Another day in San Francisco. Caught the CalTrain, walked up to the info centre on Market St / Powell to get a map and some directions. The way to get to Haight-Ashbury is on the bus, it seems. I found it to be much like Newtown: quite a few interesting shop fronts containing pricey and not so great merchandise.
Ventured into Forever After Books, on Haight; I suggest you ask Google about it. Bought a couple of books by Tom Wolfe: The Pump House Gang, which was published on the same day as The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test back in 1968, and The Right Stuff, which is about the moon shots. I headed down to Rockin' Java Café, had an iced coffee, and checked out Amoeba Music next door. I bought Spearhead's Rock The Nation single, randomly, and a shop t-shirt in loud purple and fluro yellow. I read with interest that Paul Kelly was playing at the shop later in the month.
In summary, Haight (from Ashbury down to the park) has one decent cafe and one decent music shop. It's well past it's prime in my humble opinion, at least as a random-person's hangout.
Walked up through Golden Gate Park to catch a bus to the start of the Golden Gate Bridge. Penka's flatmate had told me that walking across this particular bridge was akin to walking through a cloud, and she wasn't wrong.
The Bay Bridge, Oakland.
San Francisco from the southern end of the bridge.
Alcatraz.
North end of the bridge looking south.
Berkeley is over there somewhere.
The funny thing with this bridge is that it's easy to get a bus to the southern end, but there's hardly anything at the other end that will take one back to San Francisco. I spent more than an hour waiting for one at a really tiny and hard to find stop halfway down one of the streets. The directions I got were accurate, but I didn't have enough faith in them. Also the tariff increases quite steeply from one end of the bridge to the other.
After that I got what turned out to be a crap Thai from Thai Stick on O'Farrell St, which I ate it in the kid's playground a bit further down that street.
Popped into the Virgin Megastore on Market Street and bought Midnight Oil's Diesel and Dust (Danny reckons this is all you need) and Head Injuries, their first album.
Had a tea at the organic supermarket and read the New York Times for the day. Caught the CalTrain back to Palo Alto, took a straightfoward but not-too-short path back to Rains. Penka was out drinking with her mates, so I took the opportunity to get some rest.
