4/14
When you travel, it is nice to be comfortable and stylish. Leggings and boots are a good combination to
achieve these goals, and if you happen to have a pink and red elephant shaped
purse, you have really got an outfit.
Top it off with some black-with-white-polka-dots cat-eye sunglasses, and
look out California, here comes Izzy Laskin.
Make sure you have a notebook in your purse, so you can
live-journal your trip. Here’s what Izzy
reports so far:
“in taxi
croosed charils
in airport
and we have lift off.
smooth so far
we’v laned!
driving to Monterey.”
If I haven’t said it before, it is worth noting that our
children are travelling jewels. Of
course, modern technology and small screens help to distract them, and even
these gems get antsy after six and a half hours in a plane and two hours in a
car and a teeny hotel room. But they are
game and delightful, and I sure am happy to be travelling with them. Of course, we are only one day in, so this
may change.
And the really amazing thing is that it’s not that much
travel to get you all the way to the other coast. You fly out over the Atlantic Ocean and just
a few hours later, here you are at the edge of the great blue not-so-pacific
Pacific Ocean which was really crashing about last night. Peter expected it to somehow look different
from our ocean, but it doesn’t, really. There are lots of massive military
installations all along California’s Central Coast, but I should think that a
post to the Defense Language Institute at the Presidio of Monterey would be
pretty sweet as these things go.
Monterey is a little artsy (that coastal light), and pretty touristy,
and makes a great business out of its almost-native son and local hero John
Steinbeck. Cannery Row is just tourist-shop-and-restaurant-central
now, but it should be noted that every souvenir shop has its rack of Penguin
Classics, featuring ALL of Steinbeck’s works.
It is worth reading Cannery Row
while you are here, because it is such a lovely and sympathetic portrait of the
Row’s lower denizens. And of course, you
can identify just about all the spots Steinbeck writes about, so that is pretty
cool.
It is a safe bet that 99% of the restos around Cannery Row
follow the the-better-the-view-the-worse-the-food rule. And, being from New England, the lure of
seafood is not so great . . . yet we do succumb, happily, and Peter is
delighted by an order of local squid.
The Monterey Bay Lodge is not Spain, or the Ritz, but what
the hell as my grandfather would say.
4/15
Among the superlatives you will use to describe the many
delights of the Monterey Bay Aquarium, several must be devoted to the structure
itself. Set in, surprise, an old sardine
cannery, the buildings sit unobtrusively at the end of Cannery Row, completely
comfortable in the local architectural vernacular, and giving away little of
the delights awaiting you inside. It is
really a brilliant piece of design, and in the main lobby they still have
several of the massive old cannery boilers and a fine photo essay on the
canning process. While it is true that
demand for canned fish plummeted after WW2, what also sealed the fate of this
place is that the local sardine fisheries crashed about the same time, due to
over-fishing – the technologies to catch and process the fish became so good
that they just fished ‘em all. And so
the big message of the MBA – take care of the marine environment before it
disappears for good – is told pretty much at every turn.
We loved the Aquarium.
Everything about it is fantastic, from the aforementioned buildings, to
its setting right on the crashing sea of Monterey Bay, to its brilliant giant
tanks with minimalist presentation, to its relative lack of crowds (compared to
the New England Aquarium, at least). A
few highlights:
-
The biggest, reddest, most active octopus I’ve
ever seen, undulating and groping its way around its tank.
-
Learning how a sea urchin uses its little spines
to grab your finger and see if it would be good for lunch (Isabel’s finger
would not, apparently).
-
Watching the rockfish in the kelp forest tank
just sit and sway with the current.
-
Feeding time in the minimalist Open Ocean Tank,
which involved luring the slow moving turtles and freaky-looking mola-mola out
of the way, and then tossing handfuls of squid and watching the dolphinfish and
esp. the Bluefin tuna go nuts. Lesson
learned: do not get between a tuna and
his lunch, because he will take. you. out.
Then the 20,000 herring show up for their handfuls of krill and they are
a beautiful silvery shape-shifter, swarming around and flashing and then when
they’ve all apparently decided that they are full, dropping like a sack to the
bottom of the tank. Amazing. The hammerhead shark just stays out of the
way during all of this, apparently he doesn’t eat every day.
-
Those charmingly playful sea otters.
-
A hilarious exhibit on the psychedelic-like
qualities of jellies (their shapes, movements, colors), complete with 60s-era
music and marvelous kaleidoscopic and light-show interactive bits.
-
At all the presentations, the interpreters tell
you that IT IS OK TO EAT FISH. “I love
fish!” they gaily announce. This was
generally in preamble to handing out the MBA’s Seafood Watch List card, which
is regularly updated with lists of fish to eat or avoid, depending on the
status of their populations, and whether fishing methods harm their environment
or other marine populations. Peter made
sure to get not only the West Coast list, but the East Coast list AND the sushi
list. I am completely toast on the last
one, it turns out that just about all my faves are to be avoided. And now of course, Peter is an expert,
pulling the list out at every meal, to keep us honest.
Bill says it is Packard money that built this place, well, good
on them, they certainly poured a ton of it in here and it shows.
A related treat right before the MBA opened was seeing a
huge population of harbor seals with their newborn pups, at a beach near the
Hopkins Research Station, which is a Stanford gig. Dozens of the big gals snoozed on the beach,
with little log-like pups next to them.
It is pupping season, apparently.
Even Isabel when she first wakes up is not as cute as a newborn seal
pup.
Seals and sea lions are everywhere around here. They hang out under what is left of the
actual commercial fishing dock (not to be confused with Fisherman’s Wharf which
is full of “Best Chowder!” terrible-looking restaurants and sweatshirt shops), arf-ing
away and providing endless photo opportunities.
As I’ve mentioned, in addition to the jangly tourism of
Cannery Row and the cheerfully earnest gestalt at the Aquarium, Monterey is
also home to a large military population.
One forgets how that culture bleeds into the surrounding community, when
one lives where we do. This is
screamingly evident at Chowhound-recommended Compagno’s, where we got
sandwiches for lunch. This little deli
is about a block from the Monterey Presidio, and if the men in dress blues
outside didn’t give it away, the short haircuts and walls plastered with
military memorabilia inside let us know where we should stand. The vintage GI Joe dolls, models of Apache
attack helicopters hanging from the ceiling, uniform ephemera – all that I can
explain. But what I will do if the kids
ask about those t-shirts celebrating numbers of kills in various distant places
that sound vaguely like places they’ve heard about on the news? But in fact they are so delirious with thirst
that they pay no attention, and Bill wisely decides not to record the scene with
his camera. The owner clearly knows his
clientele. “You’re Korean, right?” he
says to one non-Korean kid who looks about 19, “No” kid answers, “Arabic.” It’s a language school nearby, and there’s a
Navy postgrad program in town too. The
owner is in fact very friendly, where are we from, etc., giving us dinner
advice, and selling us the largest sandwiches known to mankind, which are
problematic for us to finish after our ginormous and delicious breakfast from
another Chowhound recco, First Awakenings in Pacific Grove. Compagno’s freaked me out just a little – it
is just hard to absorb such a sensory assault of militarism, even if you do
support it generally. It’s easier to
take when all that stuff is 150 years old.
(This was a full day.)
We took our missiles I mean sandwiches to Point Lobos State Reserve
which is considered the crown jewel of the California state park system. Easy to see why, the roads and paths wind
along this gorgeously dramatic craggy rocky coastline against which the dark blue
Pacific crashes and rages. The coast is
topped by twisted old trees, and you can look out at more rocks that are topped
by – sea lions! Arf arf arf-ing away,
you can hear them even over the pounding and splashing of the water. And if you peer down into the raging tumult
of a crevasse that fills with the crashing waves, you might see a sea otter
enjoying the ride, splashing and floating and flipping around. It must be fun to be a sea otter around here. We also visit a grove of Monterey Cypress,
which are the remnants of an ancient tree population, marvelously wind-swept
and twisted, and covered in lace lichen and green algae (which actually looks
like rust-colored moss, but which, according to the tree expert I consulted –
my boss – is in fact related to the lichen).
Overall, Point Lobos is, as Laskins like to say, pretty fabulous.
4/16
It turns out that there is one aspect of travel about which
Isabel is decidedly NOT a jewel, and that is the California state law that requires
individuals six and under to wear a life jacket on board a boat. Oh how she wailed at putting it on for the
whale watch. Oh how she pouted, head in
my lap, for the bumpy hour-and-a-half ride out to the whale grounds. Oh how many ginger candies I ate, given said
bumpiness. But we saw a gray whale, and
a couple of humpbacks slapping around, fins and flukes, a whole mess of
dolphins, and even an albatross, so she perked right up. I took a little longer.
Our naturalist on the whale tour was a frighteningly
energetic gal named Katherine (Isabel:
“I think she ate Extra Cheerios at breakfast this morning!), who made a
big joke about if we see orcas (they are coming in to the area now), grab the
kids and toss them overboard because orcas love kids, hahaha! Our children looked bewildered at this, and
many of our fellow passengers didn’t speak enough English to really get it, so
the joke kind of fell flat, particularly with me. I’ll toss YOU overboard, sister.
The whole coastline here is gorgeously rocky and beautiful
and you only have to drive a few minutes to get to a perfect picnic spot. We loaded up at yet another Chowhound recco,
the fabulous Parker-Lusseau bakery, and tried gamely to eat on a bench in a picture-skew
spot near Point Pinos light, but were eventually driven into the car by the
wind.
Monterey is one of those retirement-kind of cities – they
call it a city, but there aren’t any buildings over about four stories tall,
except for some hotels. And the streets
are broad, and empty, and there are lots of parking spaces, and about zero
pedestrians, which is too bad because it is pretty and sunny and there are nice
flowers everywhere. The oldest
government building in California is there – an 1847 Customs House – and there
is an attractive historical plaza and a Paseo de Storia which is like the
Freedom Trail only in Monterey. Still, it
was all a bit tame for me, but we loved the marine aspect of our visit, and we
ate VERY well here, so I think Monterey and environs gets four thumbs-up from
the Laskins.
Still, it doesn’t compare at all to San Francisco, the heart
of which sprawling, densely-populated metropolis we are in now. What really
doesn’t compare is the Monterey Bay Lodge to the Palace Hotel, which is also
not the Ritz but it may as well be.
Arriving at the Palace with Isabel is a little like arriving at the
Plaza with Eloise – lots of grown-up attention, and a certain amount of tearing
around to check it all out. Of course,
if you have an elephant-shaped purse, you are bound to attract the right kind
of attention.
Everything about the Palace is big, from its restored Palm
Court to our vast suite, to the endless halls that all look the same and in
which I got lost twice trying to find my way back to our room from the large
pool. The kids like to just take off and
run down the halls, which are so plushly carpeted that no one can really hear
them anyway. Isabel skips occasionally,
and sometimes kicks one leg out to the side, like she’s dancing a little
hornpipe. In her polka-dot swimsuit cover-up, it is a sight to see.
4/17
They say that the San Francisco bay was discovered
relatively late in the age of North American western coastal exploration,
because thick fog obscured the opening on the coast. Now we know what that was all about – it was
so foggy when we crossed into Marin this morning, on our way to Muir Woods,
that we couldn’t even see the top of the bridge towers! So we spent part of our afternoon driving
around to get a better view of the bridge, once the fog blew out.
But before that we spent a pleasant morning wandering about
the redwood grove at Muir Woods National Monument. These trees are one of those things that
everyone should see once in their life – like Monument Valley or the Grand
Canyon, they are unique to North America, and breathtaking. And a little hard to describe – they are just
extremely tall tall tall trees, in a deep valley that is almost a
rainforest. They are not the biggest or
the oldest redwoods, but they are the closest to us at the moment, and they
rather make their point about the world being a whole heck of a lot bigger and
older than little old us. It is green,
and smells lovely, and there are birds twittering and we see a banana slug,
too. There is lots of good information
along the trail, of course, so you can learn about the trees. And some older exhibits, such as a cross-cut
of a tree, showing its rings and therefore its age, with some little markers
showing when major world events happened in relation to the life of this tree. We know it was born in 909 AD, and that it fell
down in 1930. If you are Peter, you
don’t bother with the sign nearby that tells you precisely how old it is, and
you just inform your mother that it is not over 1,000 years old, as I said, but
in fact 1,021 years old. Then, if you
are Peter, you learn a life lesson about holding your tongue when some nearby
mother announces to her son that “this tree was 2,000 years old when it fell
down!” People, you sigh to yourself,
just do not read anymore.
There is a plaza in front of the entrance to Muir Woods, where
all the tours gather. Hanging on the low
fence there is a sign: “THIS IS A
FIRST-AMENDMENT PROTECTED AREA.”
“Funny,” remarked Bill, “I thought the entire country was a
first-amendment protected area.”
We also spot two Packers fans on the trail. Some people keep a life-list of birds
spotted. We keep a life-list of places
we see people in Packers garb. So far,
pretty much everywhere we’ve ever been is on it.
Some wrong turns, and infuriatingly incorrect information
from that bad girl Siri meant that we drive around and around and around
looking for a gas station since we had to return the rental car today. But before that we had the slow thrill of a
lifetime as Bill inched our rental car down the ultra-curvy, oft-photographed,
world-famous Lombard Street. Then we
moved only slightly faster back up to Coit Tower, all the way at the tippy top
of Telegraph Hill, where we could now get a terrific view of everything. Inside the base of Coit Tower (a monument to
the city’s firefighters, funded by Lily Hitchcock Coit, who they say was
rescued at the tender age of eight from a burning building, and thereafter
dedicated her life to championing firemen), there are some brilliant WPA-era
murals depicting scenes of California industry ca. mid-1930s, painted by about
27 different artists. At the base of the
tower is a completely unnecessary but rather dramatic giant statue of
Christopher Columbus. What is he doing
here, you wonder, it’s not like he discovered San Francisco Bay? Well, who knows, but since all the names on
the pedestal are Italian, it is a safe bet that some local Italian
businessmen’s association just decided that they needed an Italian monument in
town.
4/18
Today is the 106th anniversary of the great San
Francisco earthquake and fire. So far,
so good. Some buildings in California
have a waiver of sorts tacked on the outside, saying that this building is not
up to code for earthquakes, so if one happens, get the heck out. They are actually more formal, but that is
the basic message. This is why there are
not a lot of buildings older than about 100 years around here. It’s a little unnerving.
Even more thought-provoking is the sign that is outside many
buildings in SF, saying that this building contains materials that cause cancer
and have been known to cause birth defects.
What the heck are we supposed to do with that information – not go
in? To the airport??
Near our hotel is a curious bronze monument near the top of
which a wreath has been placed commemorating this anniversary of “The Big
Shake.” It turns out that it is the
Lotte Crabtree Fountain, which dates from 1875, although it too was damaged
during the quake. Its significance is
that many San Franciscans gathered there post-temblor to find family members. Then, on December 31, 1910, Luisa Tettrazini
(she of turkey casserole fame) sang a concert to the people of SF on this same
spot, presumably in honor of those who perished, but also to celebrate the
resolve of the survivors in rebuilding their beloved city. Bill thinks, and I agree, that it is fair to
say that in 100+ years since they have done a stupendous job.
Our dear friend San Francisco
native Andy Reinhardt describes himself as a transportation nerd and now we
know why: this is a city with many
different and actually quite fascinating forms of public transport, so I think
if you live here, you just get to know a lot about it. Today we took the two most picturesque
forms: the F line of vintage streetcars
from around the world, and the ding-ding-ding-went-the-trolley world-famous and
priced-to-match cable cars on the Powell and Mason line. The streetcars run right down Market Street
by our hotel, and they are beautiful – brightly colored, each with its original
municipal markings, so you might go one way in a car from Louisville (Kentucky)
and another in one from Milan (Italy).
Our driver told us there is one from Boston on the line, but we have yet
to see it. Apparently there was a
trolley festival in SF in the mid-1980s, and the mayor at the time (Dianne
Feinstein) liked them so much that she started a movement to bring trams back
to the city. They are great fun, and our
driver claimed to have gone to that trade school down river from us in
Cambridge. We couldn’t quite bring
ourselves to ask how he came to be driving a streetcar on the F line, but one
wonders. He also warned us to watch out
for pooping albatrosses on Alcatraz, our ultimate destination this morning,
since when an albatross goes, it goes big.
Spoiler alert: we did not see any
albatross this morning.
It is safe to say that the
hardened criminals who did time at the maximum security federal penitentiary on
Alcatraz didn’t arrive by jaunty streetcar and cheerfully-staffed ferry. They came by boat of course, but probably
shackled, and with what trepidation did they approach the dock at The Rock. More than we did, anyway, since it was a
beautiful day and we of course got to leave whenever we wanted!
Alcatraz is a must-see for anyone coming to San
Francisco. Not only do you get
spectacular views of the bay and the city coming and going, and from the island
itself, but it is also a completely fascinating place and terrifically
well-managed and presented by the National Park Service, America’s Best Idea as
Ken Burns tells us, and by golly he is right about the ones around here anyway. (Muir Woods National Monument is another NPS
joint.)
Originally, there was a military installation on the island,
from the 1850s on, and it was heavily armed during the War because CA being a
Union state (smart move), they feared a Confederate naval attack into the bay. In fact, a number of Confederate
sympathizers, mostly sailors from Southern vessels were detained at Alcatraz,
where they could contemplate their fate and “chew on the bitter end of treason”
as one newspaper of the time put it. The
fort stayed a military detention center for several decades, and only became a
Federal penitentiary in the 1930s, in response to the crime wave of that
decade, when the govt. wanted a highly public, highly secure place to stow bad
guys like Al Capone and Machine Gun Kelly and Kreepy Carpis and other
colorfully named denizens of the underworld.
When you arrive, you hike up up up the hill, to the
cellhouse, where you take the audio tour through the building. The audio-tour is a must: it’s free, and it’s so well done. The information is fascinating, it moves you
through at a good pace, and best of all, it features a great deal of oral
testimony from former guards and prisoners and well-placed sound effects in the
back (clanging cells, men muttering/fighting/getting stabbed, phones ringing,
alarms, etc.). The cells are pretty much
as they were when they shut down the prison in 1963, although some are done up
with prisoners’ effects, so you can see what they looked like at the time. A cot, a sink, a toilet, a chair and table
that pops out from the wall, and a couple of shelves – that’s what you got. And of course by now, the paint is faded and peeling,
and it is cold because the building has some drafts, and it is just grim grim
grim. And that’s the “regular”
cells. The “hole” is just cells with
cots and necessaries, and they are completely enclosed because part of the
punishment was darkness – constant, total darkness.
It’s funny because you start to feel something like sympathy
for the prisoners – it is that bad – and yet you have to remind yourself that
they were there because they were a) criminals and b) bad criminals,
transferred to Alcatraz because they weren’t thriving in other prison
populations. There is a great
wistfulness when one former prisoner talks about how on the side of one
cellblock, the one facing the city, on New Year’s Eve you could hear the
merrymaking from the exclusive St. Francis Yacht Club across the bay, and the
prisoners always listened for that. You
learn about their desperate escape attempts, which never succeeded, and which landed
them either in the hole, or dead. And
you see some of their paintings, and the library, and how one of them taught a
lot of the other boys how to crochet to pass the time. The audio tour ends with a former prisoner
talking about how he gets out when the prison is closed in 1963, he’s set down
in San Francisco, and all around him people are living full lives and hurrying
to get places, but he has nowhere to go and nothing to do, and he’s scared to death. And you feel sorry for him, and you should
because prison in those days was all about punishment and nothing about
rehabilitation. But still, he’d been a
bad guy! The worst of the worst, to have
ended up here. So it’s a bit of a
dichotomy.
The dining hall is interesting, because apparently the food
was pretty good – it was the tail end of the era of scratch institutional
cooking – but it was also the most dangerous spot in the prison, since every
man in there had a metal fork, knife, and spoon and we all know where that
might lead. Apparently one day everyone
got so upset about having spaghetti again that they started rioting and tipped
the tables over, and it took the guards cocking and aiming their rifles to
restore order. It’s known as the
Macaroni Riot.
Another thing that happened on Alcatraz, that is very famous
but doesn’t have much to do with the prison, is the Indian Occupation movement
in 1969-1971. In November, 1969, a group
of Indians took over the island, reclaiming the land for American Indians in an
effort to raise awareness of and demand reparations for the US government’s ongoing
poor treatment of native Americans. Indians
who hadn’t gone gently on to the reservation in the late 1800s were
incarcerated there, so there was a certain symbolism in that, but it was also a
completely abandoned piece of Federal land, and there did exist one treaty with
the Sioux that said that they could buy abandoned land, so they decided to
fight with the tools that the govt. had used, namely, the law.
The occupation was wildly popular at first, and generated an
enormous amount of public awareness and private financial support nationwide for
Indian issues. This action was instrumental
in changing the way that the government worked with Indian activists from there
on out, forcing acknowledgement of mismanagement of Indian affairs and
neglectful treatment of individuals and starting us on a long road towards the
govt.’s very recent billion dollar settlement with multiple tribes, in response
to decades of lawsuits from Indians. As
it was put at the time in a speech by Pres. Nixon, the US govt. needed to and
would shift from a policy of termination of tribes to self-determination of
tribes (Tricky Dick: Friend of the
Indian. Who knew?). But after just a few months, the extreme
egalitarianism of the movement worked against its success, and eventually the
original occupiers were forced out, the Alcatraz movement splintered from mainland
Indian movements, and things kind of fell apart. Indians stayed on the island for 19 months
total, but the last year and a half was hard, and not productive in terms of
negotiations or good publicity for the movement. Learning about it now, one is of course
struck by the similarity with the modern Occupy movements – the grass-roots
organization, the egalitarianism, the idealism, and yes, the fizzle. But the Indians were inspired, as perhaps
today’s occupiers are, by an organizer of the Berkeley free speech movement,
who said, basically, that sometimes you have to stop the machinery, and lay
your body across it if you have to, in order to make people listen.
Getting back to our transportation theme, we hopped back
into cheery San Francisco after returning from The Rock, with a ride on a cable
car. You know, it really IS just like a
Rice-A-Roni commercial, clear blue sky day, up comes the shiny cable car to the
crest of the hill, bell ringing! You
feel a little ridiculous paying SIX DOLLARS PER PERSON for the ride, but you do
it anyway because here you are and it’s the thing to do. And you might just hum The Trolley Song while
you are on board.
(My journal has been hijacked by that scoundrel Bill for the
next several paragraphs.)
With Peter in mind, especially, Bill suggested we disembark
at the Cable Car Museum to see how the whole system works. He also proposed that MUNI should offer free
admission to anyone who has paid the stiff ransom to ride on it. It turns out that MUNI has taken that
sentiment to heart and made the museum free to all. The museum is housed in the powerhouse for
the cables that make the cars go, so you can watch the big drive wheels spin,
sending the cables whirring under the streets.
It also houses the last surviving original car and some informative
displays on the history of the system.
It turns out it used to be much more extensive and what exists today is
a small fraction of its pre-earthquake peak.
We walk up to the Fairmont Hotel at the crest of Nob Hill to
ride up one of Andy’s glass elevator recommendations. After snaking at length through this grand
hotel to find it, we are greeted with an “Elevator out of service” plaque. Oy! I
was afraid Izzy might just collapse in an exhausted heap, but she reverses course
with the rest of us after minimal cajoling and once outside we head downhill .
. . to Chinatown!
To some degree, Chinatown is another one of those things one
simply does when in SF. Only it’s
free! Unless of course to maintain the
cheerful demeanor of your 6 year-old daughter you feel obliged to buy for her a
genuine made-in-China pink kid’s size parasol with hand-painted flowers for decoration. Then it costs you $3 dollars! We all enjoy the impossibly crammed shop
where the parasol was purchased, and the many others like it along the
way. The best tableau, however, is three
staff on break from their restaurant sitting on the curb, each with a paper hat
like the ones you see on cooks at a 50’s drive-in (or Kopp’s in Milwaukee, but
I digress), smoking cigarettes, and chatting away.
When we exit Chinatown, we realize we are only blocks from
The Ritz, I mean The Palace, so we continue on foot with a brief stop for a
restorative frozen yogurt. Izzy holds up
remarkably well through all the walking, as does Peter. After a pause in our suite, Bill suits up in
business attire to attend the opening of his conference while the rest of us
suit up for another spin in the lovely hotel pool.
(Here endeth the hijacking.)
4/19
We are here in San Francisco because Bill has to attend the
American Conference on Gift Annuities.
Too bad for him, trapped in the windowless meeting rooms of the St.
Francis on this glorious blue sky day. He
missed a lot of fun.
Devotees of science museums accept the fact that the Boston
Museum of Science, while venerable, and popular, is a bit old and threadbare as
science museums go. We love it, because
it is OUR science museum. But compared
to, say, the brand new California Academy of Sciences (CAS), well, there
actually isn’t much comparison. The CAS,
located on the site of the old California Academy of Sciences in lovely Golden
Gate Park, is the latest incarnation of a venerable old society, one of those
white-guys-travelling-the-globe-and-bringing-back-rare-specimens organizations. Don’t get me wrong, they did great service in
expanding the general public’s exposure to and knowledge of the greater,
natural world. But you know, it’s a lot
of weird looking specimens in jars, stuffed ibex, frozen Galapagos turtles, and
that sort of thing, and it’s just not how public education in science goes
today. The CAS suffered twice from
earthquakes: in 1906, most of their
collection was lost (hooray for the ladies:
a botanist named Alice Eastwood saved the only cart of specimens to
survive), and then again in 1989, when the then-museum structure, which by now
had a natural history museum, a planetarium, and an aquarium, all vintage
1950s, was severely damaged. So, they
took the opportunity to re-think while re-building, hired Renzo Piano to re-design,
and the result is one of the most spectacular museums going.
The original structure now includes a surrounding pergola
that is covered with photovoltaic cells (of course the whole museum now is
green green green), a glorious atrium, and a fantastical moonscape-like living green
roof. There are two giant spheres, one
housing a planetarium, and the other a three-story rainforest habitat complete
with plants and bugs and reptiles and birds.
The aquarium part starts on the main floor, where you look into the tops
of two tanks – one California coast, natch, and one a Philippines coral reef –
but continues in the basement with more tanks.
They have a magnificent collection of tropicals, and even an Amazon tank
that you walk through, looking up into the rainforest. There’s a swamp environment, with a mad-looking
albino alligator named Claude. And that
roof! It undulates likes the hills of
San Francisco, has round portholes for ventilation and to let sun into the
rainforest, and has a whole ecosystem of plants and bugs and birds.
Even the cafeteria was terrific with interesting and tasty
offerings.
Can you tell that we loved the CAS?
It is also great that this amazing place is located in
Golden Gate Park, the largest public park in the country, where many other
delights await. Such as pedal-boating on
Stow Lake, where we floated along in a bit of a zig-zag fashion (Isabel was
steering), past a Chinese pavilion, lazing turtles and all manner of waterfowl
including a beautiful great blue heron.
A man playing a sort of flute wandered by, followed by his dog, and the
entire effect was mesmerizing.
But even with the flutes and the birds, pedal-boating is
pretty hard work (for those of us who pedaled), so we stopped in the Japanese
Tea Garden for a restorative interlude.
I think that if I lived here, and they sold season passes to the
Japanese Tea Garden, that I would come here several times a week. It is that delightful. We stop for a tea break (tea and kuzumochi
for me, strange Japanese drinks and mochi ice cream for the kiddies), and contemplate
the rock-rimmed pool in front of us, complete with gentle trickling waterfall, and
surrounded by carefully pruned trees, shrubs, and azaleas. A quiet walk through the Garden shows us more
of the same. Gosh, we all feel better
after that.
The garden was originally established for the Great Western
International Exposition in 1894, and
afterwards, the caretaker, Makoto Hagiwara approached the park about making it
a permanent structure. The Hagiwara
family actually lived there until 1942, but you know what happened to them
after that. They weren’t permitted to
move back in afterwards. So, there’s a
shadow.
Our tea break also gave Isabel’s newest friend, Claude, the
stuffed white alligator from the CAS time to get to know everyone. Isabel always travels with an entourage, and
one lucky member is chosen every day to accompany us on our adventures. For this trip the group includes Pedoodle the
dolphin, Gupo and Jupo the mother and son penguins, Bloofoo the blue-footed
booby, Cattie who is, yes, a cat, and No-Name the small orange bear. Now they are joined by Claude and Otty, who
is a small sea otter from the Monterey Bay Aquarium.
Getting back to the Andy-tour, more glass elevators, this
time in the “new” tower at the St. Francis Hotel (remember “Hotel” the TV
show? That’s the one!) in Union
Square. You take them all the way to the
top, ogle the view, then ride down facing out and down, “so as to simulate
crashing,” all the way to the bottom. A
visit to Dad (unfamiliarly tricked out in a suit) at his conference provides an
opportunity to indulge in this goofy but fun and free activity.
Everything in San Francisco seems to come with a tower or be
high on a hill, and Bill’s college chum John Ashworth’s swell digs are no
exception. We go to almost the top of
Nob Hill, and find the posh Crest Royal apartment building, where we’ve been
invited for dinner with John, his partner Victor, and John and Bill’s former apartment-mate,
the delightful Mireille, who lives down the hall! It’s like Friends. This was a super fun evening. Our hosts were so charming and hospitable, are
fine cooks of course (you can read more about that below), and have this
incredible view of the city and much of the bay. And some readily-visible neighbors to the
right, which John commented was a little like Rear Window. The kids enjoyed this immensely (although
Isabel had a mysterious crisis at the appearance of the paella, but rallied to
eat some chicken and try the rice). We
are so pleased to have had the opportunity to introduce them to Bill’s great
pals, and have them experience this little slice of actual San Francisco life,
and in such style. Everyone poured into
bed pretty exhausted, but much sated tonight!
4/20
We’re slowing down . . . this morning, could barely make it
to Sears Fine Food, a throwback dining establishment just off Union Square,
world-famous for their silver dollar pancakes.
But we did, and in fact it was worth it.
You get 18 pancakes, which means three stacks of three for each kid, but
I had to cage half of one from Peter who was not happy about sharing.
I’d like to say that we strolled to Yerba Buena Gardens,
which are lovely gardens around an arts center in the SoMa district. But it was more like a trudge. The Children’s Creativity Museum, a.k.a. the
‘Zeum, beckoned, but the number of toddlers outside waiting for it to open did
not bode well. Would this be too
childish for P? HARDLY! We hit the animation studio, and spent a fun
hour and a half making a Claymation feature called “Isabel vs Godzilla.” You can see it on Facebook, I hope. I produced, Peter was art and motion
director, Isabel handled the camera (which involved hitting the space bar on a
keyboard). It is eight seconds long, and
brilliant. I think I may enter it in the
extremely-short animation competition at Cannes.
Another forced march picked up Bill along the way to our
next destination, the much-anticipated (by me) Yank Sing for deem sum (yes, that
is how they spell it) lunch. More on
that below, but this outpost of YS is in the Rincon Center, which used to be
the central post office for San Francisco.
The P.O. part retains its Art Deco fixtures, and is lined with glorious
WPA-funded murals by Russian artist Anton Refregier that depict California
history from pre-contact through WW2.
They are kind of cubist in style, and some of the more fraught images
reminded me vaguely of Guernica. There
are the missions, here is the Donner Party, Sutter’s Mill of course, that’s a
disturbing one on The Beating of the Chinese, The Dock Worker’s Strike of
course (it’s the WPA after all, so pretty lefty), and at the end, the Four
Freedoms hard by the Death of Fascism.
Apparently he wanted to put FDR in, but that was considered too
political. It took eight years for the
artist to complete these, so I guess that political tide was already turning by
the end. Anyway, they are completely
worth seeing, and you can have deem sum lunch to boot.
At this point, valor gives way to necessity and we start
cabbing it around town. Bill needs some
indulgence, so we head back to Golden Gate Park for a visit to the elegantly
modern De Young Museum, and its, yes, observation tower, which affords, once
again, spectacular wrap-around views of this ridiculously dramatic cityscape. There is a small but nice exhibit of Arthur
Tress photographs that he took in SF in 1964 and that provide us with another
little window into this amazing place.
(Damn that Bill, here he is again) But before entering the De Young, we discover
the “Garden of Enchantment” just opposite the DeY front door. It is a well-named spot. On approach, you are greeted by a tranquil
pond with water lilies blooming and several turtles perched on a rock, including
a darling turtlet. In the middle of the
pond is a small island filled with tall grasses and flowering bushes. At one end, crouched amid the grass is a Native
American man playing a pipe/flute. At
the other end, the panthers he is captivating with his music. Suitably mesmerized by this scene, you then
wend along a short twisting path through a small wood lined with small
sculptures, including a particularly charming one of two penguins
side-by-side. After which, you reach the
high-point of your encounter, the “Fog Bog.”
Alongside a raised wooden boardwalk, jets periodically create a bank of
mist that no child can resist becoming part of, whether just standing amid the
billows, or running through it screeching with glee. Peter and Isabel did all of the above. (Bill out.)
Of course, after he gets his fill of the DeY and we all
enjoy the tower views, we have to show Bill the Japanese Tea Garden, which
means I get another tea break. Remind me
to order some jasmine tea when I get home, and I will drink it and close my
eyes and pretend I am there.
I’m not sure that I’ve written adequately about the glories
of the Palace Hotel. From the massive
display of roses upon entering, to the millions of crystal chandeliers, to the
large sunny pool in which the kids recharged their batteries every afternoon,
and of course the glorious stained-glass covered space that is the Palm Court
(a strong rival to the similarly named space in The Plaza Hotel in NYC I would contend
without hesitation – now cut that out, Bill!), where we breakfasted on our last
morning, it’s just one big luxurious poof of fabulousness. We lingered at length over several extra
pieces of apple cake at breakfast, just to stay a little longer. You should linger, as long as possible, to
really get your money’s worth out of The Palace because by god they are going
to get it out of you. Our fab suite was
relatively reasonable, but the $60/day parking, $15/day internet, and
$4/underpants-and-up-from-there laundry charges do start to add up. (Post-trip note: we are very happy to be home and wearing
clean clothes again.)
Here’s a little-known (I think) historical fact: according to a discreet display down a hall
off the lobby, Warren G. Harding died at The Palace, of an apoplectic fit. Really.
One thing that made this trip particularly sweet was the
underlying knowledge that San Francisco is home for some of our great pals, including
some whom we hadn’t seen for a long time.
So it felt like we were exploring with all of them as our benevolent guides,
and that was lovely. We are not leaving
our hearts here, although I think we’d all – except for Isabel – like to leave
a few pounds of something. And the
mountains of laundry with which we return echo the many hills of that fine
city, but we are quite sure that we’d like to return, laundry notwithstanding. Peter is already planning for a summer
internship at the Academy of Sciences
when he is older and I think that Isabel would like to sing
ding-ding-ding goes the trolley just a few million more times. I bet you’d like to join her.
And now for some . . . Eats Highlights
Monterey was a Chowhound-Urbanspoon-Zagat perfecta. Two excellent breakfast places: the mountains-of-food First Awakenings near
the Aquarium (hosting, I think, a certain number of up-at-dawn East Coast
touring families waiting for the Aquarium to open), and The Wild Plum, a
funkier organic place “downtown.” Peter
ate ginormous pancakes at both, and then claimed to need a nap. Of course, he’d been up since five.
Dinners at Sea Harvest, a fish market with tables basically,
and Passionfish, an upscale, organic/farm-to-table/sustainable fish kind of
place were very different, but both good, the latter I would say ventured
toward great. I had a grilled sardine
and romaine salad, in honor of our location, which came with a garlicky panna
cotta on it – sounds weird, but worked perfectly – and sturgeon with a puckery
lemon-veggie relish accompaniment.
Isabel delicately ate her fine-restaurant go-to, a crabcake. And Peter polished off his butterscotch
pudding with salted caramel in about 30 seconds, would have licked the bowl if
he’d been allowed. He also kept his MBA Seafood
Watch card out, to keep us honest about what we were eating (never mind that
the resto makes a big point on their menu about sustainability, save the tuna,
etc.). It is always good to dine with an
expert.
The lunch places, Compagno’s and Parker-Lusseau, are at
opposite ends of pretty much any spectrum you can think of, cultural, culinary,
etc. but both worked in their moment. I
think I may see that apple gallette from the latter in my dreams.
You know you are in a city that takes its food seriously when
you see a crème brulèe street cart on the corner. So bring it on, San Francisco! We hit up Henry’s Hunan for dinner in SF our
first night, which was classic, slightly Americanized Chinese, in a kind of
dusty place that was apparently considered the best Chinese restaurant in the
world in 1974. Its day has perhaps
passed, but dumplings and a meat pie and hot and sour chicken worked some
magic. Isabel is adept at removing and
eating only the noodles from chow mein, leaving a little pile of chicken and bean
sprouts on her plate. It is quite an
operation.
Most expensive breakfast evah was at Boulette’s Larder in
the Ferry Building, which is basically the most fabulous food court on earth –
it is the place where all those local successful purveyors and producers have
stalls and shops, think Cowgirl Creamery and Acme Bread and Sharffen-Berger and
Far West Fungi and a bunch of people I’ve never heard of but that’s not saying
a lot. To be fair, while expensive, it
was also a most delicious breakfast, and I don’t think I’ve ever had better
organic sheep’s-milk yogurt with citrus, stewed rhubarb, and rose-petal jam. (Hungry yet?)
Tadich Grill is a San Francisco institution complete with
lots of old wood and old waiters in white aprons and one assumes lots of pols and
old-time power brokers at multi-martini lunches. It claims to be the oldest restaurant in
California, but that may be stretching the provenance a bit – started as a
coffee stand on the wharves in 1849 then evolved over the years to its present yet
seemingly timeless incarnation. Still,
who really cares about that, the same folks (Croation, by ancestry) have owned
it for about a billion years and that’s kind of the point. This is a place where you have gin and
tonics, and a platter of raw and smoked fish, then move on to a cioppino (which
Bill gives two big thumbs up) or some pan-fried sand dabs, and finish up with
some custard rice pudding, or if you are feeling very modern, chocolate mousse
cake with raspberry sauce. Your table,
if you are lucky, is in a semi-private paneled booth, with a big mirror that
your daughter can use to make faces at herself all evening. (Yes, she had a crabcake, again.) Tadich is my kind of place.
Super Duper Burger was super.
Au Bakery (also known as Golden West) is truly a hole in the
wall: a half door opens into an alley,
and you just go up and ask what they have.
If you have the charming and delightful Peter and Isabel along, chances
are that the lady will give you some extra treats such as a sour cherry muffin
that she can’t sell because the top broke off.
This and the blueberry may be the best muffins we have ever eaten, evah.
The finest paella we’ve ever eaten, with the best view, was
at John and Victor’s, with an able assist from Mireille (she is the sous chef
on all paellas at their place, apparently).
Mireille pulls out a foie gras entier direct from France in honor of our
visit, which even Peter politely tries. I
try not to swoon. This was accompanied
by champagne, then a fine pinot noir with the paella, and Armagnac from France
came out for the berries and cream and cookies for dessert. People sure do know how to live here in
SF. John and Victor apparently belong to
a very high-powered supper club, which makes ours look like the church potluck
in comparison. Was this just a simple
Thursday night supper for them? It all
seemed so effortless, I am inspired. I
hope that is a paella dish that I see in my future.
Everyone seems to go to Sears for the special silver-dollar
pancakes. It was a real cross-section,
from society matrons to local guys just having breakfast to tourists like
us. In this respect, Kopps is the Sears
of Milwaukee . . . sans tourists. NOW
CUT THAT OUT, BILL. When it is time to
reference Kopps, I’ll reference Kopps, but this is not the time.
I don’t tend to drink tea when travelling because you just
can’t get a good cup of hot tea outside of your own home, except for maybe at
Fortnum’s in London. Happily, I found
one more exception on this trip: the
Japanese Tea House, which produces, as you might expect, a really really fine
cup of tea. Thank god, I was falling
apart a little on all that coffee.
Asking a San Franciscan where to get the best dim sum is
like asking someone from Boston where to get the best lobster roll. You’ll get many different and strongly-held
opinions, but they tend to coalesce around a few places. It is up to you to choose correctly. Maybe you have to try them all? In any case, we couldn’t do that (or rather,
we didn’t do that. We could have, and it
would have been fun, but I think I would have been doing it alone!) so we opted
for Yank Sing, which is a well-known white-tablecloth Chinese restaurant famous
for its deem sum. Some deride it as
Americanized, it is definitely on the expensive end of the spectrum, and others
feel it is not as authentic an experience as heading into Chinatown (which is
true, certainly, but you have to know what you’re doing there, which I did
not). Others think it is consistently
the best in the city, and if you hit it early in the lunch rush,
incomparable. John cautioned that they
use a lot of MSG but Victor said, oh, that’s a great idea. All of that said, this was super-fun, and
totally delicious. You are seated in a cacophonous
room, filled to busting with other diners, and all the carts converge on you at
once! The ladies pushing them are
wearing headseats, and it is clear that they get a message when someone new
arrives, and they all swarm over to offer you:
-
Shanghai pork dumpling (best evah, these are soup
dumplings, and while I wouldn’t know a good one from a bad one, we all loved
these and could have made a meal out of them)
-
Steamed pork bun
-
Barbecue pork bun
-
Fried shrimp roll
-
Fried crab claw
-
Peking duck (I’d have eaten the entire duck if
they’d let me, but it was wicked expensive)
-
Minced chicken in lettuce cups
-
Potstickers, pork and greens inside
-
Rice noodle with shrimp (another table fave)
-
Turnip cake with ham and dried shrimp (Bill and I
thought this was great, but not Peter, and Izzy is just a lost cause for now. Too bad for them)
I could have eaten more, it was so good and such fun to be
completely in charge. You can beckon the
cart over, or wave it away when they show it to you. You feel like the emperor
decreeing: away with that expensive sea
bass. Yes, I reprieve those shanghai
dumplings for my dining pleasure. Then
they put a little stamp on your receipt at your table, and that’s how they know
what you owe at the end.
Isabel could also have eaten more deem sum, because it turns
out that she was not in a mood for deem sum or being adventurous and so didn’t
eat anything except for the bun that came with my duck. I’m not bringing that girl back to San
Francisco until she agrees to eat more widely.
Peter, on the other hand, loved it (no surprise there) and used the
opportunity to further improve his chopstick skills.
If the Monterey Bay Aquarium had fish police, they’d have
arrested us for our dinner at Sanraku in the Metreon center since most of what
we ate was on the AVOID list. The
delicious albacore that Bill ordered probably should have come with a little
circle with a fish in it and a line across it, it is so bad to eat! We did not feel so guilty as to not eat it,
however, and it was lovely sushi overall.
Dessert was an Asian-French mashup from one of those hyper-cute
Asian-concept bakery stands, called Cäko (all hot pink and white, and selling a
lot of cupcakes). A Silvana is a kind of
giant frozen macaron: two
cashew-meringue wafers, with buttercream in the middle, frozen solid, and
covered in finely-ground nuts. It came
in regular and mocha and chocolate and also green tea-coconut and purple yam,
which was rather violently violet and which we didn’t try.
We got many of our reccos from the Zagat app, which I think
is magic – it just knows where you are, and tells you what is nearby and you
get all that good Zagat info of ratings and comments. I don’t believe we ate at a resto rated under
21 for food the entire trip! Urbanspoon
is like a better Yelp, but people still enter things like Starbucks in it, so
you have to sort through more chaff to find the wheat. And of course, the Chowhounds are always
helpful guides, esp. the “first-timers at Yank Sing” thread and the Monterey
threads. Finally, check out Chef’s Feed,
which is an app where chefs post their local faves. SF is included and we are pleased that we managed
to get almost all the Yank Sing reccos.
And while I’m on the subject, that map app on the smartphone
is brilliant, just brilliant. I am now
officially addicted to my little blue dot, and followed it – or maybe it
followed me – all around the town.
I think I shall miss California. I’m having some pinot noir and a bit of
Cowgirl Creamery Mt. Tam, in an effort to retain the magic a little longer – but
the nor’easter blowing outside is reminding me that I’m home.
No comments:
Post a Comment