It begins oddly. At the airport, someone has left a didgeridoo unattended and is being asked, over the tannoy, to retrieve it. You can’t just leave these things lying around; who knows what havoc they could cause in unskilled hands?
Before long we’re on the tarmac. Engines begin to hum and then whine, building to a crescendo, preparing to launch us on our way to the US. Suddenly everything dies. The lights go out, the air conditioning stops, the engines are silenced.
Something electrical has blown and we are delayed for an hour. It’s not an auspicious start. I’m also fretting about the didgeridoo.
We land in San Francisco after 12 agonising hours in the middle seats of the central aisle (but I can totally recommend The Secret Life of Walter Mitty). We are tired and wired, and must take a train to reach our hotel. This should be interesting; it’s the sort of practical, directions-related thing at which I am complete rubbish.
Miraculously (to an Aucklander), the public transport works as public transport should, and the ease with which we navigate it belies my fears of becoming hopelessly lost. Still, early days, eh?
During the 10-minute walk from the BART train to our hotel I note that San Franciscans are trim and fit looking but appallingly dressed. Baggy jeans, sports clothes and leggings are everywhere. Even the suits are ill fitting, and wearers look slightly shambolic as a result. Anyone wearing decent clothes is very clearly visiting from Europe.
Judging Americans for their dress sense is the sort of shallow behaviour you’d expect from me, but their country surprises me in completely unexpected ways. Over the next three days the city manages to dispel just about every negative preconception I have about the US. San Francisco is intoxicating. And it’s gorgeous, too. You know San Francisco will be cool but it’s surprising just how beautiful this place is, with buildings that are by turn pretty and awe inspiring, and a cityscape that bursts with hillside gardens and unexpected vistas.
The latter are made possible by San Francisco’s unique geography. You think Auckland is hilly, try this place on for size.
We attempt to shake off our jet lag by walking and walking. San Francisco’s vertiginous swoops make this feat more impressive than it sounds. We walk through Chinatown and gorgeous Russian Hill, where we see stunning deco buildings and the famed Telegraph St parrots.
We wash up at an excellent soul food restaurant that we only later discover is in the city’s notorious Tenderloin district. It’s here that we get a first glimpse of the weird duality that marks San Francisco: incredibly polite and friendly service, and hundreds of homeless people roaming the streets after dark. We will experience plenty more of both.
The next day we catch a train to Berkeley, home to one of America’s most prestigious universities. School’s out so the place feels surprisingly empty, though we almost attend a graduation, which is also surprising. Instead we stumble upon the music auditorium, which displays posters for upcoming concerts from, among others, Michael Tilson Thomas, Jordi Savall and recent APO visitor Bernard Labadie, who is bringing his orchestra Les Violons du Roy. No one like that ever came to Waikato Uni.
If Berkeley is most famous for the University of California, I’m equally excited about visiting another local icon: Amoeba Records. I manage to restrain myself. Mostly.
Back in town we hop on a cable car to Fisherman’s Wharf, which is as tacky as we were warned, with souvenir stores all on the verge of closing down. It’s a surprise in a city that is otherwise not tacky at all, even in the tourist areas.
Among the latter is The Haight, which we visit the following day, and which is famous for one summer in the late 1960s when it became the centre of the universe. It is no longer the centre of the universe, but you can still walk past buildings within which the likes of Hendrix, Joplin and The Grateful Dead resided.
The Haight’s architecture is astounding. Skinny three- and four-storey houses loom above the sidewalk, crowded so close to one another you’d struggle to slip a credit card between them. They are the epitome of Victorian elegance.
They are mostly fakes. Seven in eight of the original Victorian mansions were destroyed in 1906 as fire swept through the city following the earthquake. The majority of the houses you now see came from the Sears catalogue. You bought a kit set house; Sears dropped off the bits and you erected it yourself. Amazingly, they’re still standing, with many of them, including the famous Painted Ladies, meticulously maintained and festooned with gold leaf. City laws now require these houses to look broadly the same, and there is block after block of these lovely buildings. It’s utterly unlike NZ and its higgeldy piggeldy housing stock. I like how NZ has modernist structures sitting cheek by jowl with villas, but wandering through The Haight, it’s hard not to think that San Fran got it right.
(At least, that’s the case in town. Out of the city you can see places where San Fran has not got it right. The insistence on conforming to this ideal type has led to plenty of architecturally dishonest terraced boxes that seem to give only a cursory nod to minimum regulations.)
We reach The Haight via Golden Gate Park. Golden Gate Park is lovely, and huge. It’s big enough to contain buffalo and was designed to be larger than Central Park, specifically to spite Central Park’s designer, who refused an offer to build an equivalent space in San Francisco. Confusingly, and despite being called Golden Gate Park, it’s nowhere near the Golden Gate Bridge, which we are yet to see, other than as a pair of mist-shrouded towers in the distance.
In the evening, following a guide book’s recommendation, we set off in search of Bourbon and Branch, a bar in the style of a speakeasy. It lies behind a nondescript door and if you don’t know it’s there you sure as hell won’t find it. If by some fluke you do stumble across it, you hit a buzzer. And then you wait. Eventually someone comes to the door and says, “Yes?” The appropriate reply is “Books”, and you are promptly asked for ID (!) before being ushered through a restaurant, behind a revolving bookcase and in to a darkened dream world of exotic whisky and floor to ceiling bookshelves. A great end to the day.
Our last day in SF and we head out in search of Golden Gate Bridge. When you manage to find it (who knew it would be so difficult to locate?), Golden Gate Bridge is breathtaking, all the more so for its utility, the fact it’s just a bridge to get people from one place to another. We’ve got bridges at home. Nothing prepares you for this one. Experiencing it, you can see how the US became the greatest country on earth and it’s a reminder of America’s enduring power.
There are times where you can see that America’s form of capitalism really does work. The service is unfailingly polite; if it’s not, people go elsewhere and your business closes. This is not the case everywhere in the world. Moreover, capitalism, as America practices it, allows you to put your trust in things. The cable car is old and rickety but you know it’s safe, because the culture of litigation ensures it.
These efficiencies make the homelessness that more jarring. It’s the flipside of the capitalism that works so well in other contexts. America’s poor seem, from the outside, to have been left to fend for themselves. And in what’s still a depressed economy, there are plenty of them. We are told that SF has 30,000 homeless people, out of a population of 800,000. It’s astonishing. It’s a tragedy. The richest, most powerful country in history has utterly failed its vulnerable. Do all countries have these binaries? I guess we’ll find out.
But for a visitor who doesn’t have to live these day-to-day realities, San Francisco is a wonderful town. Even if our final memory is of a bum aggressively trying to scam us at the train station as we head to the airport.
Kiwis on Tour 
2 thoughts on “San Francisco”