Sayonara San Francisco

It really has been a tale of two San Francisco's - San Rafael (see previous blog posts) and the City!

It's been fabulous having 10 days  right in the city. We've been blessed with having our good friends put us up and  show us the highlights - personal guides with all the inside knowledge - special thanks to Carol & John.

We've see modern art at SFMOMA and art across time at the de Young Art Gallery.

We oggled city  architecture, wandered the  botanical gardens, enjoyed a Hawaiian plate lunch  and we've loved getting out into nature in the State Parks seeing chipmunks and woodpeckers, butterflies and bird life. Check out the Night Heron in the picture below, we don't get them in NZ.

 I've especially loved seeing the Pelicans in the harbour, the Bristol Freighters of the bird world, they are everywhere and we saw them diving for fish from the St Frances Yacht Club  - very lucky to get taken to lunch there, one for the holiday favourites memory bank!

One of the last things we did was to admire the Palace of Fine Arts park down in the Marina district.

Built for the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition and recently saved from ruin by the  good people of San Francisco,   the park has beautiful gardens with a lake,  rotunda, Roman-Greco  columns and the resident ducks, herons and turtles all seem to coexist happily in the ponds - perfect!

The street art in our local neighborhood is wonderful  and it doesn't appear to get vandalised like it would back in NZ. Not sure how long these lovely pottery butterflies would last on a front fence in NZ.

Even the trash bins look fabulous!

We've explored beaches and basins and watched the marine craft go by - this is the harbour that never sleeps and the sound of the fog horn is quite lovely.

We enjoyed a walk along Crissy Field and even with the fog rolling in there were so many people out with kids and dogs  - picnics and parties - everyone  enjoying the waterfront.

A cool little adventure park for kids looked to be a hit judging by how busy it was and the happy sounds filling the air.

We have loved our time in San Francisco.  Like everywhere in the world,  San Francisco has not been immune to the impacts of Covid.

There are noticeable changes since our last visit - so many more homeless/people with addictions sleeping on the streets. You could get high on the smell of some of the dope actually being smoked in public as it's not illegal here. The lines we saw at 7th Street shelter for homeless support were sobering - there are a lot of people really down on their luck .

Everywhere we went we saw 'We're Hiring' signs in stores and even saw a big freeway billboard with a $1000 sign on incentive.  

All the folks we've met or interacted with have been so lovely and welcoming, helpful if we were asking for directions and happy to share local insights which is always really interesting.

We have felt really safe in the city. We walked home after a dinner out one night and it took approx 30mins walking up Market Street and through the Castro - no problems!

We've seen more Tesla cars here than you can shake a stick at - they're everywhere.  We also saw  Waymo self driving cars in the city, driving about in a testing phase with a driver onboard. Hmmm, not sure if I'd been keen to totally trust a driverless car. 

As we flew out from SFO we could see all the container ships moored off waiting for industrial action at the Oakland container terminal to be satisfactorily concluded.

Sayonara San Francisco, we've had  a wonderful  time, loved every minute! Next stop Narita, Tokyo.