San Francisco

30^th October - 12^th November

The train down from Seattle was very nice. It took about 27 hours, but it was far more comfortable than going by 'plane, and the food and the scenery were better. As I would be on the train for so long, I decided to get a sleeper cabin, which was about 6'6" by 3', or just large enough for the bunk. The train was delayed by a couple of hours in the middle of the night when it got stuck behind a freight train with faulty brakes, but that was the only problem. I remember waking up and seeing palm trees outside the window and thinking "Wow. They weren't there last night".

I met my aunt Enid and uncle Charlie at Oakland Station, and we headed to Pleasant hill, where I would be staying. As it turned out we only saw each other four or five times over the fortnight due to our very different schedules. Still, it was good to see them again, even if it was only occasionally.

One of the first things I tried to do was change what Canadian money I had left to USD. This proved surprisingly difficult. The first three banks I tried said that they weren't "commercial banks", so they couldn't do it. They even seemed quite surprised that anyone would want such a service. Wells Fargo could do it, if only I had an account with them. Eventually I had to trek all the way into the city and find an Amex office.

I spent some time exploring the city, as usual. And I went to Tiburon (just across the bay) with Enid for a meal one day. That was fun. She managed to miss the Bay Bridge road on the way back, and we needed to drive all the way round San Francisco to get back onto it. So we had a nice little detour.

I went to see the BIG TREES in Muir woods. That was actually my second attempt to see redwoods: there's a park that's about a mile or two south of Colma (which is on the BART system), so I thought that would be an easy walk. As it turns out, however, It's not possible to walk at all. I only found that out after I'd spent about two hours winding my way through downtown Colma, though. It turns out that you can only get there by freeway, which struck me as being a serious flaw. I mean, California pretends to be keen on environmentalism, but they make it impossible to get to one of the most beautiful places in the country without driving. Anyway, A few days after that I got the ferry across to Sausolito, and a bus from there to Muir Woods I got a great view of Alcatraz Island on the way over. Everyone else seemed to have seen a weather report, because there only seemed to be a half-dozen people there. It was calm and sunny when I arrived, but within half an hour, it was blowing a storm. There was about six inches of rain that afternoon, and I believe the winds hit 50 or 60 miles an hour. Still, I had fun, and the other people who had braved the weather had big grins on their faces. But I didn't think it ever rained in California.

At one point, I could hear a tap-tap-tap sound come from a nearby tree. My first thought was that it was a woodpecker or some such, and then I realised that the tree was creaking as it swayed in the wind. I looked up to see about 200 tons of tree moving about 20 or 30 feet from side to side. It was about then that I decided that I ought to stand under a different tree. Then I realise that (of course) all the trees were doing the same thing. As I was a couple of miles inside the forest, it seemed rather pointless continuing to worry about it.

On the final weekend I was there, I met up with Ellmyruh and Maryam. We explored Chinatown, where we saw people beating fish to death and I'm fairly certain I saw a tray full of brains, but they wouldn't let me stop to investigate further. There was a Chinese man who was singing to the girl in a calendar in a shop window, which we managed (with great difficulty) not to laugh at. It was very sweet, and we didn't want to embarrass him. There was also a statue of a gay lion, which was guarding a shop full of oriental porcelain erotica.

After that, we went to Japantown for lunch, where we managed to find a restaurant where the walls were lined with particularly gorey manga comics, full of decapitations and the like. While we were there, we went to the stationery shop they have there, which is full of all sorts of bizarre Japanese stuff. And we had more fun than you're supposed to have in stationery shops. We rode around on cable cars in the afternoon, and went to Fisherman's Wharf. We got serenaded by a very strange busker who wore a tuxedo under a transparent raincoat (the weather was a little bad). We agreed that his patter was better than his singing. Eventually, we made our way to the Rainforest Café for dinner. Maryam had brought some plastic frogs, and I had bought some Kinder Eggs in Canada, and we played with the toys while we waited for our food to arrive. The waiters acted as if this was a little unusual.

After this, we walked along the beach in the dark, and climbed onto the roof of this little concrete hut thing that I think belonged to the harbour authority. We stood on the beach for a while and watched the sea and the stars, and had a deep and meaningful conversation along the lines of "Oceans are good." After that, we headed to Ghiradelli's for sundaes. Elly and Maryam got one between them, and I had one to myself. I finished when they were half way through. There were neither the first nor the last people on this tour to think I ate too quickly.

We rode more cable cars back to the BART station, and on one particularly steep corner, people had to get out and push, which was an experience. Ellmyruh went back home, and I went to stay for a weekend with Maryam out in Placerville. The plan was that we would go and see Apple Hill, which is this big orchard place, where in the autumn everywhere's selling apple juice, cider, apple pies, ornaments made out of apples, apple honey and pretty much anything else that they can make out of apples.

When we weren't at Apple Hill, there wasn't much to do except hang around the house (it was a five minute drive to their mailbox), so I chatted to Maryam's father and sister, and watched some TV. We saw a particularly entertaining bad movie late one night called "Crocodile". Drunk teenagers, giant man-eating reptiles; the usual kind of thing.

On the Monday, we went into Sacramento and met up with Ellmyruh again. We had lunch in Max's Opera Cafe, and we drove around, doing very little (phrase of the day: "Look at the trees! They're SOOOOOO pretty!"). we spent some time in Fry's (which is like Best Buy, only bigger), and we drooled over transparent PC cases and the like, before wandering off from each other and getting lost. We met up by the entrance just in time for me to get my train back to SF.

The next morning, as I headed off to Las Vegas, Charlie told me that Enid had had to go back to England over the weekend, as my great-aunt had taken a turn for the worse. She's OK now, which is good. But it meant I didn't get to say goodbye properly.