San Francisco

Updated 09JAN2000
Updated 15JAN2000 : 1 2 3 4

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Big Mac Meal Index : NB their "medium" meal is really, honestly, equivalent to our Large

Sydney Big Mac Meal	In $US	San Francisco Big Mac Meal	Including tax	Cost of Living vs Sydney
$4.95	$3.16	$4.09	8.5% = $4.44	40% higher

My first night in San Fransisco, I simply decided to go for a stroll (the right of any Englishman, as they say), and see what hit me. Well I walked past some empty lots, holes in the ground and ground-level car parks, and got to Market Street where the seedy old trolley buses and trams were running. The trams seem to be painted individually and you could call them vintage, but the trolley buses look, I think, 70s vintage and are just plain old and yucky, graffiti inside and out. So I decided to avoid the McDonald's and go to the Carl's Jr instead, and this looked to me like an ambitious combination of burger-chain and mexican. After politely querying my price and discovering that wonderful Californian 8.5% sales tax which doesn't need to be factored into advertised prices, I proceeded not to eat a very sloppy burger, very floppy fries and a drink made mostly of fizzy water. (The McDonald's across the road also made its burgers in the classic Tower of Pisa disjunctive style). On my way back, I declined three beggers and had a black guy walking in front of me turn around and yell ... at something. Sheesh, it was just one block to 7th and Mission.

Okay, my initial reaction to San Francisco after walking around for a couple of days: It tries to be as good as Sydney or other cities but fails, not by much, but it does suffer from more neglect than its sister city (which I've heard was Sydney -- but at the Japanese Tea Gardens, (a nice place to get ripped off, BTW), they say it's Osaka, Japan! I feel rooked!) I'm thinking very hard to remember an area of Sydney CBD that's as "poor" as the downtown areas here, but I doubt it. I've found that if I take a different street back to the hotel when I walk from the Moscone, I can run into many more people on the street than on a different street. The streets: They're mostly the same, footpaths/sidewalks and the asphalt look identical, but:

• they like to park their cars really close together,
• the emergency sirens are really old fashioned (though I think they make up for it in volume)
• the police and fire brigade (department) have funny little boxes everywhere (miniture TARDII?)
• there's the usual ugly newspaper vending machines everywhere, in fact, vending machines are everywhere
• heaps and heaps of disused buildings, and heaps of others with really old metal security grilles
• there's steam coming out of the streets everywhere, but you're supposed to ignore it
• the traffic lights, especially the pedestrian lights, are quaint and remind me of Paris
• there's plenty of overhead wiring for the trolley buses and streetcars (trams), and further out of town for the light rail (MUNI trains); but that's a good thing now, depending on whether you like public transport more than you hate cable television ...
• most of all ... the streets smell of shit. Sometimes. But you only have to walk a block and there's that warm wafty smell again -- it's exactly the same smell coming from the septic tanks at a caravan park. My friend from Boston says she can't smell it. (She's probably become used to ignoring it, like the steam). Oh well, I suppose that's to be expected, pen and ink in a city that's full of septics?

Fair's fair, and I think my first impressions were based solely on the SoMa district (south of Market Street, the main street). (Except for the pen and ink, that's everywhere!) There certainly are nice spots, and if you stay inside places like Macy's, the Moscone Convention Center, or this very nice internet cafe, then you can forget all about the ghettos outside. I don't consider Fisherman's Wharf a "nice spot", but then I'm more interested in getting the feel of a city than in visiting the typical tourist districts. Another review I've seen says it's like "finding pearls in a hill of dirt", but I hardly think the Moscone or high-street shops are that special -- they're exactly like the good buildings of any other city.

I thought Sydney had too much variety of public transport, what with two types of suburban trains, three brands of government buses, ferries, the monorail, and the light rail. But SanFran probably takes the cake:

• Normal diesel-powered buses, which come in articulated (bendy) and non-articulated variety; the MAN ones even sound a bit like the German ones in Sydney
• Trams, which have those folding doors and a quaint look, no wheel-arches so they're nice to watch
• Trolley-buses, which use the same overhead wires as the trams, but trundle around ugly as muck; these also come in articulated variety sometimes, and go in more places than the trams; and if they go up an empty street at the far end of town, they really are extremely quiet until they put on the brakes
• Cable cars, how could you forget; these are not so much public transport as a tourist attraction, because as I found, it is absolutely impossible to catch one unless you get on at the beginning since they're always full with tourists hanging off the side; but I admire the way they work, like underground chairlifts, rather than being self-propelled they do not have any overhead wire and the "middle bit" of the track isn't live with electricity or anything
• MUNI light rail (MUNI being the $1 per 2 hours system which combines all of the above), goes under Market Street and then heads out through the suburbs via special median strips and the like; these are modern German carriages and their overland corridors make the city look quite modern in places
• BART heavy rail, which is currently planned to extend to the airport and already goes a long way under the water and to the other side of the bay; catching a "train" under Market Street is weird because you get to choose from both the MUNI line, or the BART line directly beneath it; they make a big deal about the number of miles it travels but then we're talking west-coast America, not Sydney or London.
• Oh and, maybe I should mention, bendy spiral escalators which I've never seen before in my life!

Plus I'm not counting the ferries that go out on the bay. If you come here, you can buy a $2 (plus tax!) map that gives you all the public transport options, and I bet the city can be quite easy to get around (especially with that easy system of $1 as far as you can get for 2 hours). You'll never find it overseas, I bet, so it's going to be hard if you want to take public transport when you arrive. But there's always the internet.

I'm not sure if it's just this hotel or the town, but there seems to be a predisposition to German and Japanese tourists. The interactive welcome message on the TV in my room was in English, German and Japanese, and I often saw maps of the city which came in English, German and Japanese.

I'll leave my other comments in my general impressions about America, but I have to mention one more thing about San Francisco: One of the more popular music stations they put through stores if they don't want to offend anyone is the love-songs station, 96.5FM "KOIT". Now, am I the only one to see the joke here? Yes, they pronounce it the way you think. They even have a 1-800 number called the "KOIT Connection", sheesh! Maybe if they got a web site with a ".us" domain, they could slam the joke over your head. I think Terry Jones's Mrs Average would have the only sensible comment to make here.

All in all, if this really is Sydney's sister city (or should I say lesbian partner?) then I could probably get along quite nicely. I've been assured that the crime rate is really low and that rather than being mugged, you're more likely to be begged. The proliferation of beggers here is a curious result of a liberal attitude towards a conservative problem. Really, San Francisco is an exception to the rule that is California. I looked in the phone book and found that all the mayors and senators are Democrat. I suppose I could think of a few more compliments for this city, but that would be giving too much credit to the people who always call something that's a bit crap as having "character". I keep hearing that this city has character. (The Hotel Britton brochure even describes itself as being in "exciting SoMa" -- so now I've heard everything). I'm sure it does have character. Just as, I'm sure I'm being spoilt by pre-Olympic Sydney. But let's be honest! :-)

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