Sunday, January 16, 2005

A travelogue of trip to San Francisco

Note: This blog is best viewed with firefox browser.

Pioneers:
As you all know, Anil was here in San Jose and we had a good time.
I decided to combine my blogging (mis)adventures with writing something about our trip to SFO.

I love San Francisco for its form, for its cultural programs, for its roads with ups and down, for muni, for that unique cosmopolite nature.

We used the yeoman services offered by CalTrain on the weekends and it was just fabulous. These trains are so nice and relaxing that I have now started hating driving to SFO on 101. The train not fast but it just relaxes the busy commuters. That is so vital.

I used the transit 511 planner to plan the trip After reaching SFO, we took the muni and it immediately landed us in some trouble because we just missed one of the buses to golden gate bridge and quickly we changed the plan to go to the beautiful pier 39 which has got a lot of naval history attached with it. Here is a picture of Anil



at fisherman's wharf en-route pier 39.

We roamed around the pier and visited the little but interesting shops around. Pier 39 is a very enjoyable place. People roaming around, a few solo-shows like riding unicycle, shops selling weird things, eateries and food stalls, a nice view of golden gate bridge and alcatraz, dirty (subjective ;) ) seals are some of its features. Here are a couple photographs:


You can see the ship in background of this photograph, with a different angle here.





Then we decided to go to golden gate bridge and were looking for some help to get there. As we were waiting for line 30, we met a lady who migrated to SFO 35 years ago and immediately became friends with her. She was very talkative and seemed to know the city and muni very well. She was telling us that she had a couple foster children, one in India and one in Guatemala. The city was like heaven for this lady who had a gray head and wore glasses to give her that kinda bossing appearance. The ease with which she was moving around stemmed from the familiarity with the city. She was all praise for it. She gave me the clear directions and still I managed to mess it up all and we got delayed unncessarily. But finally we were able to get on the muni line to golden gate bridge. This is that signature place of interest and inspiration in SFO. The golden gate area is simply gorgeous.



I have not written much about the peoples, the eateries, the streets and cultural culminations of this city. But then, this was just a glimpse!

Do visit SFO sometime!