Shopping in San Francisco?


Joni's father wanted the family together in San Francisco for his
wife's 55th birthday.  We couldn't pass up a free trip to San
Francisco, so we found ourselves there on a Wednesday morning, buying
bread and salami at an Italian deli.  Larry was attending pathology
classes all day and nobody else was in town yet, so we got flat
fortune cookies at a Chinese bakery, we rented a car, and we drove
over the Golden Gate bridge and up to Muir woods.

The trees in Muir woods towered overhead, blocking out almost all of
the sunlight.  A ranger told us about redwoods.  Their bark is spongy
so the trees can absorb moisture from the fog, but it is up to a foot
thick to protect the trees from fire.  Many trees sported black burn
marks.  Both the wood and the bark contain tannin, which protects
against insects, fungi, and fire; the redwood bark is inhospitable to
moss which grows in abundance on the fir trees in the park but not on
the redwoods.  Muir woods tallest tree stretches 252 feet above the
ground; the widest tree is 14 feet wide.  Most of the trees aren't so
wide, but all of them reach into the sky.  However, their roots
descend only ten feet; we saw some uprooted.  One tree had a 10 foot
burl far above our heads.  Redwoods reproduce from miniscule cones or
by sprouting from burls, but usually the burls are on the ground.
Throughout Muir woods redwoods clustered in circles that grew from a
parent tree's burls.  The ranger told us that tourists mob the park
during the summer, but in late November, there was little sign of
life in the park.  A few other tourists wandered the trails, and
winter wrens flitted among the trees.

The gift shop had some very nice boxes and picture frames made using
redwood burl.  We ate our bread and salami at tables in the gift shop
and continued our drive along along the coast towards Stimson Beech.
Ducks floated in the water off the scenic shore.  Without binoculars
we couldn't identify them, but we were able to identify a crowd of
people by the roadside as bird watchers.  They were training to take
kids on Audubon field trips in the area.  We got to look through a
scope at an unfamiliar species of duck and frolicking sea lions.

The road that passes through Muir woods and continues on to Point
Reyes is a slow, twisty road.  We finally reached the Point Reyes
National Seashore.  At the information desk we learned that Point
Reyes was still distant.  A brochure informed us that the park offers
"some of the finest bird watching in the United States".  If we'd
known we would have crammed the binoculars into our luggage.  We took
the fast road back to San Francisco and tried to visit the Camera
Obscura, but it was closed.  Apparently it opens at random at the
operator's whim.

On the way to return the rental car we passed Japantown, a small
cluster of Japanese shops and a mall.  We looked at overpriced
merchandise in a Japanese hardware store.  We saw chests of drawers
from the Meiji period in an antique store.  The chests differed from
their Western brethren only in the styling of the drawer pulls which
surprised me because I expected Japanese furniture to look somehow
foreign and exotic.  One interesting thing we saw was a nice painting
featuring three goldfish.  We liked the painting, but the shop was
closed.

Joni's brother, Daniel, lives in San Francisco and used to wait tables
at a small restaurant called Aperto.  He advised us to take a cab as
getting there by bus was complicated.  The taxi driver got confused
about our destination and ignored Larry's remarks that we seemed to be
going the wrong way.  The ride was rough: he would accelerate to 35
mph to travel one block and then hit the brakes for a stop sign.  We
finally did arrive, shaken but intact, at Aperto.  The food there was
the best of the week.  Joni and I shared the Tagliolini Pepati, a
pasta dish with a buttery red pepper sauce.  Joni also had an
excellent spinach salad which she refused to share.  Daniel had a
pasta dish with shrimp and Cos had squash ravioli.  Dessert was a
cream cheese brownie topped with gelato, the "Dan special".  We
waddled out of the restaurant and, due to concerns about another wild
cab ride, returned to the hotel by bus and BART (the local subway).

Thursday morning we took the bus down to Union Square, one of San
Francisco's major shopping areas.  Joni had to go into San Rio (Hello
Kitty) and the Birkenstock store.  Then she spotted Britex.  The staff
said that it's the largest fabric store in the country.  Joni looked
at fabric for a while there but determined that her regular store in
Virginia has a better selection of cotton fabric.  A Britex worker
tried to get Joni to buy a roll of Chiffon.  In The Whisky Shop we got
to examine a hunk of peat, smell barley before and after smoking and
sniff the bung (cork) from a barrel of $9000/bottle whisky.  (Smelled
like whisky to me.)  The guy working there told us that a $16,000
bottle is coming soon.  He spoke on the virtues of haggis.  You can
never have a "good" haggis he said.  It's either great or horrible.

As we walked around the city every so often I would notice metal doors
in the side walk.  Occasionally they would be open.  I finally
realized that these doors were used for sidewalk delivery to the
stores.  Trucks unload stuff onto lifts under the doors.    

Larry's class was in the Ritz.  While waiting in the lobby for Larry
to appear, I entered a small gallery.  A large map of the USA hung on
the wall with each state cut out of a piece of that state's license
plate.  My attention was caught by a Frederick Hart cast acrylic
sculpture containing two faces on an irregularly shaped block.  As I
turned the sculpture, faces would appear and disappear from internal
reflections, and a face viewed from behind would appear as an illusory
positive image inside the plastic.

We lunched at Great Eastern, a Chinese restaurant.  Joni discouraged
me from ordering the frog legs (or something more exotic) so we had an
unremarkable kung pao chicken.  Larry returned to his class and we
headed back towards Union Square through the heart of Chinatown.  In
one shop, two Chinese people, who were eating lunch at a table in the
back of the store, ignored us.  We looked around and noticed netsuke
displayed along the wall.  Eventually the Chinese guy noticed that we
were looking at the netsuke and he revealed that the table was in fact
a glass topped display case filled with netsuke.  The ones in the
table were the cheap ones only 50 years old in the $100 to $200 range.
The ones we had seen before were more expensive ones that were over
100 years old.  Down the street, a Japanese place sold fancy furniture
such as $2000 dressers.  The staff said that the dressers were made of
walnut but I didn't think it looked like American black walnut.  They
also had items made from Keyaki wood with a striking grain featuring
dark lines on a light colored wood.

We hopped on the cable car and rode it up to Lombard street, the
twistiest street in the city.  Several cars (some obviously tourist
filled) navigated Lombard's switchbacks to go down the hill.  Some
obeyed the posted 5 mph speed limit.  The hill top gave us an
excellent view of San Francisco, with light colored buildings brightly
illuminated by the afternoon sun.  Dark streets divided the buildings
into sharply demarcated rectangular blocks.  We boarded the next cable
car and rode down to Fisherman's Wharf.  (A special 5 day bus pass
enabled us to ride the cable car freely without having to pay the $2
fee each time we got on.)

Fisherman's wharf is another shopping area.  I found an oddly shaped
"Testore" violin in a music store.  The Testore family had several
famous violin makers, but my later research hasn't turned up any
information about the funny shaped instrument.  It sounded ok, as far
as I could tell.

Throughout Chinatown we had seen little cards with names painted with
rainbow colors using Chinese characters and symbols like dragons.  On
the Wharf we saw someone who would paint your name in large Roman
letters with rainbow paints.  She used wide foam brushes and would dab
each brush in several different paints to get the rainbow effect.  

Pier 39 is the pinnacle of San Francisco's tourist trap shopping, but
it has one redeeming feature.  Before 1989, California sea lions would
pause during their migration at Seal Rock, an island somewhat West of
the Golden Gate bridge.  But after the 1989 earthquake, the sea lions
decided to rest instead on the docks at pier 39.  The weight of the
animals was too much for the old docks, so replacements were built to
take the weight.  By the time we discovered the sea lions it was
getting dark.  I estimated that about 400 animals were on the docks.
One dock section about 20 feet away from us held a heap of about
thirty animals lying on top of each other.  On other docks, sea lions
stood with noses raised high and barked at each other.

Beggars abound in San Francisco.  Evidently competition among beggars
leads them to try to distinguish themselves.  One beggar's sign read
"Homeless my ass.  I just want to get high.  I'll spend every penny on
beer and every dime on weed."  Another guy hid beneath tree boughs and
jumped out, surprising passing tourists.  "Paul Stone" stood very
still in a statuesque pose while wearing a toga.  We saw someone give
him money and he bowed and shook the kid's hand.  Another strange site
is the metal people.  Their clothes are covered with metallic paint.
A sign demands $1 for photos and $2 for videos.

We dined in Chinatown at an undercover restaurant.  On ground level it
said it was a lounge and it looked like a waiting room.  The hostess
communicated with the restaurant downstairs on a walkie-talkie.  We
had a whole deepfried dungeness crab and a 3 treasures tofu dish.

Friday morning we visited Molinari's Italian deli to get our lunch
ingredients.  Joni went to Haight Ashbury.  I got on a bus to go to
the Exploratorium.  The driver told me to get off and walk to the
left.  I arrived at something that said "Palace of Fine Arts".  No
Exporatorium was in sight, so I opened my backpack to get out the map
and some flat fortune cookies.  At the sound of rustling plastic, an
enormous flock of small birds appeared at my feet.  I couldn't resist
feeding them bits of fortune cookie.  I flicked a dime sized piece of
cookie towards the flock and half a dozen birds converged on it in
midair.

The Exploratorium wasn't as impressive as I expected.  The bubble
vortex machine made ring shaped bubbles---apparently porpoises blow
ring shaped bubbles for amusement.  An air bubble in water has a
higher pressure at the bottom than at the top.  A ring shaped bubble
forms if the bottom punches through.  In another exhibit you stick
your hand in a pool of water and view your hand from below using a
mirror.  From underneath you see a what looks like dry hand emerging
from water.  If you submerge and air pocket it looks like a water
pocket.  A small sprinkler like the type used to water a the lawn was
illuminated by a strobe.  We could see an S-like pattern.  Apparently
water droplets coming from different nozzles form at different times.

Jill and Judy appeared just in time to make the reservations Joni made
for everyone to go into the Tactile Dome.  We crawled into the
lightless tactile dome in groups of two and three.  We went down a
slide onto an air mattress, up a cargo net and into a room with a dim
red light---the only light in the dome---and down a slide into a room
full of beans.  The walls of the dome are studded with objects to
identify such as a small bundt pan, and a key chain.

We had dinner at Greens, a famous vegetarian restaurant.  The food
there was okay.  I had a pizza and the Meyer lemon pot de creme for
dessert.  Back at the hotel we distributed birthday presents and
chanukah gifts.

A few days before we left Virginia, I had realized that all the
Japanese woodworking places I know of are located in the San Francisco
area.  Two of them are in Berkeley.  At first, Joni had thought we'd
go on Thursday before everyone else was around.  But then Judy had
said she wanted to go.  When Diane had discovered we were going to
Berkeley on Saturday, she wanted to come too.

I had mentioned Chez Panisse due to a dim recollection that maybe it
was in California.  Turns out it's in Berkeley.  Despite having eaten
a disappointing dinner there, Diane decided that she wanted to try the
Cafe Chez Panisse for lunch, so she had a local friend get us
reservations for six at 11:30am.

Six of us got to Berkeley with insufficient time to do anything before
an 11:30 reservation.  Dan, Becky and Larry were supposed to join us,
which would push the total well beyond six.  We stood in front of the
restaurant trying to decide if some of us should eat there, or if we
should cancel the reservation and pay a $25 cancellation fee.  When
the cafe opened we discovered than Dan and Becky were going to be
late, so we went ahead and took our table.  Eventually Dan, Becky, and
their apartment mate, Aaron, showed up and squeezed in.  Then Larry
arrived.  We were told later that getting a reservation for ten at
this place would typically require one month advance notice, but we
sneaked in with just a couple days.  I had a cheese filled "crostada"
and the hazelnut ice cream for dessert.  Joni had a beef roast and an
excellent chocolate cake with whipped chiffon cream for dessert.  The
waiter told us that Chez Panisse uses only local produce.  The
mushrooms are collected by the staff in the morning before the place
opens.  He recommended the brussel sprouts and he was right: they were
excellent---not bitter and nasty like normal brussel sprouts.

After lunch we split into groups.  Judy, Joni and I headed for Misugi
Designs where we found a large essentially empty room.  All their
tools are special orders.  So we walked to Hida Tool.  Their store was
much smaller than Misugi Designs but it was crammed with merchandise.
They had saws and chisels, marking devices, gardening tools, and a
wide variety of planes, including tiny ones only an inch wide.  The
helpful Hida Tool staff took me into the back and let me try some
Japanese saws.  Because of their holiday sale I was compelled to get
two saws and a one inch chisel.  They took my saws apart and packed
them in cardboard so I could safely place them in our luggage.  Prices
were much better there than at the Japanese hardware store in
Japantown.  Judy examined the chisels for a long time and then found a
device for snapping ink lines onto the work.  She almost bought it but
then decided that she wouldn't use it at home, only at work, so she
would tell her boss to buy it.  Joni got a carbon steel knife to give
to her mother and a shirt depicting Japanese carpenters at work.

The whole group met at the Berkeley Bowl, which we had heard was a
great gourmet shopping market.  It was just a grocery store.  Larry
had made reservations for us to eat at a Thai place which was believed
to be the first place Joni and Jill had Thai food.  Joni and I were
still stuffed from lunch and didn't eat much.

Sunday morning we tried to eat breakfast at our usual haunt, Cafe
Roma, but it was closed so we had to go somewhere else.  While
everyone else walked across the Golden Gate Bridge, Joni and I went
down to the wharf, got tickets to Alcatraz and watched the sea lions.
They were more active during the day, barking and standing with their
noses in the air.  The stores were all closed.  Dan got us lunch
reservations at a dim sum place.  The waiting room was a mob scene.
Evidently not everyone had the foresight to make reservations.

We rode the glass elevator in the St. Francis Hotel.  We had an
uninterrupted ride to the top.  The view was very good from the top of
the elevator, but the car paused for only a moment before plunging
back towards the ground floor.

Monday began with a quick boat ride to Alcatraz island.  We could see
the bay bridge and the golden gate bridge from the boat.  The island
was converted around 1930 from a military outpost into a federal
penitentiary for the worst criminals.  It was shut down in the early
1960's because of its high operating costs.  A few years later, Native
Americans occupied the island in a demonstration.  Finally, it became
a park.

In the bookstore a woman who "lived on Alcatraz" as a child was
signing copies of her book.  She was the daughter of one of the
wardens and lived there for only three of her childhood years.  She
would go to the mainland every day, so her life wasn't so unusual.
The person who would have been more interesting to meet was someone
who grew up on the island and liked it so much she had her wedding
there.  

In the cell block we took the audio tour which tried to convey
something of the experience of Alcatraz using the voices of previous
wardens and inmates.  The tour took us around the cell block and
showed us features of the prison.  The guards with guns were behind
bars, never among the prisoners where the guns might be taken.  The
dining area was the only area where the prisoners had
weapons---silverware.  Prisoners were not able to enter the kitchen,
but the kitchen knives were hung on a wall on which their silhouettes
painted so that a missing knife would be immediately noted.  Tear gas
canisters hung from the ceiling to control the crowd, but they were
never used, not even when the prisoners, disgusted with yet another
meal of spaghetti, turned over all the tables.  Prisoners could hear
partying at new years on the San Francisco shore, and they could see
boats traveling to and from the city every day as a reminder of their
lost privileges.

Prisoners who had reading privileges would request books and a
prisoner would gather and distribute books from the library.  One of
these prisoners used his freedom to plan and coordinate an escape
attempt.  He located a weakness in the bars that separated the armed
guards from the prison corridor.  He broke through, got the guns and
imprisoned the guards in one of the cells.  His plan was to escape
into the recreation yard, but he had trouble finding the right key to
get out, and when he did locate the key he used it roughly which
caused it to jam the lock.  He and his fellow conspirators were
killed.

Another escape attempt was more successful.  The inmates carved a hole
through their cell wall and built model heads to pass for them at the
nightly check.  They got out into the ventilation area and were able
to escape into the water.  They have never been found.

Once we returned from Alcatraz we rode a bus up to Coit tower and
ascended to the top where we got a nice view of the city.  We then
went to Japantown to see if we could find the goldfish painting we had
seen on Wednesday.  The shop was locked, the painter was not present,
and furthermore, the goldfish painting was gone.  We walked around
Japan town some more and found a museum of the Japanese internment
during World War II.  A small number of exhibits showed what living
conditions were like for people forced into the camps. 

Dan managed to get us reservations at Delfina for Dinner.  Joni and I
ordered the excellent swordfish with tapenade and fennel confit.  I
had a Meyer lemon tart, which wasn't as good as the one I had at
Greens, and Joni had an overly bitter chocolate cake which she loved.

We had a lot of fun on the trip.  I did come home with a feeling that
we spent too much time shopping.  Are we good American consumers,
drawn to spend all our time in a new city at the mall?  I suppose if
we were, we would have actually bought something.