Hey, we have spent enough time in san francisco now to produce what should be a mildly amusing blog entry.
note - I have realised that since these are old emails the dates will be all wrong. Oh well.
First a small note on the local library. It is very large, marble clad, architecurally impressive, and almost 100% filled with homeless people. The toilets seem to be a hygiene maintainence centre for the san fran homeless community. People walk their dogs and have full-blown arguments in the library.
The car has held up this far (obviously), despite a worrying development - the temperature gauge has crept into the red and not left for 5 days. Internet research revealed that this was indeed BAD. One of the days we spent a few hours fretfully driving around downtown san francisco - itself normally a harrowing experience for me, the honking and beeping, impatient drivers, crazy pedestrians, etc. - and searching for a garage, expecting at any minute great clouds of steam to begin issuing generously from the bonnet. An extra pinch of stress was provided by the occasion of 'Greek Independence Day', a festival which closed off the whole of market street, the main street which runs through the centre of town, and caused us to sit steaming in the car for a good half an hour. At one point John noticed we were at the bottleneck of all the traffic being re-routed away from the the festival area. Had the radiator given out then, Ponty would have surely sent downtown san fran into complete chaos. Quite a boast I suppose.
Today we dropped the car off at a garage. Apparently the fan isn't working properly.
Nutri-log grain journal
Increased temperatures leave nutrigrain bars damp in their wrappers; perhaps the first signs of decomposition. This nevertheless lends the bars a moist consistency normally associated with labor-intensive ultra-gourmet snack cakes. A curious shift has left me more desirous of the Apple and Cinnamon bars over the previously dominant Strawberry. It is unclear whether or not the weather conditions are to do with this. Recent excavations conducted deep in the rear left corner of the snack bar box unearthed Payday! and Fig Newton bars. More to follow.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
We stayed at quite a nice hostel for a couple of nights. In the mornings there was unlimited pancake batter to be had. I hadn't flipped one of those for a while, the poor americans being deprived of pancake day. After making some friends and deciding the hostel was a little too pricey - $25 a night - we opted to sleep on people's floors and hope we weren't exposed as freeloaders. Unfortunately I was collared by an empassioned member of staff and ejected at 6 in the morning. I wandered the streets for 3 hours searching for the car in vain. Ending up in chinatown I bought Dim Sum for breakfast and a large bar of choc using my food stamps card to console myself, then trudged back to the hostel and dozed on and off perching next to a flowerbed in the sun.
Last night John and I went to possibly the best restaurant I've ever been to. It was Tunisian food. Maybre I have ranked it unfairly in my mind because I was on no sleep extremely hungry, but it was very tasty. Afterwards we slept in the car. This time it was ok for me, although I woke with the sun hitting me squarely in the face, something I'm pretty sure hasn't happened before. We will choose another hostel tonight and then head off southwards tomorrow. I luckily found a copy of Stienbeck's cannery row in a second hand book shop and will try and quickly read it before we get to Moneterey which is on route and probably our next stop. I'm hoping the book will also prepare me mentally for the fish canning job in alaska I will begin in June. Thanks to everyone for the messages!
choos. Richard. xo
No comments:
Post a Comment