San Francisco, day 2

Today’s itinerary: Haight-Ashbury (home of the hippies in the 70s), the Golden-Gate Bridge, and Chinatown.  The house featured there (pic 3) is where Janis Joplin lived for a year, before apparently being evicted for having a pet dog. The Jerry Garcia graffiti is on the footpath outside the house where he and a bunch of the Grateful Dead lived for a while. The actual Haight-Ashbury corner now has a Ben&Jerry’s on the opposite corner, and a clothes store on another. There were certainly a lot of hippies and whacked-out people around, but there’s also heaps of chain clothes shops, tattoo parlours (“I got a tattoo at Haight-Ashbury”), etc.  This set is only half-complete – my camera battery ran out just as I got to the other side of the bridge. Unfortunately, that was also the most picturesque side (you can get the city and Alcatraz in the background if your camera pans wide enough). It’s certainly a spectacular site though. Also, for some reason at times there appeared to be as many kite-surfers as boats out in the bay!  San Francisco is a fantastically pedestrian-friendly city: really wide footpaths (check out the pic, and also the bridge pic – that’s actually fairly standard it seems), you don’t have to wait long at traffic lights, and great public transport.


Travel

218 Words

2009-06-06 00:00 +0000

comments powered by Disqus