Sublime Superlemon

I wanna say so many things! This post may be quite long. I’m sitting in the window bed of an 8-person dorm room at the Green Tortoise Hostel in San Francisco. It looks like the picture above. I’ve been up for nearly 36 hours now and I’ve spent most of it sitting down and traveling. Just a few things from my flights: first, whoever finds the word CASEY in giant letters visible from space on google earth in mid-Colorado gets $5 because I saw it from a plane! Second, Denver airport is all about the Country style and they have a mini-subway system that plays a Country music riff when the doors open and close. Kudos to the guy who built that feature in. Furthermore, while flying over the rRckies I could only hear one song in my head.

But at last after landing in San Francisco today I was able to breath for having made it safely and with all my stuff across the continent. Or could I? I asked a wise-looking man at the airport information booth what the cheapest way to get downtown was and he told me to take the public transit bus, that is: samtrans, the San Mateo county bus. Little did I know that this was far from a bus for travelers but instead a bus who’s main function it was to displace actual residents of San Mateo and San Francisco. So I basically spent my first hour in California in a crowded bus full of airport employees.

And it was awesome! I could not have gotten a better first taste of California than by this accidental intrusion on the daily life of regular people. The biggest difference is that whereas Montreal has a large Middle-Eastern population, California has an even larger Latino population. When the bus finally made it’s way out of the giant airport compound one thing became immediately clear: California is bathed in relentless sunlight. Everywhere the faded rainbow pastel stucco stands out against sunburnt yellow grass and Savanah-like trees. From San Mateo and into the heart of San Francisco we wove around the bottoms of hills where low-income people kept old pickups in their yards and were watched by high-income people who lived in eco-friendly houses higher up.

So having just gotten in today, and not being in any position to hunt down the places I want to visit, I naively let San Francisco tell me what to do and where to go. I headed first for Fisherman’s Warf. It is unfortunately theme-parkish and completely overrun by tourist who have defaulted to enjoy a setting fit for their 5yr-old children. My advice, don’t even go to Pier 39. Worst fish’n'chips ever. and overpriced. However, they do have this curiosity:

Basically, tons of sealions on rafts: fun for the whole ecosystem. I chose next to head  to Chirardelli Square, hoping to find some eccentric chocolate and relieve my tongue of Helmann’s Tartar Sauce. On the way I saw this:

No, they’re not policemen, this is a guided tour. I love it. I want it as a placemat.

Enough distractions, when I reached the impossible to spell/pronounce Chirardelli Square I ordered a “Sea Salt and Caramel Hot Chocolate” from their specialty store. Let me tell you the secret to this seemingly amazing treat. First, you take regular hot chocolate, then you drop in a bar of whatever chocolate you want it to taste like. In my case: Sea Salt and Caramel. Don’t get me wrong, sea salt and caramel is an awesome combination and I’ve had a very satisfying macaroon of the same in Montreal. However, Chirardelli did not think to mix their chocolate bar into their own hot chocolate and I ended up with a mouthful of salt right at the bottom of my cup:

Finally, since Lombard street was on the way home, I went to check it out. Lombard street is the very steep very winding street that adorns almost every postcard of San Francisco. Getting there involved climbing up some steep hills. And here steep means steep. Just look at these people fooled into thinking that cablecar drivers take their job seriously:

This thing was accelerating down like a rollercoaster.

Turns out however, that I’m not the only person in the world who knows about Lombard street. What’s more, I’m not the only person in the world willing to exert himself uphill to gain the status of “having climbed Lombard”. As I climbed down, a lady passed me saying “this is almost as exhausting as when we did the Arc de Triomphe”. Nevermind her confusion about roundabouts and Parisian stairs, Lombard was an attraction, a monument, a museum. Yet we were walking by the doors of people who lived there. Big grates seperate the street from the front doors of these houses. Was it really worth it to turn someone’s home into a tourist spot? And why did we find these people’s homes so attractive a destination to begin with? A literal motorcade of SUVs is constantly rolling down Lombard as some other member of the family snaps pictures of their car on the famous street. It’s quite a disgusting spectacle:

The moral of the story is this: tourism sucks. That’s not what I’m here to do. I came here looking to try every pastry shop and cafe available and I have a plan to report back on some incredible findings, hopefully get inspired and maybe even link physics into the mix. I’m done doing the touristy stuff and tomorrow I’m headed to Caffe Trieste (which I just walked by and looks soooo amazing: think Cagibi in Montreal but Italian) and Steps of Rome and Stella Pastries. Best part: all of them are within a one block of this hostel. Oh! and I shouldn’t forget that on my way in this morning I saw a ‘wichcraft (Tom Colicchio’s sandwhich franchise) so I’m definitely getting a pulled pork sandwhich there !