Penka gave me some Paulo Coelho books: The Alchemist (I think Rogardt was reading this earlier in the year) and Warrior of the Light. I will add them to the reading stack.
I decided to spend the day in San Francisco, so I caught the CalTrain from Palo Alto at 11.15am. Penka gave me a lift to the station. The cost is a reasonable $US4.25, and a day pass is $US8.50.
Palo Alto train station.
The Oracle offices in Belmont.
San Francisco from the CalTrain.
I walked up the eastern side of SF a bit, south of the ferry terminal, and grabbed some lunch at Pier 38. This was the first freshly cooked hamburger I'd had since I left Australia. I figured the tourst-trap Pier 39 would be nearby, but it wasn't, and upon reading the map more closely I learnt that the pier numbers are randomly assigned, it seems.
SF from the south-east.
The Bay Bridge.
Oakland.
On the advice of a road worker I caught the tram up to the big BART / tram / bus interchange on at Powell / Market St, and started walking up through China Town, past Union Square Park, heading for the renowned Columbus Avenue in North Beach.
Union Square park.
The street goes under the hill, and there's another street on top.
Columbus is a big fat street running roughly north west from China Town. Not knowing how far I had to walk, and keen to try the local product, I stopped off at the San Francisco Brewing Company, purveyors of ales brewed in-house. I wasn't so impressed, and the great thing about California is that one can be quite particular without having to settle for nothing…
It turns out that my goal — the City Lights Bookshop, the famous old beat hangout — is just a block or two further up the road, right across the street from Larry Flint's Hustler Club, and some other red-light-ish places as well. I had to buy some books, of course:
- Howl and other poems - Allen Ginsberg.
- Sometimes a Great Notion - Ken Kesey.
- Pnin - Vladimir Nabakov.
This place is cool enough to have the entire upstairs room devoted to poetry. I asked the girl behind the counter if they had any Allen Ginsberg spoken-word stuff, but she was pretty unhelpful. I was specifically after a version of America that Dave played for me a long time ago. It's backed by a Tom Waits tune, and I had hopes the rest of that CD would be just as good.
Afterwards I went next door to the Vesuvio café for a coffee. Their espresso machine was broken so I had to make do with an American drip coffee.
From there I walked further up North Beach to Telegraph Hill, which has a great view of the city. There's a tower there but I didn't go up it.
Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill.
The Bay Bridge.
Telegraph Hill is quite close to that other tourist trap, Pier 39. I was keen to go there only to check out the sea lions, which somehow find the place attractive. It's the wrong time of year for that sort of thing as most of them have migrated. Perhaps these stragglers were too lazy to go this year…
Alcatraz from Pier 39.
As I'd organised to meet Penka in Berkeley, and I wanted to spend some time wandering around there, I caught a tram back to the Market / Embarcadero BART station, or at least tried to: it confusingly stoppped two blocks before it for no apparent reason, but it was close enough. I also tried to call Penka, and was thwarted by these American telephones. Fortunately catching the BART to Berkeley is easy enough, so I got on the one leaving around 4.20pm for $US3.05.
Alighting from the BART, I managed to call Penka with the help of an American native, and organised to meet up at Ethiopia Restaurant on Telegraph Ave at 19.30. Wandering up Shattuck Ave I almost-immediately stumbled upon Games of Berkeley, which surprisingly had Sus's game in stock.
The UCB campus is quite pretty, with loads of trees and nature areas adjacent to the creek that runs through the whole place. There's some pretty decent hills out the back. I had hopes of seeing a stately old computer science building, where the old BSD hackers did their thing, but it seems the department has moved semi-recently. It's a bit denser than Stanford, but is otherwise similar modulo more greenery.
Berkeley itself was a bit tame as the students weren't there. I intend to go back and buy a tie-die t-shirt; one lady selling them on the street for $US16, which seemed pricey.
Read the day's San Francisco Chronicle, and it's not bad as far as these American newspapers go. Penka got a bit lost in Oakland (these streets are very long and the numbers reset at various points along them), so we didn't meet up until 20.30 or so. The food was quite interesting, somewhere between Middle Eastern and Indian.
We headed back to Palo Alto via San Francisco and the Bay Bridge. I was pretty whacked by the end of it.
