San Francisco

February 2010

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After spending several months in Marin with my folks, we decided to move down into the city so we could take greater advantage of all of the features the City by the Bay has to offer.  During a one-day apartment-hunting trip where we looked at a half-dozen possibilities, we found a beautiful one-bedroom flat in Pacific Heights with huge windows overlooking the city and bay.  Pacific Heights is exactly in the middle of where we wanted to be and we can walk to almost every venue in the city in less than 20 minutes.  The problem, of course, is walking back as the return trip is all uphill.  However, I argued that this would save us the monthly gym membership, and the apartment comes with a garage parking space so we can keep our car in the city for when it rains.  We moved in on February 3rd.

Our house-hunting activities are progressing much slower than I would have anticipated.  We made an offer on a house in Fairfield, CA, which was accepted by the homeowner, but the listing is a short-sale and the number of entities, which must approve the deal, has strung the process out two months now and counting.  We had hoped to move directly into a new home from this apartment in San Francisco, but that is looking increasingly unlikely.  We continue to go on house-hunting trips each week, so perhaps we will find something else that is not a short-sale and we can close on quickly.

Although I have been coming to California on a regular basis for almost forty years now, and have been to San Francisco many times, this is the first time I have actually lived in the city.  There are so many things to do here and with the possibility that we could only be here for a month, we planned to venture out and explore the area every day.

One of our first excursions was to see the musical Wicked.  My sister has raved about the show for years and so we arranged to take my parents to the show during our first week.  We walked down Union Street to the Presidio one day where we visited the Palace of Fine Arts and then walked back through the marina.  Another day we discovered two tennis courts in Lafayette Park across from our apartment and decided to bring our racquets into the city the next time we returned to Novato.

We met Tom & Sandy Bailey, whom I have not seen in 30 years, at The Buena Vista Café one morning for coffee.  They are here on vacation for a week and we hope to be able to get together again before they return to Florida.  We continued that day, along Fisherman’s Wharf and Pier 39 to The Crab House where we ate lunch.  In the afternoon, we took the boat out to Alcatraz where we spent the rest of the day touring the former federal prison.

We visited Chinatown a couple times each week.  The “official” Chinatown is about twelve blocks from our house and we can walk there in 20 minutes.  But there is another Chinese community in San Francisco, which is on and around Clement Street, about a 10- minute drive west.  The official Chinatown has many shops geared for tourists, but there are some interesting places tucked away in the back alleys.  We discovered a fortune cookie manufacturer, which employs three women who bake and hand fold the cookies seven days a week. 
 But we are still looking for a Sichuan restaurant, which has food comparable to the fare offered at the place in Vancouver where Cindy’s friend Carrie took us when we visited last year.  Chinese New Year is this month and there will be mass celebrations during the second half of the month.

One weekend we decided to take the Amtrak Train over the Sierra-Nevada Mountains to Reno so we could experience the huge snowfall, which had been building up due to a series of storms.  The train originates in Emeryville and takes about seven hours to cover the 200 miles, which passes through Sacramento, Roseville and Colfax.  From Sacramento to Reno there are volunteers from the Railroad Museum who provide a running commentary about the construction of the line over the mountains and various historical points of interest, which we pass.  As we approached Alta, we telephoned my sister Lauraine, through whose property the tracks run, and she came out to wave to us as we chugged by.  After a couple days at Harrah’s, we took the same train back.

Cindy had a Women’s Club Fashion Show in Novato on February 11th so we returned to Bel Marin Keys for the day.  Dressed as Marilyn Monroe, she sang a song for the group.  Meanwhile, I worked in the garden and collected a bushel of bok choy, which we had been growing to take back to San Francisco.  We also loaded our bicycles onto the car before we returned that evening.

There are many great places to bike in San Francisco, which avoid most hills.  We drove down to Ocean Beach one day and then biked up through Golden Gate Park.  Another time we drove to The Presidio and biked across the Golden Gate Bridge to Fort Baker.   In biking around the city, I have come to feel that San Francisco is very much a residential city.  One of the ‘seven sisters’, a group of seven often-photographed Victorian homes in the city has just put on the market for $4 million.

On February 17th, we invited my Mom & Dad into the city for lunch at our apartment.  In the afternoon we drove over to the Golden Gate Theater where we saw the play “Fiddler on the Roof” starring Harvey Fierstein.  Before returning on the Ferry to Novato, we had dinner at a restaurant in the Ferry Building.

In conjunction with Chinese New Year, Cindy had planned a party with Jane Baker to which they had invited two-dozen people.  The party was to feature dim sum, which we bought at Good Luck Dim Sum on Clement Street, and dumplings that they planned to invite guests to make at the party.  The highlight of the afternoon was the cutting of the “Red Envelope Cake” on which Dad had spent hours.  Shaped like a Chinese red envelope, the cake actually contained twenty envelopes, traditionally filled with money so each guest got a prize.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We rode our bikes through Golden Gate Park again to visit the California Academy of Sciences.  In an attempt to avoid the crowds, we decided to go on a weekday, but found the place packed with kids.  Nevertheless, we had a great day visiting the planetarium, the biosphere and the aquarium.  The King Tut exhibition is currently running at the de Young Museum across the street, but we decided we did not have time to do both in one day.

On the final weekend of February, Jane and Dan Baker drove into San Francisco and we met them at Ft. Mason to attend the Pacific Orchard Exposition.  The show runs for three days, but we were able to cover the entire floor in a few hours.  Cindy took hundreds of photos of orchards in every size, shape and color.  Jane is quite an accomplished gardener with at least a dozen orchards in her home at all times.  After the show, we invited them back to our apartment where we had dim sum for lunch and watched the news coverage of the earthquake, which had hit Chile this morning.

 

 

 

 

 

In the late afternoon we headed over to Union Square where we planned to watch the 150th anniversary of the Chinese New Year’s Parade.  This year is the “Year of the Golden Tiger” which only happens once every sixty years, and since Cindy was born in the Year of the Tiger, she is particularly enthusiastic about the coming year.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I have heard that the San Francisco Chinese New Year’s Parade is the largest nighttime parade in the country.  The sidewalks were packed by the time we got there and we decided to head up to the eighth floor of the Macy’s building where Cheesecake Factory has a patio overlooking the parade route.  We were able to secure good positions directly across from the live television coverage, which included a huge crane with floodlights aimed at the very spot where we would watch and take pictures of the event.  For the next three hours watched all forms of dragons, lions and tigers winding their way through floats and marching bands while the crackle of fireworks filled the air.

 

  After the parade, we enjoyed dinner at The Cheesecake Factory before Dan and Jane dropped us off at our apartment and returned to Marin.

We were only able to stay in the Pacific Heights apartment for one month, so on March 3rd, we moved down to The Financial District where we rented a condominium at The Montgomery, a conversion project about two years old.  The unit has underground parking and a roof deck on the eighth floor offering a view of neighboring 15-20 story buildings.  After visiting a few gyms in the neighborhood, we discovered Sports Club LA at the Four Seasons Hotel and settled into a daily routine.  I entered the 99th running of the Bay to Breakers Race, which is not held until May but I will need every bit of the next two months to prepare to run the 7½-mile course.

The Bel Marin Keys Yacht Club had their monthly dinner on March 5th so Cindy and I drove up to Novato to attend with my parents.  The theme this month was Chinese New Year and the room was decorated accordingly.  The highlight of the evening was the lion dancing performed by a professional troop who carried on to the banging of drums and cymbals to the delight of the crowd.

The San Francisco St. Patrick’s Day Parade was held on Saturday, March 13, 2010.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 The parade started on Second and Market Streets and we could have watched from inside our new gym, but the weather was beautiful so we stood on the curb for the 2-hour event.

 

 

 

 

We took our bikes over to Tiburon one Saturday morning, parked outside of town and rode the bike path along the bay to the center of the village.  We had time for breakfast at a little pastry shop before boarding the 10:00 AM ferry to Angel Island.  The one-mile ride takes about fifteen minutes and dropped us off at Ayala Cove.  Our main objective was to visit the Immigration Station on the north side of the island and since there was a guided tour at 11:00 AM, we rode our bikes along the Perimeter Road where we parked at the entrance and walked down into the complex.

The Angel Island Immigration Station was the Ellis Island of the West.  It was built 100 years ago as a model to replace the deteriorating immigration facilities, which existed in San Francisco just south of where AT&T Park is located today.  Almost a million people, including 175,000 Chinese, passed through the facility in its thirty years of operation.

The Administration Building burned to the ground decades ago, but a knowledgeable Park Ranger took us on a 90-minute tour through the remaining buildings where we could see how the people lived as they passed through this station.  Although most people spent only a few days here while their paperwork was processed, Chinese averaged much longer due to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the fact that most of them were “Paper Sons or Paper Daughters”.

Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act to specifically keep Chinese people from coming to America and taking jobs from US citizens.  The fire that consumed the Hall of Records during the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, however, presented a unique opportunity for clever Chinese.  After the fire, people were asked to come in and reconstruct their records.  As there was no proof to the contrary many Chinese claimed that they were born in America, making them US citizens, and they further claimed that they had 7-10 children in China who were also eligible to come to America.  With thousands of new Chinese-Americans given citizenship after the fire, there were upwards of a million potential “Paper Sons & Daughters” in China.  The sale of these citizenship slots became a huge business in the first half of the 1900’s and the focus of the Angel Island Immigration was trying to determine who was a legitimate relative and who was not.  Eventually, through various appeals processes, ninety-five percent of Chinese passing through the station were allowed into the country, however, present day opinion is that ninety-five percent of those were Paper Sons & Daughters.

We continued our ride around the island passing through Fort McDowell and the decommissioned Nike Missile Site.  There are several US Coast Guard facilities on the island but these are off-limits to tourists.  Although there was a haze over the bay, we still have spectacular views of the city and Golden Gate Bridge.  We returned to Ayala Cove and walked through the Visitors Center before having lunch and catching the 3:30 PM ferry back to Tiburon.

Jane and Dan came into the city on Sunday, March 21st and we went to The Top of the Mark for Sunday Brunch.  The food was delicious but the restaurant was quite crowded and our table for four somewhat smaller than necessary to spread out and relax.  The view was exceptional though and afterward we brought them over to our apartment and spent the rest of the day planning the Yacht Club dinner for April, which Jane is planning and we have agreed to assist.

Carolyn and Fred are taking their family to Hawaii for a couple weeks so we went up to visit them before they left.  We only stayed one night, but got a chance to take the kids to the park in the afternoon and enjoyed dinner with everyone at night.  We left the next day and returned to the city via Novato.

We spent our final week in San Francisco taking care of some last minute errands.  Cindy is going to Paris for three weeks and needed to get her visa from the French Consulate.  We also found out that one of the offers we had made on a house in Fairfield had finally been accepted, so we began the inspection process and hope to close in early April.  On Friday, April 2nd we moved out of our apartment and went back to Novato where we helped Jane cook dinner for 60 people at the yacht club.  The theme for the dinner was ‘Opening Day on the Bay’ and I had asked Dad to make a cake celebrating that event which was the hit of the party.

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