San Francisco, City of Walking

Short Version:
We walk.

Long Version:
We'd decided to watch the Argentina v Deutschland World Cup quarter-final at a cafe somewhere before making our way into the city, so set off from the campground at 0630. I was mildly concerned about how incredibly sore my legs were after the previous day's run, but lovely wife said walking would help. We found Sausalito (the city at the northern end of the Golden Gate Bridge) easily enough, but didn't spot any particularly-enticing candidates for football-watching. We did, however, find a free all-day parking lot right at the north end of the bridge. Hoorah!

Reaper secured, we set off on foot across the Golden Gate Bridge. Thousands of people do this every day, and thousands more cycle across it. Why the hell can't the nonsensocracy in Auckland make it happen there? Uselessness. Reminds me of the bumper sticker I saw on a lesbian couple's car* in San Diego:
If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention.
Either that or you've used so much ire-juice already on this sort of idiocy that you're hoarding your reserves in case some day something comes up where a voice making sense has a chance to be heard despite the clamour of banality, bureaucracy, and self-centred vote-gathering that is public "decision-making" in New Zealand**. At any rate, we walked across the Golden Gate Bridge, which was really cool. No giant radioactive monsters attacked it, and all the supervillains must still have been in bed (or watching the football), as we made it across unscathed, and without witnessing any driving carnage worse than the apparently US-standard unsignalled lane change.

Then we walked along the waterfront, past the Palace of Fine Arts (which looked very cool, but not very open) and along a bunch of deserted-seeming residential streets (we think all the natives were away for the long weekend) to Fisherman's Wharf, which was odiously tourist-focussed (apparently it gets worse as the day ages - I shudder to think). Having already walked something in the order of 400km***, we hopped aboard a cable-car. Apparently this is very difficult, as there are huge queues. We missed the departure of one by about a minute, then waited about four minutes for the next one, which we boarded with zero fuss, nabbing prime position at the outside front corner. The cables the cars run on are under the street surface, and are perpetually**** in motion. The cars move when the driver engages a clamp, grabbing the cable, which then hauls the car along, up and down stupidly steep streets. They have many more levers than I saw used, but I did see them using what I assume was some sort of clutch mechanism a few times - generally when stopping the car mid-intersection, which I assume they did purely because they could, as I saw no actual reason for the halt.

At the far end of the line, we saw the queues. Actually, we saw the queue, but it was so enormous that we initially thought it was multiple. We skirted its end, and made our way past the jugglers in the Yerba Buena Gardens and on to the San Francisco Museum Of Modern Art, where we saw works by Picasso (quite good), Matisse (so-so), Mondrian (decidedly ratty), Warhol (same old pictures of yesteryear's celebrities you've seen a million times already, but more captivating in the original than reproduced) and many, many others. Many were complete arse, many were boring. A few stood out, though, including one by a guy with the same name as our cat, and some giant-sized portraits with an organic pixellation effect*****. We had a coffee in the rooftop sculpture garden, then hit the streets, to Maiden Lane******, where there were opera singers, and then on to Chinatown, where there were lots of Mexicans*******.

For some reason, Janine loved Chinatown. There was a really weird mix of stuff for sale, from over-priced Orientalisms to ridiculously cheap San Francisco t-shirts ($1.88), and some spectacular shelf-walls of assorted, unidentifiable foodstuffs in large jars. Janine bought less stuff than she wanted, but more than her pack-mule was entirely happy about. We saw animals from the same menagerie as our squirrel-thing, then found ourselves at the Lucky Creation Vegetarian Restaurant, where we were fed delicious meat-free foods by some nice people, although we did have to give them moneys in return. It was kind of like Auckland's Happy Valley Noodle House, only with betterer (and meat-free) delicious foods.

My feet (which had started to hurt before we finished the bridge crossing) and my legs (which were still complaining of past maltreatment) were incredibly unimpressed with the route we plotted whilst in the restaurant; up a steep hill and some steps, down a steep hill, up a steep hill, down a steep hill, repeat ad nauseum then walk along the flat forever. Even more lower-half-displeasure was incurred when we realised that we'd bypassed something we wanted to see, and walked back up a steep hill, down some steps, then up a steep hill or two, ending up about a block away from where we'd turned tail. Worth it, though, to see the sneaky lanes behind houses, and both the steepest (Filbert, east of Hyde, 31.5% gradient) and crookedest (Lombard, east of Hyde, 8 switchbacks in one block) streets in the city. The crooked one was a bit arse, actually; we were bemused at the phenomenal numbers of people sitting gridlocked in their cars, waiting interminably for their turn to drive down it, slowly. Weird.

We walked west, then we walked west, then we walked west some more. We saw a lot of things, and eventually reached the Presidio, which is an enormous park bearing signs of long neglect followed by some remembrance. Then - glory be! - we reached the bridge. The number of sightseers had increased massively, and for some reason they seemed to be predominantly ethnic Indians. Only for the first half of the span, though, after which they disappeared from the mix completely. Weird.

Not soon enough for my feets' or legs' liking we reached the Reaper, removed shoes and bloodied socks, and powered our way past a cyclist v skunk encounter******** and back to the campground, where we inhaled delicious foods and went to sleep to the sound of Mexican music from the parking lot below us. Which was weird.

* = I could tell they were lesbians, because they were canoodling at the traffic lights. And because they looked like they came from Rocky Bay on Waiheke, rather than from a Victoria's Secret catalogue, which would have marked them as actresses. Not that there's anything wrong with actresses.

** = Probably elsewhere as well, althogh the only place I'm getting any political information about at the moment is the US, and politics here is a seething morass of chaos, without even a pretence at trying to get things done.

*** = May not have been quite that far.

**** = I wonder if they turn them off at night, but not enough to research the subject.

***** = Kind of like an oil-painting variant on the picture someone made a few years back of a pixellated George W. Bush, where every pixel was a close-up photograph of an anus.

****** = Was once named Morton Street (or Avenue, or Boulevard, or something). Was the red-light district heart of San Francisco, with a ridiculously high number of murders, right up to the point when all the brothels burned down in 1906. It was rebuilt to be somewhat more savory, and renamed something other than my ancestral name to emphasise the change.

******* = And a series of people delving deeper into their own noses than I've ever seen done before. Seriously, there was some hardcore excavation happening in Chinatown.

******** = No matter what you think you know about skunks making a bad smell, you cannot comprehend the awfulness of skunk odour until you smell it. We got a peripheral whiff as we blasted by - unlike the poor cyclist, who must've copped a full dose - and we were well and truly violated. Apparently it permeates fabrics as well, and basically lingers forever or until you burn all of your possessions, whichever comes first.