Country Mice in the City, Day 2

The perfect capuccino, Part 2 (breakfast edition) Just to make sure that the capuccino at Roxanne’s café was perfect, we hit it for breakfast. Take two was just as good as the first sample. Breakfast was a seafood omelette for Jim, and Jake’s scramble for me (spinach, bacon, provolone cheese, tomatoes and fresh salsa). Aaah, how I love San Francisco.

Telegraph Hill and Coit Tower. After a bit of wandering, we found bus #39 heading up to Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill. The route snaked through North Beach, which was instantly recognizable by the Italian flags painted on all of the light-poles. The Tower itself commanded an astounding view, diminished only by the slightly hazy conditions. We were the only native English speakers at the top; I recognized Japanese, German, French and Italian. There were a couple of other languages I wasn’t so sure about.
At the bottom of the Tower on the inside are Murals painted by artists as one of the Depression era government work projects. They were suggested by Diego Rivera, and were done in fresco. The subjects were the people of San Francisco and California: sailors, cops, robbers, dairymen, bakers, newspapermen, librarians, truckers, workers of all sorts. There were some very sly pokes at the Establishment. For instance, in the library corner a man was taking Karl Marx’s “Das Kapital” off of the bookshelf while winking slyly at you, and people were reading newspapers with headlines about the dedication of the Tower and the controversial murals.
As soon as we stepped outside at the bottom after paying for and taking the $5 elevator ride to the top, the haze was instantly gone and the sky was clear. We still could get some good shots, but not quite as spectacular as from the top.

Municipal Trolley Line, There are antique electric trolleys which run along the waterfront, and are quite different from the more famous cable cars.

Ferry Terminal and Farmers Market (upscale). This is sort of like Seattle’s Pike Place Market, but the Gucci version. There was the Mushroom shop, the Caviar shop, a bakery with astounding foccacia, Japanese delicatessen, and Frog Hollow Farms. Plus a kitchen shop, wherein I lost control of Jim. At least he didn’t but the $5,000 espresso machine or the 8 burner gas stove that cost I more than my mortgage payments for a year. Let’s just say that he spent enough that we got a free subscription to Bon Appetite magazine.


A beatnik café. In North Beach there was a café that our guidebook said had been where the “Beat” poets of the 1950's had gathered. They had outstanding espresso and pizza, plus pictures of famous folk who had eaten there over the years. The bathroom had a sloping ceiling that even I had to stoop for. I’m not quite sure how Jim managed.

Los Gringos on de bus. From the café we caught a city bus that was going downtown. I believe that we were the only people-not-of-color there...and couldn’t understand any of the multiple languages being spoken. What an amazingly diverse city.

Chinatown Tea Shop. I had asked the concierge at our hotel for the name of a tea-shop, and he gave me two. The walls were lined with tins from all over Asia. The oolong teas were labled by the mountain on which they were grown. The clerk explained that the higher the mountain, the slower the tea grew, and the better the flavor. I might add that the higher the mountain the higher the price. By the time she led me through tasting several, let’s just say that I was pretty even with Jim for the kitchenware shop earlier in the day.

When we got ready to go from there the three blocks up the hill to our hotel it was after 5 and the cable cars were jammed. When the second one came I shoved Jim and said, run for it. I started trudging up the 3 blocks of hill with the bags. I found those blocks to be much longer than they looked; I swear that each block was another mile uphill. My glutes and hamstrings complained mightily...it turned out that there were several spots to sit inside, so I hiked needlessly. Buns of steel will be my reward.