed that the only record shop in the Haight that sells electronica is smaller than the average ubiquitous Starbucks bathroom. The four pound burritos and copious amounts of ice cold Negra Modelo available at the hyper-coloured Mexican restaurant two blocks west of Ashbury helped me to quickly forget my disappointment.

AmazingRich and Krustukles blog battle to the death, Kaiju style, in the Japantown mall for the import car accessories, Mothra battle sets and cellular telephone covers booty which fills the otherwise crappy mall.

Chinatown
Made famous well before Jack Nicholson and Kurt Russell ever had an opportunity to visit it, Chinatown is without a doubt my favourite neighbourhood in all of San Francisco. Like Toronto's Chinatown, except much, much bigger, much, much older and without the ever-present long-expired fish stink. Dodging the Dim Sum sellers on Grant Street, a quick trip into the very small Ross alley found an ancient forture cookie factory ('People's Glorious Fortune Cookie Company') where fortune cookies are made by hand by an old woman who offers you the choice of "lucky fortune cookies or sexy fortune cookies" for sale, with a wink. Deep down the dark back alleys, the traffic sounds of the main streets were replaced by the sounds of mahjong tiles slapped on counter tops in a gambling frenzy. I felt as if I were in another country, or time, or one of King Floyd's Call of Cthulhu adventures, minutes before my character was to be consumed by a Deep One. Li Po, sadly, lost its spot as my most favourite bar in the world, as tattooed Asian female bartenders and drunk hipsters had been replaced by a grumpy Chinese bartender watching college football and yuppie posers cackling away about their stock options.

Alcatraz Island
Yes, Fisherman's Wharf is touristy crap and yes, Alcatraz Island is about as interesting to the San Francisco natives as the CN Tower is to Toronto natives, but the audio tour through the cold and damp rotting Alcatraz prison sends a shiver up my spine each time I take it. It marches you through the very best physical representation of why you should never cross The Man, stopping you in front of the cell where the country’s worst bastards murdered two guards in cold blood, then takes you on a little audio journey on how prisoners tried from going completely mad in six foot by eight foot pitch black isolation. By the end of the tour, you swear to yourself that you'll never even think anything un-Republican out of fear of being branded and taken away as a thought criminal to meet Alcatraz justice.

Another cold and damp moss covered hallway of one of the older parts of Alcatraz Island. With a little paint and a Starbucks installed at every turn of the hallway, this could easily become re-integrated into San Francisco culture.

Enough writing already. Suffice it to say, San Francisco was an incredibly cool and vibrant city that I could go on about for days: Huevos Rancheros, La Musee Mechanique, SoMa MOMA PoMo Homos, Anchor Steam, Good Vibrations 25% off sale (except for the glass dildos evidently), misc.fitness.weights hipsters Bill & Rich, Japanese Tea Garden Pocky, Union Square high-end consumerism, the Empress of China, slo-mo Washington Square sword fighting, platefuls of Sake Nigiri, gay street chocolate, Sony Metreon and the Cartoon Art Museum.

A wonderful and successful vacation to recharge and to stay glued to Krista for seven glorious days. Sigh. I'm already looking forward to the next time that I can visit America's most un-American of cities, my favourite, San Francisco.