Day 3  Sunday 4^th August.

I love San Francisco!  People are genuinely very friendly. Stop to look at your map, someone stops to help.  Ride on the Muni (SF version of The Tube) and grey-haired ladies are offered a seat.  I will keep a tally to see if,  in this respect, SF lives up to London’s record of 100%. Going well so far.

The place is buzzing, up-beat, colourful.  It is the Summer school holidays here, so lots of families out and about.  At Fisherman’s Wharf everyone had maps.  Probably no native San Franciscans about at all;  except the highly diverting tram and cable car drivers, and traffic wardens.  Tram driver over the microphone – “What you doing pulling the bell all the time.  It givin’ me the headache.  It right beside my ear.  Pull it once and stop.  I hear all right!”  Cable car driver, (they have to have superior upper body strength, as that is the only force holding the brakes on the wheels coming down those big hills), at a stop, “Other side! other side!   Too many people hanging off that side now.  Come hang off this side now!”  These cable-cars would have ninety-nine OH&S Police coming out of the woodwork in Oz.  Odd.  I thought the OH&S revolution, like all good things that come to Oz, had originated in the USA.  Maybe it did, but not in San Francisco.  

Fell off the cable car at the Lombard Street intersection – it’s the one billed as the crookedest street in the world.  It is spectacular, but the crookedness is the result of traffic-calming – the street itself is quite straight.  The traffic calming projections (necessary because of the extreme steepness of the street) are bursting with hydrangeas in full bloom.  Pink this year.  I wonder if they change the acid content of the soil and put on a blue display next year?  

Then walked on down the street and along to Fisherman’s Wharf.  Bigger than the Seattle version, but without that spectacular fish-throwing exercise that has made Seattle’s famous – as a management methodology as much as a tourist resort.  Alcatraz sits out in the bay keeping an eye on everything.  Clam chowder and Prohibition ale (for Sophie – I had a nice Californian Sav Blanc) at about 3.30.

San Franciscans love their dogs. They (the dogs) have interesting wardrobes.  On the tram from Fisherman's Wharf to Embarcardero, I could not see out, being of a height that puts me between the low windows and the high windows.  So I sought interest within the tram and found this young couple and their therapy dog.