'I may have made a couple of booboos.' 'You owe us 8 million pounds.' 'Like I said, booboos.'
More pancakes this morning. We haven’t quite got the hang of them due to the mix being too thick and us trying to French them up. Bloody American pancakes. I (Emma) had two cups of coffee and sent my body into crisis. Laura almost set the pan on fire. For some reason we are still alive after 10 days without supervision.
We walked through the non-touristy part of Chinatown. Laura had to restrain herself from buying all of the lychees. We were the only non-Chinese people on the street for about 5 minutes, until we were overtaken by another tourist who said “who needs to go to China?” Indeed. It was pretty incredible. Then all of a sudden we were in Little Italy. They mark the neighborhoods by putting the colours on the lampposts. Little Italy had, as one might guess, the Italian flag colours. Castro had the rainbow stripes. Chinatown had dragons. There were people doing Tai Chi in the park, which shouldn’t have surprised Laura, she says, but did.
Oh god I’ve eaten so many biscuits.
Anyway, then we went to the Beat Museum looked at exhibits in a serious and learny manner. Then we went to the City Lights bookshop, the central hub for all the beatniks back in the day - we bought books and got free books as well (books that were being given away, I’ve gotten over my kleptomania phase). Then we had coffee (see: crisis). Laura was seriously happy. I know this because she made that noise, like a chipmunk being shot over a cliff, as well as punching my arm and nudging me into traffic in glee.
We got a streetcar (which was unnamed but for the purposes of this blog post shall be called ‘Desire’, which pleases Laura as she just went ‘yayyyy’ next to me. Joint effort, this. Shocking, isn’t it). Our driver had the most amazing growly voice (probably due to throat cancer but Laura chooses to romanticise this).
We dumped our books at the hostel and caught the bus to Haight Ashbury, only it wasn’t quite Haight Ashbury, it was Haight Masonic, a whole 40 feet away so Laura promptly marched us off in the opposite direction. (‘I can honestly say, hand on my heart, whoops! Sorry’ - Laura). About 10 minutes of up-and-down hilling I started to have some sort of caffeine crash and went very quiet so was tenderly led into a cafe and fed dry bagels until I looked more human.
I (Laura) have gained control of Emma's blog.
We retraced our steps and finally made it to Haight Ashbury - dominated by a giant Ben and Jerry’s - how very counter culture. I did take a picture of the clock stuck at 4.20: bong o’clock, but we concluded that it was basically Camden. Different social movement but same overpriced t-shirts.
Then we walked down the hill to Castro and took many many photos of the giant rainbow flag against the sunset. We saw Castro Camera, Harvey Milk’s shop which is now a tribute to him. Then we stopped for a drink in a place called Twin Peaks (they did not serve pie or damn fine coffee - for shame). We nearly froze waiting for the streetcar back to Union Square so distracted ourselves by taking more photos of the giant rainbow flag.
When we got back to Union Square they were starting to put the Christmas decorations up. The palm trees were covered in fairy lights, every window in Macy’s had a wreath in it and men in cherry pickers were putting up baubles bigger than their own heads onto a hundred foot Christmas tree. All of the shops had put up their Christmas window displays during the day. It is officially Christmas in San Fransisco. I made the noise of a chipmunk being fired over a cliff again (I have been reliably informed).
Tonight we dine on cheap white wine, chocolate cookies and Reese’s peanut butter cups (it has taken us three attempts to remember what they are called, even though the packet is in front of us). Gosh this miniature bottle of white wine has gone to my head.
In conclusion: we like Frisco very much. Eeee!