I was walking to Caltrain wearing one of my new t-shirts on the Friday before the Pride Parade, when it occurred to me that perhaps the shirt might be sending the wrong message for the weekend:
Oops.
Archive for the 'San Francisco' Category
For the love of pho / We scour S.F.'s Little Saigon to find the best Vietnamese beef noodle soup - Reading this article is a lot more effective than just wandering around the Tenderloin trying to pick a Pho joint after Google Local SMS suggests "Pesticide Action Network North" in response to "vietnamese, san francisco, ca."
Whether it's because people in the bay area think they're even more clever than their neighbors or because there's just more disposable income floating around, the fact of the matter is there are a lot of vanity plates to be seen in these parts. (Or maybe it's just the fact that I spend 17 days a year in my car commuting.) I believe I've finally seen enough plates to declare the worst vanity plate I've ever seen:
I was driving north on 19th and had just passed Noriega when it happened: A giant black Range Rover cut in front of me without signalling. But before I even had a chance to get very upset about the fact that my view of (anything) had been obstructed, I saw its license plate: ERRANDS. "Are you kidding me?" The thing is, now that I think about it, I think they actually meant it. I don't believe anyone who could afford that gas guzzling waste of space (much less anyone who actually lives in the bay area and yet still bought that thing) could have saved up enough irony over the course of their entire life to select that plate ironically.
That said, today I encountered a runner up: A BMW 3-series whose plate read MMMONEY.
As excited as I am by everything Octavia Boulevard (and Hayes Valley in general), it sure would be nice if it were a little easier to find the Octavia off-ramp from either direction. I managed to miss it the first two times I tried to use it from both 80 W and 101 N.
It's basically not signed until almost the last minute. To get there, follow signs towards Civic Center / Golden Gate Bridge, do not exit at Civic Center, and then you should see a sign for Octavia Boulevard.
When I first contemplated the idea of riding a bike in San Francisco a couple of years ago, it was pretty terrifying. Of course, this was when I still lived in Berkeley and was kind of scared of going to (much less even driving in) San Francisco, and I hadn't ridden a bike since high school. "It's like a video game," Tyler tried to convince me.
The thought of riding a bike in the city was a little less scary a year ago, but only because I had gotten over my fear of the city itself, and was now just dealing with the idea of riding a bike in it. The idea of having to ride over those hills didn't help much, though.
But I finally bought a bike and I've been riding to CalTrain a couple of days a week, and y'know what? It's not so bad. In fact, it is like a video game, what with dodging buses and the stuff the kids in the western addition like to throw at me. Heck, there's even a time limit in the morning, and if I lose I miss my train.
But then Mark had to go and point out that the only problem is you only get one life in this game. Point taken.
Well that's a real bummer. It looks like Cafe Evolution is making way for some intelligent design. Um, not to say that Vegans have anything to do with creationism, but the joke was just begging to be made. That place was pretty awesome. I'd recommend you check it out before it's too late, but then you'll just be bummed when it's gone.
The San Francisco Bicycle and Walking Map. This map has some easily readable topographic information about the city. If you're walking or biking in the city, this looks like the tool to have.
A handy article about, but what I find most interesting about this is the use of a blogspot blog to publish a single article. (via Ernie)
We have a ritual of going to Arby's in South San Francisco for lunch whenever one of our Subaru drivers is getting his car serviced. The problem is, South San Francisco is possibly the least hospitable place on the peninsula, and it doesn't really help that your average Arby's tends towards the ghetto side.
Let me first say that any city that thinks it's a good idea to write "South San Francisco - The Industrial City" on the side of their mountain probably isn't going to be a very nice place to live, much less visit.
While we were ordering our food, one of the employees went to her car, and returned with a cup of instant soup, presumably for her lunch. When she opened the door, the wind caught it and blew it open, and the gust blew some napkins and cup lids into the air, and one of the employees said "Wind storm!" and I had a sad vision of her saying that everytime a few lids were blown into the air.
It looked like a nice sunny day, so we decided to eat at one of the tables outside. As soon as we sat down in the middle of a sea of pavement, we realized how windy it was, but we decided we could weather the nuisance. We had a nice clear view of the South San Francisco sign in one direction.
A plane taking off from SFO passed over us, its shadow making it even colder for a second and its sound eclipsing the sound of the rattling fan of an air conditioner which had just kicked in at Arby's. And a few seconds later, the wind caused one of the metal umbrellas to start spinning around and squeaking loudly. The squeak of the spinning death blade and the rattle of the air conditioner continued intermittently for the rest of the meal.
Once we finished our meal, we undertook an expedition to find out why the back half of the parking lot was barricaded off. The barricades only served to keep a car from driving around the back of the building, and the only thing we found back there were the bathrooms. We walked over to the short concrete wall at the back of the parking lot to see what was on the other side behind the shrubbery that stuck up a few feet above the wall.
Tyler hopped onto the top of the wall and peered over the hedge to see someone's back yard -- about 30 feet below. I looked down between the wall and the hedge and noticed that it was actually a 30 foot tall hedge, and then I looked up at tyler, his toes sticking over the edge of the wall, the wind at his back, and the only thing between him and doom was that plant. He obviously still thought the hedge was in a flower bed that started level with the parking lot I was standing on, because that's what it looked like.
"You uh, might want to get down from there." I suggested.
It almost made me wish I was eating lunch in San Mateo.
(This was an attempt at a setting sketch. I'm not sure how well it really described the environment, though.)
Arizmendi Bakery: Gourmet Pizza Schedule
This place fills the void left by the cheeseboard as something I miss from Berkeley, and it's just a nice walk through Golden Gate Park away. My personal favorites are the pizzas with kalamata olives or lemon.
It's really sad that most of my initial observations about San Francisco are about driving. But given that I had to drive to get here, I guess that's kind of understandable. Let's get them out of the way quick:
- San Francisco needs some pretty serious traffic sign infrastructure to get people where they need to go. And yet, there are still several classes of information that I'm having a really hard time finding when I need it:
- All way stops lack the "All Way" placard at the bottom of the stop sign, making me nervous about pretty much every stop sign I stop at. I'm gradually learning to look at the street for that information, though.
- Street names can be awfully hard to find, because they seem to vary in size, color, placement, and redundancy.
- As if the idea of parallel parking on 19th street weren't daunting enough, let's throw in the added complication of needing to pop the right side of your car up onto the sidewalk unless you want your car to get smeared.
- Parking in my neighborhood turns out to not be as impossible as I feared, but it can be still frustratingly difficult at times. Easily the most irritating thing is the spots between two driveways that are ever-so-slightly too small for my slightly longer than average car that I park in only to find I'm sticking over on both sides. Those're the worst, and only make me want a Mini that much more.