Golden Gate

Humans have a strong affinity with water and cities with watery views tend to be more attractive than those without. San Francisco is firmly in the former category. It's also a cool (temperature wise) city so you can explore it on foot or using it's effective public transport system even in summer without becoming exhausted as you might do in Singapore, Bangkok or Brisbane.

The city is on a peninsula so many of it's more interesting sights are near the water: for example the sea lions on Fisherman's wharf, the Golden Gate Bridge and Ocean Beach. The cable cars with their element of risk are great fun and the cheap theatre tickets you can buy at Union Square can lead you to an unexpectedly satisfying evening of musical enrichment (we saw The Fantasticks). In spite of my mistrust for big cities and crowds, San Francisco was rewarding on many levels - culturally, aesthetically, gastronomically (go to Chinatown)... and we also met a celebrity (see previous entry).

Anthony Bourdain in San Francisco

Here is a picture a really cool guy with Lena and Anthony Bourdain. No, the really cool guy is Tony Bourdain.

We recently spent a few days in San Francisco and whilst strolling through the Ferry Building we saw that our favourite travelling TV chef would be doing a book signing later in the week.

So on Thursday we queued up (as you can see he has lots of fans).



By the time we got to see him, although he must have signed maybe a hundred copies of his book and posed for that many photos he seemed like a very agreeable fellow. I suggested that he do an episode in Brisbane and he laughed - ok he sort of snorted.

From this my first book signing, I can see how people get so much pleasure from meeting celebrities.

We're currently on a week long circle through Sacramento, Lake Tahoe, Yosemite National Park and Sequoia National Park. We're staying with Lena's best friend from school who lives in Sacramento, the sprawling capital of California.

Anthony Bourdain signing copies of his new book "Medium Raw".

Mountain Views

The golden light of a California evening is not a fiction. Perhaps it's the extra emissions from all those cars zipping down the freeway refracting the sunlight in peculiar ways.

We are living in Mountain View, one of several communities along the peninsula leading ultimately to Big Bay City San Francisco. Mountain View town centre feels like Noosa or Port Douglas but a few degrees cooler. The main street is neatly and pleasantly laid out and contains a succession of Indian, Vietnamese, Chinese, and Middle Eastern restaurants.

We're sharing an apartment with a noisy Israeli and a quiet German. There's the title of the book right there - The Quiet German. The noisy Israeli is an extreme jerk. The phone that we understood was a shared phone he keeps in his room for his personal use. He listens to loud godawful music all day through his shitty bass heavy personal speakers. He has his own dish rack, bin and cleaning cloth. Why do these people keep happening to me?

Here are children playing in the park in San Jose.
Four out of five children grow up to be extreme jerks.

Today I took the train one stop to see what it was like. This service is called CalTrain - not to be confused with the other services in the Bay Area, BART, MUNI, Amtrak and in San Jose there's also a light rail system. All of these systems are independent of each other so you need separate tickets. If they are like the San Jose LRT and CalTrain, they are slow, inefficient and expensive. Why the f... should renting a car cost less than taking a train - explain this to me in simple carbon emission equivalencies. Well it does. That's what's wrong with the system right there.

OK there are quite a lot of commuters taking these trains and many of them even bring their pushbikes onto the trains. But take one look into the faces of these fit, yoga practicing, vegetarian joggers and you know they're already converted. They were going to be on that train even if it cost fifty bucks for one zone. What about the millions of fat boneheads obliviously chomping cheeseburgers behind the wheels of their giant SUVs. They're not even going to consider the train if it costs $12 for a day pass into the city compared to only $4 bucks worth of gas and the convenience of never having to exercise any of their lower body muscles.

This part of the system doesn't work here. Public transport has to be cheap, fast and frequent - how obvious is that?

Better take my blood pressure medication.