San Francisco!
Warning: This post is really long and very picture heavy. I decided to get it all out in one big post. I'm still using Photobucket even though I hate the size of their pictures. But there were too many pictures for me to upload them all to Flickr, and I refuse to pay for an upgraded account. Also, I'm clearly not a professional photographer and it's fairly clear in some of the photos. So, without further ado,
Day 1: Our trip to San Francisco started on October 17. My friend Blake came to pick me up about 6:30 a.m. We planned on at least 12 hours driving, and didn't think we'd arrive until after 7 California time. Little did I know that Blake is a speed deamon and we got there around 5, even after stopping for gas twice and one other stop at a Wal-Mart so Blake could buy a lock for his cubby at the hostel since he'd left his at home. I was so glad we got there when we did, because we were able to get find the hostel before dark and get checked in.
We stayed at the Green Tortoise. It is the first traditional hostel I've ever stayed at. We stayed in a traditional dorm style room, so we had six roommates that changed almost nightly. It was a co-ed room, but I was the only girl in there. Most of the guys were decent though, so I felt pretty comfortable. The hostel itself was on Broadway Street, which if you're not familiar with San Francisco, is basically the center of SF's "Red Light District". The entire street and one or two bordering streets were lined with strip clubs and a few adult toy stores. It was crazy. But, it also bordered North Beach and was only one block away from China Town. We really were in a great spot and once we figured them out, had good access to multiple bus lines.
After we checked in, we decided to drive the car out to the SF airport and leave it at long term parking. We figured it was the cheaper option for parking rather than trying to find a 24 hour lot right in the city. Most of the surrounding lots had 12 hour limits and were $24-30 per day. The airport was $14. Once we dropped the car off, we took BART back to the city. However, once we got off BART we had no idea what bus to take and spent over an hour walking around trying to figure it out. We were tired and by now it was dark and despite dropping off most of our luggage, still had a few things with us. I looked pretty soffisticated walking around carrying my pillow, let me tell you! We finally called the hostel and asked which bus to take and when we got on the one they told us we ended up being taken to the opposite side of town and got stuck at the end of the line. We'd gotten on the one going the opposite direction! So then we had to find yet another bus line to take us back. It was just crazy. But we finally made it and realized we had this amazing view of the Transamerica building.
Day 2: We decided to spend this day at Fisherman's Wharf to get it out of the way and to get tickets for Alcatraz. We really wanted to do a night tour, which sells out really fast. We were able to get tickets for it, but had to wait clear until Friday!
Anyway, we did Pier 39 where Blake cracked open an oyster and had the pearl set into a pendent for his mom. I love those pearl things, I'm a total sucker! By the end of the day I had three and Blake had 4. It's a long story, but basically we're just a couple of suckers haha!
Blake's first pearl
While we walked around we saw a group of guys making spray paint art. They were so cool! They were only $10, and they guy was awesome enough to custom make one for me. We had watched them make about 10 different ones and he let me choose the colors and design I wanted, so that was fun.
Day 3: We signed up for a bus tour with Elie's Green Dream Tours. He was amazing! I would recommend his tour to anybody wanting an inexpensive, personalized tour. He picked us up from our hostel and then drove us to Lombard Street then through North Beach, Fisherman's Wharf, past Alcatraz, The Marina, The Presidio, a stop at the beach to view the Golden Gate Bridge, across the bridge to Muir Woods, back into the city to Golden Gate Park, Twin Peaks, The Castro, Haight Ashbury, City Hall, and The Seven Sisters all while telling us the history of all the different neighborhoods and interesting facts of the city. It was about 6 hours and we got to have about an hour to walk through Muir Woods and look at the Redwood trees. They were amazing! It was the only rainy day we had there, but it made the forest smell so great. We didn't get a picture opportunity of the Seven Sisters due to the rain, but the best thing about the tour was knowing where we wanted to go for the rest of the week and we got a icture later.
Lombard street
Viewing the Golden Gate Bridge from the beach near the Presidio (an old military base)
The bridge from the "other side".
Muir Woods
Blake channeling his inner Superstar :)
View of the city from Twin Peaks*
*When we got to the top of Twin Peaks the fog and clouds were still far enough back that we could see the entire city, but as we stood there we watched it roll in and within about 5 minutes we couldn't see anything. However, right before the clouds completely overtook everything a giant rainbow popped up over the city, which you can see if you look really closely. Blake was super excited to see a giant rainbow over San Francisco and found it pretty appropriate considering we were in the gay capitol.
After our tour we went back to the hostel where we enjoyed free dinner and then just hung out and visited with all the people there. We met some really interesting people!
Day 4: Monday night Blake was looking online for things to do and found that a free walking tour was being offered in The Castro the next morning. Free is always awesome and one of the main reasons we went to SF was so Blake could see The Castro. The tour was pretty much centered around Harvey Milk and the gay rights movement in the 70's. If you haven't seen the movie Milk, I highly recommend it. The movie was filmed on location so as we walked around on the tour we saw a lot of the places highlighted in the movie.
This flag is at the metro/bus station on Castro Street.
This is a mural painted on the building above the store which was Harvey Milk's photography business. It's now some fancy housewares place.
We saw this business and thought it was hilarious, but even more so after we both spotted it on failblog.net a couple of days later.
There is a school in The Castro which is named for Harvey Milk and focuses it's education on equality and civil rights. They had beautiful murals on the outside which were created with the help of the students.
After our walking tour we walked around some more and then found a little burrito place to have lunch. Then since the two areas are right next door to one another we went to Haight Ashbury to look at the hippies. It was a great place for people watching! We went to Ameoba Records, which I guess is famous for being San Francisco's biggest record store. It was really big and they had everything. But just walking through the area was fun enough for me. There was some fun stuff.
After all that we headed back to the hostel to get ready to go on the hostel sponsered pub crawl. They took us to a few bars that had $2 specials, so we had dinner for $4 (cheeseburger and fries for $2 each). Nothing beats getting cheap food in an outrageously expensive city!
We saw this crazy lady walking through the bars trying to sell stuff to drunk people. That was funny.
Day 5: Blake has a friend that he went to massage therapy school with that had just recently moved to SF. She and her husband picked us up and took us to lunch at Fisherman's Wharf. It was really nice of them to buy lunch for us. After lunch we walked around for a bit and then they drove us to the Academy of Sciences museum at the Golden Gate Park. They had free admission that day, so we got to experience that. It was fun. They had a giant aquarium that was really fun to look at. The museum was so big and we only got to be there for about 3 hours before it closed so we really didn't even see half of it. I'd definitely love to go back some day and see it all. There's apparently a really neat planetarium area and there is a rain forest. The lines to get into both were really long so we stuck to the areas that were open for browsing so we could use our time to our advantage rather than just standing in lines. Right by the museum is an outdoor amphetheater that I'd played a concert at with my youth symphony when I was in high school. It was cool to see it again, but I honestly don't remember any museums being near it, and there's two of them! I'd have liked to walk through more of the park and see the Japanese Tea Gardens, but we needed to get back to the hostel so we could take advantage of free dinner again. We had an entirely free day!
Day 6: We couldn't leave San Francisco without seeing China Town, especially since it was only a block from the hostel. We ate lunch in some really inexpensive place where nothing was in English and we had no idea what we were eating. It was a little scary, but neither of us got sick so I guess it was okay.
We spent part of this day trying to find some fortune cookie factory. We found one little one, but Blake was convinced it wasn't "the one" we were supposed to be looking for so we found an address of another which ended up being clear on the other side of town (supposedly, we never found it!) so we took the bus down there and realized were were in the ghetto so we quickly hightailed it out of there and then stopped for some delicious frozen yogurt and found the theater showing Wicked. Sadly we didn't see it, just because we were on a budget. I suspect that we could have seen it if it hadn't been for those damn pearls.
This night the hostel sponsered an activity referred to as "Beer Olympics". Basically they divided the participants into teams based on what country they were from and then played drinking games. Blake and I watched and laughed at them all for a while before deciding to leave with a few people and we went to a couple clubs to see what the club scene was like. It was pretty fun!
Day 7: We slept in really late this day and then just kind of bummed around for a while. We ventured back up to China Town for some reason and as we were walking down some unknown street we found "the" fortune cookie place we had been looking for the previous day. The cookies were multi colored in red, blue, black, and the regular tan color. They were supposedly flavored, but I couldn't tell the difference. After that we headed back down to Fisherman's Wharf so we could go to Alcatraz. Before getting on the boat we went to see the sea lions at Pier 39. We were told that they were experiencing a record number of them this season and had counted over 1,000 that day.
Then it was off to Pier 33 to go out to Alcatraz. Seeing it at night was really cool. I've been there twice during the day, but this was by far the best. They had the hospital wing open for half an hour while we were there. It's not normally open during the day, and I had never seen it. It was pretty cool and creepy at the same time. They had some special tours you could take also. We opted for one that focused on escape attempts from the prison. It was interesting.
An X-Ray table?
view of the city from the boat
After Alcatraz Blake really wanted to go dancing and had decided on a place called The Stud. We took a bus as far as we could but then had to walk about 4 blocks through some scary neighborhood to get there. It was definitely an interesting place, but was pretty much dead so we decided to find somewhere else to go. We met a couple of guys out on the street while waiting for a taxi so we started chatting. Blake asked them if they were familiar with this club he wanted to go to. It was a hispanic dance club (Blake likes dark boys hehe). The two men basically laughed at him but then said, "Come on, we'll take you there. It's definitely an experience."
So we all piled into a cab (they covered the cab for us, how nice!) and headed to this club. It was definitely cheesy! I really wish I'd taken pictures. Other than Blake there was only one other white guy there. He was probably about 40 and was pretty tipsy, but he latched onto me as soon as he saw me and wanted to dance. He was actually really funny. They were playing pop music when we got there but then it suddenly changed to Mexican dance music. Then all of a sudden that stopped and some guy gets up and introduces the fabulous Miss so and so (I can't remember her name) and this drag queen comes out and lip sings to Kylie Minogue while these two male go go dancers are dancing around behind her in their underwear. The place seriously met every single stereotype for a gay dance club. After the drag queen was done the two guys from the street grabbed us and dragged us out of there. As we were leaving Mr. 40 gave me a hug and asked me why I was leaving him. haha.
The guys then took us to a bigger dance club over in The Castro. That place was much more fun and I think I danced with more guys than Blake did! We stayed there until it closed then took a taxi back to the hostel. It was a great way to end our week.
Day 8: We checked out of the hostel and then headed to the airport to get the car. We left our luggage at the hostel so we didn't have to lug it around and then went back to pick it up once we had the car. We spent a few hours driving around looking at cool architecture to find silly things like the "Mrs. Doubtfire" house:
And the "Full House" house:
And the Seven Sisters. These are probably the most famous of the old Victorian houses, and the view of them is really pretty with the city behind them:
After that we said good-bye to the city and headed over to Oakland. We had tickets to see Mika that night and had a few hours to waste so we went to a movie.
The concert was amazing! I love Mika, so I'm really glad I was able to go. We drove home after the show. Blake drove most of the way then I took over. I finally had to pull off around the time the sun started coming up because I couldn't see and I was so tired and was starting to not feel well. We slept at a little rest stop for about an hour and a half and then Blake started driving again. I kept sleeping and when I woke up we were about 10 miles from my house. We made it home around 11 a.m., which was pretty early considering the stop! Blake drives crazy, I am a much more conservative driver! It's probably a good thing I was asleep so I had no idea how fast he was driving.
It was such a fun trip! I saw way more on this trip than I ever have on previous trips there. The hostel was really fun too. I loved that we had free breakfast every day and that they offer free dinner Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. We didn't eat there on Friday since were were at Alcatraz, but two nights of free food is awesome! Plus you could use the kitchen to cook your own food so most nights we just ate Ramen there to save money. Plus I loved meeting so many awesome people from all over the world. I would definitely stay in a hostel again. Plus it's way cheaper than a traditional hotel!
Day 1: Our trip to San Francisco started on October 17. My friend Blake came to pick me up about 6:30 a.m. We planned on at least 12 hours driving, and didn't think we'd arrive until after 7 California time. Little did I know that Blake is a speed deamon and we got there around 5, even after stopping for gas twice and one other stop at a Wal-Mart so Blake could buy a lock for his cubby at the hostel since he'd left his at home. I was so glad we got there when we did, because we were able to get find the hostel before dark and get checked in.
We stayed at the Green Tortoise. It is the first traditional hostel I've ever stayed at. We stayed in a traditional dorm style room, so we had six roommates that changed almost nightly. It was a co-ed room, but I was the only girl in there. Most of the guys were decent though, so I felt pretty comfortable. The hostel itself was on Broadway Street, which if you're not familiar with San Francisco, is basically the center of SF's "Red Light District". The entire street and one or two bordering streets were lined with strip clubs and a few adult toy stores. It was crazy. But, it also bordered North Beach and was only one block away from China Town. We really were in a great spot and once we figured them out, had good access to multiple bus lines.
After we checked in, we decided to drive the car out to the SF airport and leave it at long term parking. We figured it was the cheaper option for parking rather than trying to find a 24 hour lot right in the city. Most of the surrounding lots had 12 hour limits and were $24-30 per day. The airport was $14. Once we dropped the car off, we took BART back to the city. However, once we got off BART we had no idea what bus to take and spent over an hour walking around trying to figure it out. We were tired and by now it was dark and despite dropping off most of our luggage, still had a few things with us. I looked pretty soffisticated walking around carrying my pillow, let me tell you! We finally called the hostel and asked which bus to take and when we got on the one they told us we ended up being taken to the opposite side of town and got stuck at the end of the line. We'd gotten on the one going the opposite direction! So then we had to find yet another bus line to take us back. It was just crazy. But we finally made it and realized we had this amazing view of the Transamerica building.
Day 2: We decided to spend this day at Fisherman's Wharf to get it out of the way and to get tickets for Alcatraz. We really wanted to do a night tour, which sells out really fast. We were able to get tickets for it, but had to wait clear until Friday!
Anyway, we did Pier 39 where Blake cracked open an oyster and had the pearl set into a pendent for his mom. I love those pearl things, I'm a total sucker! By the end of the day I had three and Blake had 4. It's a long story, but basically we're just a couple of suckers haha!
Blake's first pearl
While we walked around we saw a group of guys making spray paint art. They were so cool! They were only $10, and they guy was awesome enough to custom make one for me. We had watched them make about 10 different ones and he let me choose the colors and design I wanted, so that was fun.
Day 3: We signed up for a bus tour with Elie's Green Dream Tours. He was amazing! I would recommend his tour to anybody wanting an inexpensive, personalized tour. He picked us up from our hostel and then drove us to Lombard Street then through North Beach, Fisherman's Wharf, past Alcatraz, The Marina, The Presidio, a stop at the beach to view the Golden Gate Bridge, across the bridge to Muir Woods, back into the city to Golden Gate Park, Twin Peaks, The Castro, Haight Ashbury, City Hall, and The Seven Sisters all while telling us the history of all the different neighborhoods and interesting facts of the city. It was about 6 hours and we got to have about an hour to walk through Muir Woods and look at the Redwood trees. They were amazing! It was the only rainy day we had there, but it made the forest smell so great. We didn't get a picture opportunity of the Seven Sisters due to the rain, but the best thing about the tour was knowing where we wanted to go for the rest of the week and we got a icture later.
Lombard street
Viewing the Golden Gate Bridge from the beach near the Presidio (an old military base)
The bridge from the "other side".
Muir Woods
Blake channeling his inner Superstar :)
View of the city from Twin Peaks*
*When we got to the top of Twin Peaks the fog and clouds were still far enough back that we could see the entire city, but as we stood there we watched it roll in and within about 5 minutes we couldn't see anything. However, right before the clouds completely overtook everything a giant rainbow popped up over the city, which you can see if you look really closely. Blake was super excited to see a giant rainbow over San Francisco and found it pretty appropriate considering we were in the gay capitol.
After our tour we went back to the hostel where we enjoyed free dinner and then just hung out and visited with all the people there. We met some really interesting people!
Day 4: Monday night Blake was looking online for things to do and found that a free walking tour was being offered in The Castro the next morning. Free is always awesome and one of the main reasons we went to SF was so Blake could see The Castro. The tour was pretty much centered around Harvey Milk and the gay rights movement in the 70's. If you haven't seen the movie Milk, I highly recommend it. The movie was filmed on location so as we walked around on the tour we saw a lot of the places highlighted in the movie.
This flag is at the metro/bus station on Castro Street.
This is a mural painted on the building above the store which was Harvey Milk's photography business. It's now some fancy housewares place.
We saw this business and thought it was hilarious, but even more so after we both spotted it on failblog.net a couple of days later.
There is a school in The Castro which is named for Harvey Milk and focuses it's education on equality and civil rights. They had beautiful murals on the outside which were created with the help of the students.
After our walking tour we walked around some more and then found a little burrito place to have lunch. Then since the two areas are right next door to one another we went to Haight Ashbury to look at the hippies. It was a great place for people watching! We went to Ameoba Records, which I guess is famous for being San Francisco's biggest record store. It was really big and they had everything. But just walking through the area was fun enough for me. There was some fun stuff.
After all that we headed back to the hostel to get ready to go on the hostel sponsered pub crawl. They took us to a few bars that had $2 specials, so we had dinner for $4 (cheeseburger and fries for $2 each). Nothing beats getting cheap food in an outrageously expensive city!
We saw this crazy lady walking through the bars trying to sell stuff to drunk people. That was funny.
Day 5: Blake has a friend that he went to massage therapy school with that had just recently moved to SF. She and her husband picked us up and took us to lunch at Fisherman's Wharf. It was really nice of them to buy lunch for us. After lunch we walked around for a bit and then they drove us to the Academy of Sciences museum at the Golden Gate Park. They had free admission that day, so we got to experience that. It was fun. They had a giant aquarium that was really fun to look at. The museum was so big and we only got to be there for about 3 hours before it closed so we really didn't even see half of it. I'd definitely love to go back some day and see it all. There's apparently a really neat planetarium area and there is a rain forest. The lines to get into both were really long so we stuck to the areas that were open for browsing so we could use our time to our advantage rather than just standing in lines. Right by the museum is an outdoor amphetheater that I'd played a concert at with my youth symphony when I was in high school. It was cool to see it again, but I honestly don't remember any museums being near it, and there's two of them! I'd have liked to walk through more of the park and see the Japanese Tea Gardens, but we needed to get back to the hostel so we could take advantage of free dinner again. We had an entirely free day!
Day 6: We couldn't leave San Francisco without seeing China Town, especially since it was only a block from the hostel. We ate lunch in some really inexpensive place where nothing was in English and we had no idea what we were eating. It was a little scary, but neither of us got sick so I guess it was okay.
We spent part of this day trying to find some fortune cookie factory. We found one little one, but Blake was convinced it wasn't "the one" we were supposed to be looking for so we found an address of another which ended up being clear on the other side of town (supposedly, we never found it!) so we took the bus down there and realized were were in the ghetto so we quickly hightailed it out of there and then stopped for some delicious frozen yogurt and found the theater showing Wicked. Sadly we didn't see it, just because we were on a budget. I suspect that we could have seen it if it hadn't been for those damn pearls.
This night the hostel sponsered an activity referred to as "Beer Olympics". Basically they divided the participants into teams based on what country they were from and then played drinking games. Blake and I watched and laughed at them all for a while before deciding to leave with a few people and we went to a couple clubs to see what the club scene was like. It was pretty fun!
Day 7: We slept in really late this day and then just kind of bummed around for a while. We ventured back up to China Town for some reason and as we were walking down some unknown street we found "the" fortune cookie place we had been looking for the previous day. The cookies were multi colored in red, blue, black, and the regular tan color. They were supposedly flavored, but I couldn't tell the difference. After that we headed back down to Fisherman's Wharf so we could go to Alcatraz. Before getting on the boat we went to see the sea lions at Pier 39. We were told that they were experiencing a record number of them this season and had counted over 1,000 that day.
Then it was off to Pier 33 to go out to Alcatraz. Seeing it at night was really cool. I've been there twice during the day, but this was by far the best. They had the hospital wing open for half an hour while we were there. It's not normally open during the day, and I had never seen it. It was pretty cool and creepy at the same time. They had some special tours you could take also. We opted for one that focused on escape attempts from the prison. It was interesting.
An X-Ray table?
view of the city from the boat
After Alcatraz Blake really wanted to go dancing and had decided on a place called The Stud. We took a bus as far as we could but then had to walk about 4 blocks through some scary neighborhood to get there. It was definitely an interesting place, but was pretty much dead so we decided to find somewhere else to go. We met a couple of guys out on the street while waiting for a taxi so we started chatting. Blake asked them if they were familiar with this club he wanted to go to. It was a hispanic dance club (Blake likes dark boys hehe). The two men basically laughed at him but then said, "Come on, we'll take you there. It's definitely an experience."
So we all piled into a cab (they covered the cab for us, how nice!) and headed to this club. It was definitely cheesy! I really wish I'd taken pictures. Other than Blake there was only one other white guy there. He was probably about 40 and was pretty tipsy, but he latched onto me as soon as he saw me and wanted to dance. He was actually really funny. They were playing pop music when we got there but then it suddenly changed to Mexican dance music. Then all of a sudden that stopped and some guy gets up and introduces the fabulous Miss so and so (I can't remember her name) and this drag queen comes out and lip sings to Kylie Minogue while these two male go go dancers are dancing around behind her in their underwear. The place seriously met every single stereotype for a gay dance club. After the drag queen was done the two guys from the street grabbed us and dragged us out of there. As we were leaving Mr. 40 gave me a hug and asked me why I was leaving him. haha.
The guys then took us to a bigger dance club over in The Castro. That place was much more fun and I think I danced with more guys than Blake did! We stayed there until it closed then took a taxi back to the hostel. It was a great way to end our week.
Day 8: We checked out of the hostel and then headed to the airport to get the car. We left our luggage at the hostel so we didn't have to lug it around and then went back to pick it up once we had the car. We spent a few hours driving around looking at cool architecture to find silly things like the "Mrs. Doubtfire" house:
And the "Full House" house:
And the Seven Sisters. These are probably the most famous of the old Victorian houses, and the view of them is really pretty with the city behind them:
After that we said good-bye to the city and headed over to Oakland. We had tickets to see Mika that night and had a few hours to waste so we went to a movie.
The concert was amazing! I love Mika, so I'm really glad I was able to go. We drove home after the show. Blake drove most of the way then I took over. I finally had to pull off around the time the sun started coming up because I couldn't see and I was so tired and was starting to not feel well. We slept at a little rest stop for about an hour and a half and then Blake started driving again. I kept sleeping and when I woke up we were about 10 miles from my house. We made it home around 11 a.m., which was pretty early considering the stop! Blake drives crazy, I am a much more conservative driver! It's probably a good thing I was asleep so I had no idea how fast he was driving.
It was such a fun trip! I saw way more on this trip than I ever have on previous trips there. The hostel was really fun too. I loved that we had free breakfast every day and that they offer free dinner Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. We didn't eat there on Friday since were were at Alcatraz, but two nights of free food is awesome! Plus you could use the kitchen to cook your own food so most nights we just ate Ramen there to save money. Plus I loved meeting so many awesome people from all over the world. I would definitely stay in a hostel again. Plus it's way cheaper than a traditional hotel!