Our agenda revealed some ambition from the get go. We wanted to catch an early flight to San Francisco to utilize as much of the day as possible, and we found a flight leaving from Kansas City at 6 a.m. our first free day. Alex, who besides making the lame awesome through her physical therapist duties also serves the local football team as an athletic trainer, did not go off duty until about eight hours before our flight, so leaving the night before proved untenable. We consequently rolled out of bed the first day of vacation at 2:45 in the morning to catch our plane.
Everything went smoothly from there really. Alex enjoyed flying over our home town in the plane (it took us two hours to cover what the plane covered in about 15 minutes) and four hours later we found ourselves in San Francisco at about 8 in the morning (time zones helps going west), ready for a full day of tourism.
BART (the San Francisco equivalent of a subway) took us from the airport to the city proper, and after dropping our bags off at the hostel we would stay in that first night, we headed towards Chinatown. There we saw some of the iconic architectural style designating the area and the shops proudly decorated with dragon sculptures, elegantly painted fans, and cuisines of the far east. It was neat to just walk around and see how the locals have integrated with the city as a whole while retaining elements of their homeland traditions.
We headed to the cable car museum, one of the most fascinating destinations we saw in San Francisco. San Francisco is famous for its cable cars, which is one of their major forms of public transit. Just below the surface of the streets, steel cables roughly two inches thick are constantly being pulled in a long, continuous loop. The cable cars themselves are completely unpowered; when a conductor is ready to go, he simply clamps on to this cable and the car is moved along.
All of those miles of cable are being pulled by gigantic motors right in the heart of the city, an extraordinary achievement. When you think about the amount of torque it would take to pull those cables, how much tension that cable must be kept in to keep from slacking, it is truly of marvel of engineering how the system integrates together.
After the cable car museum it was time for lunch, and of course you can't come to Chinatown and eat anything other than Chinese, as Alex grudgingly admitted. We headed to a little restaurant and had a delightful meal of BBQ pork buns, pork pot stickers, and shrimp rice balls, albeit one where I struggled with the silverware (no spoons or forks, us Midwesterners just had to figure out the chopsticks).
We had a delightful day walking the streets of San Francisco. Other smaller stops included a Chinese fortune cookie factory, Ghirardelli (the chocolate maker) square (where we shared one of the most scrumptious desserts you can imagine), a sourdough bread factory, and Pier 39, where all the sea lions like to hang out. In St. Peter's and Paul's church, we saw a replica of Michelangelo's Pieta, which we had seen firsthand in Rome only a year ago, which brought back some pleasant memories.
We spent quite a bit of time around the harbor looking at old ships. On this particular day, admission on these ships was free, so we enjoyed seeing the large wooden ship that hauled grain and wood up and down the coast, the ferryboat that was the fastest means of transport across the bay before a certain bridge was built, and a hardy tugboat whose massive engine belied its diminutive stature.
Another courtyard we saw was filled with restored arcade style mechanical games, and the engineer in me geeked out for a while. Old pinball machines, basketball games, self-playing pianos, arm-wrestling devices galore, each crafted via mechanical means. Some of these things were over a century old, and none of them housed a single transistor. The craftsmanship involved was unbelievable, and I couldn't believe people were allowed to just walk in and play these games just like they would 100 years ago (when the value of a quarter was something like five dollars today).
One more destination before we wrap up this post: Coit tower. Built atop one of the major hills comprising San Francisco's boundaries (the least pedestrian friendly part of the city), it provided beautiful views of the harbor and the city. Inside the walls were frescoed by artists from the 1930's portraying contemporary life in the area.
After eating dinner at the sourdough factory (their sourdough is in everyway superior to mine) we headed back to the hostel for bed. And with that, we will close this very long post detailing a day that stretched for about 22 hours worth of new sites and experiences. Omnia Vincit Amour.
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