San Fran Pre-burn

You get the most beautiful view of San Francisco as you fly in over an endless Pacific on a clear day. Didn't know there were so many mountains. Just before we banked right to prep for final approach, there poking through the mist and low cloud, the red towers and part of the suspension girders of that bridge. Funny, for something I've never seen with my own eyes, it's amazing how well I know the graceful span, and how much I'm looking forward to a face-to-face 'reunion' with it.

Cloudless and about 80 degrees or 26C by the time we landed, hot and hazy on the runways as we taxied to the terminal. Shiny corridors, travel-ators and slow slow customs queues. Fingerprint scans, a dodgy no-sleep-in-24hours mug shot and then find your way to the confusing, easy-to-follow instructions of the BART rail system ticket machine...

Powell and Market was a heaving mass of buskers,beggars and shoppers galore.
Canyoned avenues of flagship stores, a smart, well dressed, cashed up crowd, and for the most part not that overweight.

A stupidly sexy cop standing guard buy some store with a perfect handle bar mo, black uniform stretched across a big fit frame. Are you kidding me with that look? I haven't slept in half a world away, but do you really expect me to dig out the digi and start snapping, cliched magnificence notwithstanding?

Check in at the hostel equals a rank smelling entrance and no room at the room of the inn to swing a cat but who cares when the bed is a bed and me and the posse are in the God damn US of A.
OK, it's only taken me 43 years to get here.

Don't try to sleep. Readjust your body clock by mixing it with every soul in town who knows this is a uniquely rare and sublime late-August, San Francisco day. Set the dial on your wobbly jet-lagged legs to Steep Hills and get out there for god's sake.

transamercia pyramid
the piers
fishermans warf
Pier 39 and huge crowds of uppety sea lions and tourists eye balling each other
lombard the crookedest street
broadway
china town
noodles followed by darkness
Oh I get it now, the hostel is on the corner of Nightclub and Exotic Ladyland
then three weary souls clamber over the piles of bags and hit their bunk beds
call me old for a travelling manic curist but ear plugs rock

As for today, woke up legs last.
Did you know that the one deemed to be best dressed each day on the playa at the burn can vie for the title of Sparkle Pony
Clearly sparkle ponies need sparkle and the best of desert bling is to be found up hill, many of them actually and down tail over in the Lower Haight.

But first the SFMOMA, and the AVEDON, O'keefe and Ansell Adams exhibitions... OMG, no really, OMFG


Then it kicked in...
A long long street of colour and mayhem
And the shops were full of soon to be burners, itching for the right bit of desert bling
Portable neon for the body or bike
More cheap-arse plastic battery operated sparkle than you could poke a very big stick at
But it all kicked in...

It was the night before christmas
It was the last shopping moments before the mardi gras parade
It was exciting
It is exciting

This city is immense and beautiful and as changeable as the tempestuous weather
Walk away from the shiny shops on Market and it all changes with every step; rents, incomes, the appearance of happiness and apparent trappings of success leach out of the place. Keep walking turn right and you get the city buildings with commanding avenues, parks and a gilded dome, lying on the grass of the surrounds on a chilly overcast day are many folks being given lunch by community support staff and charity workers. Keep walking past the concert hall and ballet centre and it all changes again. Ornate houses, street after hilly street of them, in mostly very well kept states of repair.

Get lost, ask for directions, receive ambiguity, finally get found and end up under the biggest rainbow flag ever right beside Harvey Milk Plaza. Maybe it was the jet lag but a street full of ubiquetos rainbow culture and rainbow peeps set off a massive set of fashion insecurities for the BF and I... I mean we just hit the street for the time ever and memories of Harvey, Tales of the City and all the doccos and the movies of the city and the Castro come flooding back at the exact same time as we pass a gaggle of queens....
"Oh but I only way 175 pounds honey. Well girl I'm down to 168 now.
Really.... A quick burito and a corona and we were outa there!

So that was days one and two...

Other best bits...

The homeless guy begging on Haight, silver hair and beard, his jingle, "A couple of coins so I can get my life started."

The muso playing in the hostel mess hall... "If anyone here knows Tim Burton personally, come see after the show, this next song has sooo got to be in one of his movies."

Day three, Oakland and Wal Mart

Hello, we aren't in the land of charming anymore...