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Exploration
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7 July 2004
Today I decided to go to the Exploratorium, so I went to a bus stop near Union Square. Two busses going the route I wanted went past, but they were full, so I hopped on the next bus without looking at which route it was going. After about ten minutes on the bus I looked down a side street and saw Union Square a block away. A few minutes later I was back at the bus stop, but heading in the opposite direction. You've probably guessed that it was not the right bus. However, I figured it would get somewhere interesting sooner or later. I took a few pictures through the window of the bus, including one of a McDonald's, just because they're surprisingly uncommon around here. I ended up at Washington Square, which sounds grand but didn't make much of an impression. I took some pictures before hopping on the right bus and going to the Palace of Fine Arts and the Exploratorium.
By the time I got there it was 4p.m, and the Exploratorium closed at 5, so I didn't get to see anywhere near all of it, but it was good fun. It turned out that admission is free on the first Wednesday of every month, which just happened to include today. Basically there are a whole lot of interactive exhibits to muck around with and learn fascinating tidbits of science. I'm glad I did that postgraduate course in continuum mechanics -- in many cases I was able to stand there and nod sagely as if I knew all about how the exhibits worked. I didn't get many pictures from inside the Exploratorium, most things really have to be seen in motion. I did notice that one of the exhibits used a Macintosh SE running a program which demonstrated a similar concept to a program I wrote a few years ago called FriezingWorkz.
I didn't know what to expect from the Palace of Fine Arts. I thought maybe it was an art gallery, but it looks like an actual palace. I've never seen an actual palace, so I may be wrong about that, but it sported a lot of impressive looking pillars. It's a really nice looking place.
I had dinner at Lefty O'Doul's (previously known as Something O'Somethingelse's.) Their roast beef dinner is much nicer than their cream of broccoli soup, but nothing special. I would say nothing to write home about, but here I am writing home about it. It was a nice change from Subway. Lefty O'Doul's has old baseball pictures all over the walls, in fact, I would guess that Lefty O'Doul is the name of a baseball player.
Products have different brand names here from what they have in NZ, and Asian car makes are pronounced differently. Sure, Americans pronounce just about everything differently, but I would have thought brand names would have only one pronunciation in the official commercials. I recall that the pronunciation of 'Hyundai' in NZ changed a few years back, but it's pronounced differently again here.
I finally got around to improving my image galleries in a couple of ways. To speed up loading a page where several log entries have pictures, the 'positive' strip now only shows some of the thumbnails at a time, and you can click Next or Prev to get more. Also, when you click on a thumbnail, you don't get the full-size image, but a medium sized version which is viewable on smaller screens and doesn't take so long to download. If you then want to view the full-sized version you can just click the medium version to get it.
My iBook's battery may have been rejuvenated since I reset the PRAM, but the power cord is on its way out. It only works when held in just the right position. I hope it lasts until the end of this trip, because I wouldn't want to have to buy one with the wrong kind of plug on the end. I almost wish my iBook could use the newer power cords with interchangeable plugs on the transformer. If that sentence did not make sense to you, go find somebody with a newish Mac laptop or iPod.
That's all the news I have today, now look at the pictures. The first picture is one I took accidentally while playing with my camera last night. That's what I look like when I'm absentmindedly playing with a gadget. Those of you anxious to see more of San Francisco will note the paint on the wall of my hotel room visible to the top left of the picture.
"From here, to there, to everywhere, and back to Union Square" -- from "Get Some Sleep" by Bic Runga
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6 July 2004
Well, I've had a pretty lazy day today, but eventually I wandered down to Union Square again, and took some pictures of it from the 7th floor of macy's. There's a pretty good view from up there. I hope you like the pictures.
And this is what the other side of the Pacific looks like during the day
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5 July 2004 (later)
Today was a pretty good day for photography. I can't promise I took very good photos but I took photos of good things. I went down to where the cable cars turn around on a big turntable, taking a few more pictures of Union Square along the way. Maybe tomorrow I'll see what the view is like from the top floor of macy's. Down by the cable car place I bought a giant soft pretzel even though I wasn't particularly hungry, because I'd never had one before. It seems that in the US the definition of pretzel is something which is bent in a particular shape, with no particular constraints on taste or texture. Think of a thin french stick which a clown has attempted to make a balloon animal with, and you get something resembling a giant pretzel. I took a couple of pictures showing things like the busker making music with various plastic containers, the pretzel stand, and of course somebody holding a 'Jesus loves you' sign.
After a while I waited in a long queue surrounding the turntable so I could get on the cable car. I stayed on it until it stopped near Aquatic Park and various other interesting places. On the way I took a quick picture of Lombard Street (the street so curvy that a PowerBook casing was named after it, also known as the world's most crooked street) from inside the cable car. You can't actually see the curvy downhill bit because there's a car in the way, and it's actually kind of hard to see from that angle anyway, but it's still a nice view. Maybe some other day I'll get out of the car there and take a better picture.
There were a lot of places I could have gone from where the cable car stopped, but I just wandered to wherever looked interesting. From roughly the same spot I took pictures of Alcatraz Island, the waterfront, and the Golden Gate bridge covered in fog. If I'd walked along further I would probably have got better pictures, but I'd already walked a lot and I knew there would be a long wait for the return cable car. I'm starting to understand why there are so many limousines in this city... somebody was offering a limo ride back for a dollar more than it cost to go by cable car.
Once I got back to my hotel I decided it was about time I had a look at what they have on TV over here. On the two channels I could get clearly were multiple repeats of King of the Hill, Everybody Loves Raymond, Will & Grace, and some sitcom about lesbians. There are also three repeats of The Simpsons every weeknight. I did find out that July is national hot dog month. Hot dog!
An interesting day
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Early morning, July 5, 2004
I took a picture of the aforementioned coffee house and the psychic place next to it, but some guy walked past and waved just as I took the picture. You can't see the eMacs in the coffee house but I think the picture is more amusing for having that man in it. Continuing on my quest to find a working ATM, I went into a convenience store of some sort, and right behind me as I stood at the ATM were Ho Hos. I've always wondered what they were, so buying Ho Hos is one of my missions on this trip. I bought a packet, then after looking at all the other American food I bought a key lime drink. I haven't been able to resist anything key lime since I got that iBook, but this is the first time I've had anything which actually related to the fruit rather than just the colour.
After that I mucked around on the internet for a while trying to decide what to do next. Eventually I decided to go visit Chinatown, since I only went through it quickly on the way to a restaurant the other night. It's the second closest designated tourist attraction to this hotel after Union Square. Chinatown is like a street full of $2 shops. For those of you outside NZ, the $2 shop and its clones is full of cheap junk made in China. My mum has a back scratcher from the $2 shop, so I took a picture when I saw a pile of those same back scratchers for sale in Chinatown. Well, if you're going to have stores like that, you may as well lump them all together and make it a tourist trap. They all sold the same stuff at slightly different prices... for example, at another shop I saw those 99 cent back scratchers for $2. It reminds me of the game Galactic Trader, where you go between planets buying and selling the same five commodities at different prices and trying to make a profit. I suppose it ought to simply remind me of an Earthbound marketplace. Or the more well-known computer game Dope Wars.
On the way to Chinatown I photographed one of the ubiquitous pavement signs apparently pointing the way to the USA. I'm not sure what to make of that. Later in the night I heard someone musing about how to get to California from where he was, but that made some sense in that California is a street name.
You might not know this, but over here in the USA they don't have Guy Fawke's day so they let off a whole lot of fireworks on July 4th instead. I figured I ought to go somewhere where I could see some fireworks. Somebody said Pier 39 was a good place, and it is clearly marked on my map as being a tourist attraction so I felt obliged to go there. According to my map, a bus driver, and some random other person I talked to, the way to get to Pier 39 is on the F-line. It's a bus, or a street car, or something along those lines (please groan at the pun). So I went and waited for that, and heard a group of Fijian girls working out that they also needed to catch the F-line in order to watch fireworks from the pier. They told me it cost $1.25, and had their own money ready, except for one who dropped a dollar note down the drain. Yet everybody who was waiting there hopped onto an entirely different bus which seemed to be free. I followed along, figuring that for the sake of eventually getting back to the hotel it was better to be in the wrong place with a crowd of people than in the right place all by myself. We got off that bus, and despite the fact that the driver clearly said we should go across the street and catch a shuttle, nobody did. There was a shuttle across the street whose signage announced it was going nowhere in particular. Again, I decided to follow the crowds to the wrong place. Some guy tried to talk to me in a slanguage I didn't understand, I picked up the words 'tipsy' and 'niggaz' and I could tell he was actually making sense and not just one of the crazy people who are pretty common around here, but I'm just not down wit his way of conversating. Steve K would have understood him.
Anyway, I found myself by Pier 1, and somebody said that Pier 39 would be the best place to be, but it would take 20 minutes to walk there and by that time the fireworks would be over, and it was too foggy to see them anyway. I followed the other half of the crowd up some random Pier, probably 3 or 5. There was a pretty bridge nearby which I took some pictures of. I now know it to be the Bay Bridge to Berkeley & Oakland. There are quite a few bridges around San Francisco, I don't know why it's famous for just one. One of my pictures looks really funky, I think I must have moved the camera while I took it. From the end of the pier I heard many loud bangs followed by sirens, and saw some mediocre fireworks at unpredictable times and locations. Even with my lightning-fast reflexes I couldn't get my camera to take pictures of them, there is a noticeable delay between the time I press the button and the time when the picture is actually taken. Sorry guys, you'll just have to look at some news site to see pictures of fireworks.
After taking picture of a boat called San Francisco Spirit, I wandered back in the direction of Market Street so I could get back to my hotel, taking pictures of anything vaguely interesting along the way. Just recently a whole lot of decorated fibreglass hearts have appeared around the city... it's a bit like the cow parade, but with hearts instead of cows. I've seen several around the place but hadn't taken pictures of many. If you look carefully at tonight's picture you can see someone sleeping on the pavement nearby.
I knew how to get to my hotel from Market Street, and I knew how to get to Market Street, but I also knew that I'd taken a bus to get to where I was and so I would probably need to take a bus to get back in a reasonable amount of time. I continued strolling along in the correct direction while looking out for a bus stop of some kind. At some point a lady heading in the same direction struck up a conversation with me, and offered to share a cab to my hotel since it's apparently not particularly safe to be wandering around that area amongst crazy Americans on July 4. She gets a certain amount of free taxis due to some previous accident, in a vaguely similar scheme to the way I get half-price taxis at home.
We continued walking while she tried to hail a cab, and I saw the first McDonald's I'd seen since LAX. There was another one on the same block. A bus arrived before an empty cab did so we took that along Market Street for a bit. By that time we were really close to my hotel. We stopped at a diner she likes, Something O'Somethingelse's (I'll check the name later, I'm pretty sure it's not that) since I remembered that I'd only had an iced coffee, two Ho Ho's and some key lime soda all day. I wasn't particularly hungry but eating seemed like the right thing to do. We both ordered cream of broccolli soup, which was way too salty and garlicky, so we ate the bread, complained to the friendly manager, and got our money back.
Even though we were practically just around the corner from my hotel, Diane hailed a taxi to take her where she was going, and dropped me off on the way. So here I am back on the second floor of Taylor Hotel, about to go downstairs and connect to the internet. The day started and ended the same way. I like that.
Internet and coffee
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July 4, 2004
I'm here at the Cup A Joe coffee house, where I was drawn in by the ATM (which turned out not to work) and stayed for the free internet and an iced coffee. It's the worst iced coffee ever... just cold coffee with ice in it. If I were still running the iced coffee site I'd give this 0 for creaminess, 0 for sweetness, 4 for coffee, and 1 overall. It was only $1.50, which even when translated into NZ dollars is almost the cheapest iced coffee I've ever tried.
As well as wireless internet for laptop users, this place has a row of eMacs. I have to give them points for that. Next Page |
