San Francisco Again

I simply stopped having time to blog.  That's how good the trip got.

I'll talk about some of my favorite parts.

We went to a restaurant called Farallon.  It's a 3.5 star restaurant built in and over the old municipal swimming pool.  The decor alone was worth the trip.  The arches are all cast iron and the ceiling is a tile mosaic.  Those big lamps are glass sea urchins.  It was gorgeous.  The food was incredible, too, if expensive.  That was to be expected in that sort of establishment.  My one great regret was that I couldn't have a glass of wine to go with my meal since we were in a place that specialized in wine wonderfulness.  I think everybody should eat in a place like this occasionally.  It sort of offsets the airline food and $8 sandwiches one has to eat at the conference center from time to time.

Another major high point of the trip for me was the car tour we took.  Two of the teachers who went with me met a gentleman who offered to show us around in a Town Car.  We took him up on it, and we had a very awesome tour.  He took us all over town and let us stop and get out to take pictures.  He drove us up to Twin Peaks, out to the Sutro district, down Lombard Street, everywhere, really.  He told us all about what we were seeing.  He was originally from Louisiana, and he said he just wanted to make sure we didn't leave without seeing the city.  Without his help, we would have, too.  Our only other option would have been the "hop-on, hop-off" bus.  We didn't see everything I wanted to; I didn't get to the Chinatown gates or City Lights bookstore, but we saw so much that I don't consider myself shortchanged at all.  I am going to work on the pictures this afternoon, get them processed and uploaded if I can.

During that tour, I got to see the Golden Gate Bridge.  I have heard about it all my life from my father.  He spent part of his growing-up life in California and did military training there, too.  To see the bridge finally was to make something I had only a thousand stories for a tangible thing.  The bridge itself is also a lovely thing.  So often when you have longed to see something, it somehow fails to measure up; the image you've carried in your head is somehow larger or more grand than any real thing could ever possibly be.  I don't think this could ever be the case with the Golden Gate.  It was stately, imposing, inspiring, and grand as it stretched up into the sky.  I think I could spend a hundred days with my camera trying to capture its elegance.  They would be pleasant days, indeed.

I also got to go to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.  I didn't see all five floors, but what I did see was amazing.  I don't respond to all forms of modern art; some of it does not move me at all.  I find it interesting, though, to see what people decide to create.  I did get to see several new artists that I loved and some pieces by some artists that I have never heard of that I really liked.  I love De Chirico, and I got to see one of his that I didn't know about, The Vexations of the Thinker, that may be one of my favorites by him, several lovely pieces by Frida Kahlo, and an entire exhibition of early photography by Muybridge. 

I loved the feel of San Francisco.  It seemed in my short time there to be a city that appreciated beauty and art.  If they built something, they took the time to put it together well and make it lovely.  Their downtown was vibrant, their old buildings full and refurbished.  The civic heart of San Francisco had in one mighty square in buildings of equal might and magnificence a City Hall, a Symphony Hall, a Library, and a Civic Theater.  I always think you can tell a great deal about the soul of a city by how it treats the arts, whether it provides a place for them, ignores them, whether they are seen as a necessity or an extra.  San Francisco very much is in that first class of cities.  Its soul thrives on art.

I could have lived there quite easily.  Even the clothing style suited me.  The weather suited me.  I could have melted into that city like liquid butter.  I realize that part of my feeling was the fascination of tourism and that the day-to-day living there might be quite different, but so much of what I saw there was so much of what I wanted.  California, of course, has the worst educational crisis of all right now, a state government that is completely bankrupt, so this is not the time to pull up stakes and move realistically.

I guess I'll have to say that I have a new dream city now, I guess, a new place to think of running.  I don't think it's an accident that it is so close to Japan, that so many Japanese hands have helped to shape it.  Maybe that's part of why I loved it.  Maybe that's why it felt so secretly familiar to me.  Maybe that's why I wanted to be there and that it was so hard to come home in the end.  All I know is that of all the big cities I've been to in the U.S., it is the one that has called to me the loudest, and when I came home wearing my obligatory tacky tourist "I (heart) SF" tee shirt, I really meant it.