SF

These final postings on the blog shall comprise a sort of epilogue, and, I apologise in advance, will be even more perfunctory than my most throwaway efforts to date. Consette is tired. Granted, my bad back has been less bad the last few days, but still, I am tired. Beyond this, though, it is weird to write about any other city than Portland. Part of me doesn't want to do it; I feel like I am committing a betrayal. Like Travels With Charley, this blog has ended before its ending. Here I offer you the lolloping death throes of my life's work, and maybe something to do with San Francisco along the way.

SIDEWALKS: The most noticeable difference between SF and PDX is the sidewalk breadth, respectively narrow/smelly vs. wide/clean/largely deserted.

PRIDE: We're here too early to witness the parade, but the rainbow flags adorn the edge of Market St in glorious anticipation. We spend our first afternoon wandering up and down Market - half asleep from the overnight train, but waking up as the mist burns away.

CITY LIGHTS: After a year of living in this country and pretending to know about it, the idiot decides that she has earned the right to be a tourist. City Lights Bookstore on Columbus Ave provides the first opportunity. She takes pictures from every angle, buys a HOWL cap and the slimmest Derrida she can find to honour the occasion. She is wary of buying anything more substantial in deference to the weight limitations on the plane home. As it is, a mere 100 pages of Positions has proven too taxing, and, a month or so later, she is yet to get beyond the first paragraph. After the bookstore we have a super strong coffee in Caffe Trieste just around the corner, served by some of the most truculent baristas we have ever encountered, no doubt pissed off that their neighbourhood secret was included in the 2008 Lonely Planet and has, ever since, suffered an infiltration of idiotic tourists. Too. Much. Business. SIGH.

COIT: Nice view innit.

THE SAN FRANCISCO WALK: Descending the hills from Coit Tower, the father splays his feet like a duck and waddles his way to level ground. The only way to do it without falling tit over arse.

CHINATOWN: Being an all-knowing Consette, I suggest a hidden little treasure off the beaten track where you can get the best dim sum in the city. But, being the idiotic LS contingent, they fall for the inevitable tourist trap. We are ushered off the street into an airy upstairs restaurant, where family after family of European visitors suck on soggy pot stickers and ask for bread to sop up the grease.

NOISE: This city is so noisy, and I bloody love it. Our hotel room is open to the noise of the thoroughfare. The fire engines announce their arrival with a banshee wail in the middle of the night, and all I want to do is base jump from the twenty-first floor and accost a fireman.

CABLE CARS: $5, but worth it.

MRS DOUBTFIRE: Can't stop hearing her voice.

SFMOMA: We pass a solid three hours in one exhibition alone. The Steins Collect not only boasts a clever title - is it a verb, a possessive, or an abbreviation of 'collective' (?) - but also the most comprehensive display of modern art that the idiot has ever seen. Gertrude is bit of a hero, but in terms of art dealings her brothers were just as impressive. Elsewhere in the museum, the idiot has an over-excited hernia when she spots Duchamp's toilet bowl. She is no gauge for quality, however, as the Mondrian cake in the cafe provokes just as much hysteria.

FISHERMAN'S WHARF: Delicious tack.

SEA LIONS ON PIER 39: We think at once of this poem by William Carlos Williams. Blouaugh indeed. All piled on top of each other like that, I'd imagine there's quite a lot of accidental rape. This would explain the exponential population growth. They smell of every dead fish in the sea and urine and general shit. The mother is fascinated by them, but the father, the idiot and I keep well back.

LITTLE ITALY: Not wanting to make the same mistake as the aforementioned Chinatown restaurant, we put some effort into finding a decent Italian restaurant along Columbus Ave. We settle on a thing the size of a shoebox, but the red wine at least gets the smack of approval from the father and the prawns earn a grin from the idiot.

HAIGHT AND CASTRO: The idiot makes the excursion all by herself, and returns with pictures of her feet next to the sidewalk name engravings. Haight for hippies, Castro for queers, she's really broadening her horizons at 9am in the morning.

CARTOON ART MUSEUM: We meet Reed friend Kerstin at The Cartoon Art Museum on Mission. It is great to see Reed people outside of Reed; meeting Kerstin proves that such crazy conjectures can become reality with a bit of effort.

LUNCH AT HOUSE OF NANKING: An excellent Chinese restaurant on the lip of Chinatown. In fact, not Chinatown at all, but on the dusty end of Kearny. The father turns a sceptical, hygienic eye to the kitchens, but the food which emerges is delicious. I eat the best chow mein of my life, which provides ample compensation for the Chinese fail of a few days before.

ACADEMY OF SCIENCES: At heinous expense we spend the final two hours of the day in the California Academy of Sciences, but could quite happily have set up camp in the swamp and whittled away an entire weekend there.

DINER MILKSHAKES: The idiot insists that the parental unit benefit from the diner experience before leaving the States. The father orders a banana milkshake so gargantuan that it requires two glasses. This does nothing to undo preconceptions about American eating habits.

BERKELEY: The idiot and I take a day trip to the Berkeley campus. Before leaving for her year abroad the idiot had promised her Berkeley friends (Olivia and Katie) that she would be visiting SF every other weekend. Of course she didn't visit once, and now feels it would only be right to take a look around in spite of their absence. Or indeed the absence of all students, it being the holidays. Berkeley is very different to Reed, which seems ever so small by comparison. The campus looks like the downsized model of an Italian city, and even has its own campanile; the carillon is played three times a day, and we are fortunate enough to be at the top of the tower for the midday performance.

CAMERA OBSCURA: A creepy little chamber below Cliff House where you can watch the waves in rotating upside-down black and white. There are holograms of faces and body parts all along the walls.

MUIR WOODS AND SONOMA WINE TASTING: Having abandoned pretensions of authenticity a long time ago, we take a tour bus to see the redwoods at Muir. Cue too many photographs of our cricked necks looking far up into the dappled canopy above. This is followed by three visits to pretty Sonoma wineries. Definitely woozy by the end of the day. We drive back over the Golden Gate bridge while the idiot ticks things off her life experience TO DO list. There are certain benefits to group tourism: one of the men has a Godfather Brooklyn accent so delectable I want to wrap it in a bow and take it back to England as a souvenir.

Consette x