Saturday, July 4, 2015

San Fran -day 2

Today's plan:
  • sleep until 8:30 - I've been up since 7
  • go for a run at 9
  • visit this and that - painted ladies, Golden Gate mosaic stairway, Grand View park stairs, mission district, Haas-Lilienthal House, eat at Straw, Twin Peak Summit, 
  • end the day with 4th of July fireworks.
P.S. Remember to click on photo to get bigger view.

It's three o'clock and we are taking a break.  This is how the day went so far...

We went for a beautiful run in Golden Gate Park.  Beautiful place!  We just followed trails wherever they brought us.  One of them took us through the AIDS memorial grove.  What a beautiful, respectful place.  We ran for 4.39 km.  Luckily, there were washrooms close to where we had parked the car so we changed into regular clothing to continue on our journey.  

We got in the car and drove to see the mosaic stairs.  We parked the car and heard the elusive parrots.  Those darn birds don't want us to see them!  They flew overhead but too fast for us to really see them.  We start walking, climb up 140 stairs, climb down the other side of the mountain to figure out we were not in the right place.  We walked around the mountain to the original side we started at and finally found the famous staircase.  WOW! What beautiful work!  I should've counted how many stairs there were... but thought of it too late.  There were 163 - it took over 2 minutes to get to the top. 

The second set of stairs was even more beautiful I think...Although it seemed much longer, it only had 148 steps.  The hidden garden - very colourful mosaic. 

After looking at the beautiful artwork, going up and down stairs, we moved on to twin peaks.  That was a bit useless because of the fog.  We could see absolutely nothing but white... all around, just... white.  I'm guessing that on a sunny day - they do exist right? - you would have a 360 panoramic view of the Bay... Oh well, we climbed up more steps just to say we were on top of one of the peaks.

Down, down, down we went to see the painted ladies - a row of very cute little homes.  Nothing like the Jelly bean rows in St.John's Newfoundland though.  We had a difficult time finding a parking spot... it's crazy here on Saturdays!  Doesn't help that it's the fourth of July - parks are filling up with party goers! 

We looked at the houses for a whole 2 minutes and moved on to see the Mission District.  Parts of this neighbourhood seems quite poor and shady.  Not someplace you wander alone at night... We were looking for the graffiti walls and found them.  Beautiful artwork!  I guess you could say we are having an artful day! 


We had lunch in a little hippie sort of restaurant called frjtz.  Their fries were really good! 





Now, we are sitting in our hotel room, I'm typing, Sophie is looking at her pictures on her phone and Rémi is doing I'm not sure what on his phone.










For dinner, we went to a pretty cool restaurant called Straw - circus themed restaurant. The menus were glued inside children's book covers, the dessert menu was in a notebook and people wrote/drew messages.  Pretty cute little place! The food was actually pretty good!  Rémi had a doughnut burger!! Instead of buns - doughnuts!    I had beef quesadillas.  Sophie had some sort of pasta dish with chicken.  It was pretty good as well!




Other things worth mentioning:

  • The fourth of July is not as impressive as the 1st in Ottawa.  No red, white and blue, it's not as patriotic as home.  I would've thought it would have been more.  Tons of people watching the fireworks - which were beautiful.
  • None of the streets were closed during the "concert" and fireworks - are they nuts? Every downtown street is closed in Ottawa.
  • I have never seen as many homeless people as I've seen here - with the exception of Los Angeles.  What are they doing wrong that there are so many here?  It's kind of sad to see.
  • 20 000 steps.





















No comments:

Post a Comment