Tales of the Partial Froomies Trip to San Francisco, Intersession 2010 PART ONE

Saturday, January 23rd
After a victorious night in New York with Dad and his team, a late-night viewing of A Single Man (which gets better the more I think about it), and a morning run to Amy's Bread for the requisite chocolate coma, I got on the train at Penn Station to meet up with Roommate J at Newark. It turns on she was on the Air Tram right before mine so she only had to wait about two minutes before I showed up and we jet-setting-ly made our stately way through security.
My Midwestern tendencies and Roommate J's inexperience flying by herself combined to get us there a good hour and a half before we actually had to be but (shockingly, for Newark) the flight was not delayed and we got on our way around 4:40.
Once on the plane, I dialed up my hipster quotient (usually kept around the level of my Converse shoes) and put on my newly purchased purple fingerless gloves and cracked the spine on Big Sur by *gasp!* Jack Kerouac. This was the first Kerouac I'd ever read and I bought it in the 5th Avenue Barnes & Noble on a whim since it seemed appropriately Bay Area for the ride there (for the trip itself and the ride back I brought LA Confidential--close enough). What I certainly didn't expect was to like it as much as I did. Reading it in one sitting certainly helped, especially when it came to Kerouac's stream of consciousness. For whatever reason, I was completely hooked and barely noticed the length of the flight. I finished and we landed about twenty minutes later.
When it came to navigation during the trip, I was indisputably the Boss Lady, but Roommate J whipped out her DC Metro savvy to unconcernedly buy our BART tickets at the airport from intimidating-looking automated kiosks. I'm more used to the Paris metro, where you get to yell through bulletproof glass at a worker until they understand you well enough to overcharge you on a carnet. This was not like that.
The BART ride was uneventful, and the directions from Montgomery Street I had printed out were so accurate that we found our hotel in five minutes after arriving. We stayed at the Hotel des Arts, which straddled the line between Chinatown and the Financial District (it was equidistant between the Dragon Gate and a Hermès store).
After checking in to our crazily painted and extremely European (read: functional and clean but not much else) room (with the added American bonus of a flat-screen TV), Roommate J and I decided to venture into Chinatown to find dinner. By this point it was 9:00 at night so what we were after would best be described as cheap and quick takeout that we could eat at the hotel before showering and sleeping. Surprisingly for a Saturday night, most of Chinatown seemed to have shut down (we figured out later that we just didn't walk far enough down Grant and instead turned off a little too soon) so we decided to go into a promising looking sushi restaurant and find out whether they did takeout.
This is what followed:
We walk in, see a hostess, and Roommate J asks her, "Do you do takeout?"
"Yes," replies the hostess, and indicates that we should follow her.
We follow her.
She hands us menus and sits us down at a table. Oh, that's nice, we think, she's letting us sit while we look at the menu.
Then she brings us glasses of water.
Oh, that's nice, we think, she's giving us water to drink while we decide.
Then a guy brings out miso soup.
At this point we stop being so stupid, take our coats off, and embrace the inevitable.
We wound up splitting raw octopus. This was a first for me, but combined with the miso soup and the bed of cucumbers it came with I was actually pretty happy with the meal. I paid (Nom de "Always Has Cash With Her" Plume, that's what old Jack Warner used to call me), and we headed back to the hotel for sleep.

Sunday, January 24th

"[Mary Ann] came to the city alone for an eight day vacation. On the fifth night, she drank three Irish coffees at the Buena Vista, realized that her Mood Ring was blue, and decided to phone her mother in Cleveland." --Armistead Maupin, Tales of the City.
Although we didn't decide to stay in San Francisco forever after five days, although were were onyl there for four days, although we don't drink Irish coffee, and although neither of us had a mood ring (yet) or mothers in Cleveland to call, we did indeed see the Buena Vista. This occurred by accident on our tour of Fisherman's Wharf on the first morning. We took the Powell & Hyde cable car from its origin to its final destination and walked up and down. Since it was so early on Sunday morning most things were closed, but this was probably a good thing since it allowed us to avoid kitschy tourist traps and instead take pictures of the cloudy and very calm bay. Our discovery of the Buena Vista occurred after our stop at Ghirardelli, where Roommate J got "decadent drinking chocolate," which came with a biscotti since it was apparently too much of a big deal by itself. I went with the "classic hot chocolate," which was still less expensive and more tasty than its Starbucks counterpart.
That was a good mid-morning snack, but the real event of the day was a stop at the Marina Safeway (aka the Social Safeway, or Dateway) which was in the 70s and apparently still is less a supermarket than it is an excuse for straight people to hit on other straight people. This was the only thing I wanted for sure to see/do while in San Fransisco after reading about it in Tales of the City and Roommate J went along as moral support. We decided to split up and rendez-vous in ten minutes. We also came armed with a legitimate purpose to be there: namely, the purchase of a picnic lunch.
I got my lunch supplies and, disappointed by the amount of actual shopping going on, made my way to the card aisle. I figured if there was one place to casually comment on a product it's by the greeting cards. Sure enough, after I had been there for about a minute or two, a young-ish guy sidled over and started looking at the cards right next to me. After a while he turned to me and said, sighingly, "It's really discouraging...how immature...so many of these cards are." I agreed, he aimed another soulful look at me, and then he scampered off.
This was pretty much perfect, so I ran off to pay for my stuff and meet up with Roommate J and leave. I'm not sure if Dateway is the right name, though, more like BriefEyeContact-LookAWay.
After leaving the Safeway, we walked to the Palace of Fine Arts and had the picnic on a bench by the pond. There were swans, and little families walking around, and Japanese and Chinese school girls, and French and German people. Basically it was the most eavesdrop-able corner of the world ever. It started to rain right after we decided to head over to the Golden Gate Bridge, but the lady at the Exploratorium have us perfect directions to where the bus stopped and we sheltered there for about five minutes until it arrived. For the most part, throughout the entire trip buses ran on time, trains showed up when we wanted them, cable cars came clanging around the corner as if summoned telepathically. It was great.
Walking across the bridge in the rain was a little nervewracking, but beautiful. The last time I was there is was sunny and a little chilly, so it was nice to get another view of the city. Roommate J stayed as far away from the rail as she could, except for when we stopped to take artful photos. Once we had gone about halfway across, we turned back and again the bus was waiting for us. We took it to the foot of Russian Hill and walked up a pretty impressive stairwell, stopping halfway to sit and eat the rest of our lunch. At this point we were feeling pretty footsore so we decided to walk up to the top, see Lombard Street, then take the cable car back to Market and see a movie.
Lombard Street, the least straight street in America (literally, not figuratively--that was for the following day), is quite a sight on any day, but especially so in the rain. And there was even one brave soul running down. We walked from the top to the bottom and back up and I found several future homes.
The movie we ended up seeing was Sherlock Holmes, which I had...seen before. A couple times. Still, loving everything and anything Dr. Watson related as I do, I was happy to see it again, and even picked up on more jokes and the audience in the theater there in the Westfield Mall was the best so far.
We went back to the hotel and dropped our things before heading out to dinner. This time we walked far enough in to Chinatown to find a good place. It was off the street, up some stairs so we couldn't see in advance what we were getting in to. It was all in the spirit of adventure, though, so Roommate J and I made the climb assuming there was something good waiting for us.
And there was. The room upstairs reminded me of a French ballroom fallen on hard times. There were chandeliers and white walls and French door-like windows giving out on the street below. The tables had red tablecloths and we were two of about six customers in the entire place. It was like something out of the Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy miniseries: one of those restaurants where George Smiley has awkward dinners with old friends, except the food was delicious and we were full of conversation after our long and awesome day.

to be continued...