San Francisco and Alcatraz

The state parliament

We spent a few days in the city whilst we were there.  It is a really pretty city, and I can see the attraction with it, it has great bars and restaurants, and the taxis are soooo cheap! So you never even need to use public transport.  It really is the country of the car over there.

This was my first ever visit to the US, I don't know, I had never really felt the burning desire to visit before.  So I'm glad that this trip came up.  I wasn't sure what to expect, I mean American culture permeates so much of your pop culture references that a lot of the time I literally felt like I was on a movie set.  A lot of their public services really look like they are straight out of Total Recall (the original version of course), their main public transport, the BART, which I think means something like Bay Area Rapid Transport and is their light rail service, literally looked like a mining vehicle from an 80s futuristic movie.  So boxy, and with carpet!  Who puts carpet in public transport?

Two of the seals at Pier 39

Dave with Alcatraz in the background

We even got a counterfeit coin out of the ticket vending machine.  I've never seen a counterfeit coin before, in fact I've never seen counterfeit money before, and they certainly hadn't tried to make it look like a quarter. But obviously it was the right dimensions to fool the vending machine.  Too bad we only used the BART once, so we couldn't offload it.  But once we arrived in San Francisco proper we realised how cheap the taxis were. No more public transport for us!

Pier 39 with the seals as far from the humans as they could get

One of the cells used by an escapee, never caught

The one thing that did get to me was the incredible disparity in wealth there.  A lot of people say that San Francisco is particularly bad, and that say New York has hardly any homeless, but there were so many of them.  It was fairly overwhelming for me.  London really doesn't seem to have that many, and Sydney wasn't so bad either.  But literally every 10 metres or so there would be another homeless person.  And a lot of them looked really freaking crazy.  They should be in a hospital or something, getting medical attention, not living on the streets!

We were in the city for 3 days, and during that time, a homeless person nearly punched us, another abused us, and we saw one pissing in the street.  This was from a tourist bus, so it's not like we were in a rough area of town, on a main street, at maybe 1pm, a guy just peeing away.  And it wasn't a little pee, we were there for a traffic light rotation, and he was still going when we pulled off.  But then if you don't have any public toilets, people have needs after all.

One thing that did surprise me was there were no Big Issue sellers, I mean if a place needs a Hand Up, it felt like it was San Francisco.  We have a Big Issue seller in Hampstead, his patch is outside the local Tesco, and the other night he was standing there having a beer with someone who had just done their shopping.  A bit different from the homeless in San Francisco, who seemed to either be completely crazy or have completely lost their humanity.

The view of Alcatraz

The prisoners got to listen to radio, by plugging into these two holes

And yet next to the streets with all the homeless there would be de Beers, and Prada, and Gucci.  It's like there's a Lord of the Flies undercurrent going on, but the normal people are oblivious to it.  We're driving home one night (in a taxi of course) and people are fighting over what they pull out of bins.  It's like they had lost all veneer of civilisation and were just animals.  Freaking scary! Especially as in the Walmarts you can buy massive knives, we didn't see any guns, well a BB-gun, but does that really count if people are carrying enormous gutting knives?  I guess there is at least that, no guns in the Walmart, at least the one we visited, a lot of ammo, but no actual handguns.

It's a real juxtaposition, because

The fog really rolling in

we ate at some really nice restaurants, and visited some great bars.  Apparently they don't have the problem with alcohol which is such an issue in Australia.  And every restaurant also has a great bar, with all the spirits you could want. It was a real different feeling to both London and Australia.  I can imagine you could have a great night out in San Francisco (if you manage to avoid the scary homeless people).

The exercise yard at Alcatraz

I'm a little disappointed that I didn't go during the full-on election round.  They were just gearing up for their conventions at the time, so the money hadn't fully unleashed.  I think the estimates are something like $5 billion to be spent on advertising during the campaign.  But then I think they are getting much better at targeting the money to the swing states, and I imagine California doesn't really classify as a swinging state.  So even if we were there now, I imagine we wouldn't be experiencing the full-on Super PAC onslaught.

I'm really glad I did finally get there, and I'm actually really keen to check out New York now, hopefully there really are fewer homeless people there.  But enough about the really weird society over there, and it is a really weird society.  It seems that people don't seem to realise they can't all be the 1%-ers.

View of the Bay Bridge and the city

One of the main things we did there was get out to Alcatraz.  And I would recommend it, it was quite good, unfortunately we were in a bit of a rush that day, so I would take your time if you can.  Plan for at least 3.5 hours, then you can relax.  And get the earliest ferry you can, and book online ahead.  We did, and if we hadn't there was no way we were going.  This place sells out weeks in advance.  You get an audio guide with the ticket, and it really is pretty good.  It takes you through a bit of the history, and the escape attempts.  When you are on the island you wonder why there weren't more attempts, I mean it really is not far to the mainland, an hour or so of swimming and you would be there.  But then you forget about the beauty of the Gulf Stream, they don't have that on the West Coast, the water is 15 degrees or something.  You wouldn't last that long in water that cold.

Whilst we were there we got to see the fog roll in, and it really does roll in.  San Francisco has the most amazing localised weather.