I catch a bus to Haight, and walk towards Golden Gate Park, passing several Irish / British theme bars packed with Portuguese and Spanish watching their respective teams play eachother in the World Cup.
I had walked this street about fifteen years ago. Then, there was a hangover from the sixties and the characters who hung around this street probably diminished the property values. Now however, the street is tidy and the homes spruced up with a handful of exotic restaurants inhabiting commercial units. There are still ‘smoke shops’ and a smattering of homeless people lie around near the entrance to Golden Gate Park. There is also the elaborately spray painted Amoeba Records, which was a paradise of rare vinyl and CDs to me the last time I was here.
You might expect Golden Gate Park to be somewhere near the Golden Gate Bridge, but it is a few miles to the south. The specific attractions like the Botanic Gardens and the Aids Memorial Garden are neatly manicured, but the rest of the park looks well trodden. There are roads and paths crisscrossing throughout the park and it reminds me of Central Park in New York. There are a couple of popular museums and few historic lodges, though I don’t visit these in my frugal state.
The park is much larger than I had anticipated. After an hour and a half of walking westwards through the park, I randomly recollect that today is the last day that I can pay my fine for parking the wrong way in Pacific Grove before it doubles, so decide to go back to the hostel. I know that I am somewhere in the middle of the park and there are lots of information plaques with maps etched into them. However, none of the maps say ‘you are here’, so they don’t prove very useful. Eventually after passing a road sign I realise that I am walking east on the south side of the park, exactly the opposite of where I need to be, so it takes me another couple of hours to get back to the hostel and my parking ticket.
The remaining National Parks tour group are going to see a San Francisco Giants baseball game tonight, but I always hated baseball even when I lived in Florida as a boy, so decline to join them. Instead I spend the evening in a bar I discovered from leaflets left in the hostel advertising a ‘Britpop / Punk / New Wave’ karaoke night. The leaflets don’t seem to have had much effect as, including me, there are only six people in the bar for the karaoke, and I discover that three of them are the DJ’s friends. There isn’t much evidence of punk or new wave on the playlist, but it is reassuring to know that someone somewhere is singing Happy Monday’s ‘Wrote For Luck’ (you used to tell the truth but now you’re clever) on a karaoke machine. However, I found it difficult to sit through the sensitive looking bloke singing Morrissey with a hoarse voice.
 |
| San Francisco Bowls Club |
No comments:
Post a Comment