San Francisco is a cool place. In no particular order, things we have discovered so far:
Minako Organic Japanese restaurant is tasty tasty and is run by an awesome woman with excellent taste in music. A combination of the Church, the Strokes and the Stiff Little Fingers was the soundtrack to amazing food - simple preparation let the flavours properly show through. Best miso ever. Seriously, not hyperbole, but actual best ever.
There are eucalypts everywhere here! Is a bit disconcerting to see them along roadsides when driving up to Point Reyes to look for American birdies (more on this topic later. Much, much more, no doubt). Also we saw bottlebrush and grevillea used as street plantings, which is both cool and strange.San Franciscans are nice. Intersections have weird give-way rules, where everyone lets everyone else go first because they're so nice. Also, if there's no pedestrian light the pedestrians have right of way when crossing the road. The lady at Minako Organic spent about half an hour with us discussing good places to eat in SF, even though the restaurant was super busy. She was nice, which was rather contrary to what people had said in online reviews of the place. And Pete in the Best Buy shop who sold me my $25 phone spent 45 minutes trying to make it work, which he really didn't have to do. Also, it's a very green kind of city. A billion Priuses (Prii?), cyclists everywhere, lots of runners and dogwalking types, organic food shops aplenty, and there's always options for recycling and compost, even in our hotel room. Also, the current obese person count is very low.
Suzi's favourite discovery is that she likes hummingbirds a lot. We arrived at the Hotel Del Sol before our room was ready, so we went for a bit of a walk around the neighbourhood. We found the Fort Mason park which had lots of dogs with their owners, some strange public art and a garden of hummingbirds! A purple-flowered bush was attracting all sorts of insects and birdies, but when Jon spotted a hummingbird we had to stick around to watch it. The reward was getting to see two hummingbirds DUELLING and DOG-FIGHTING through the sky. They're so leetle and sweet-seeming it seems strange to think of them as aggressive territory-defenders, but they really were fighting properly. And so quickly! (Witness poor attempts at photography.)
Michelle's favourite discovery so far was a ribbon shop. An entire shop with ribbons - silk, grosgrain, rickrack, jacquard, novelty, vintage, and more and more and more and more. The shop has a rudimentary online presence, according to the owner, so there may be some more purchasing done later on... Also, elsewhere, I found some great printed canvas or linen (designed in California) for $4 a yard. And it's only the third day away!Jon probably has liked stuff but he just left to hang out with his friend Joe at a place called the Final Final for "beets" [yes, spelling is correct], so we can't ask him. Maybe it was the steak dinner we had last night at House of Prime Rib. We had scoffed at the name and exterior of the venue when we drove past, but oh wow they were good steaks when Joe and Ashley took us there for fancy dinner! Or maybe he liked seeing the harbour seals that were loitering in the Bolinas Lagoon (part of the San Andreas faultline) on our way to Point Reyes. Or the pouring rain and crazy wind today that meant he and Suzi couldn't get to the redwood forests.
But now for today's most awesome thing. We went to the LucasArts studio in the Presidio area of town (a former navy base) and had a bit of a look around. It's kind of like a museum of all the stuff that has had anything to do with Lucas films (and George Lucas's vintage film poster collection), scattered throughout the building where people work on games and films and stuff. Props and models were set up and there was nice wall-text panels to tell you what the hunk of wood or whatever was. But HAN SOLO IN CARBONITE was not requiring of such explanatory notes. It was the actual item used in the films. A bit exciting. This was defs worth tourist-vision. It would seem that, deep down, we are all just geek-children.
