Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Blog-worthy San Francisco

Observations from my 48 hours in San Francisco:
There is something blog-worthy about having done a site visit at a university that boasts a Palestinian mural to Edward Said on the Malcolm X Plaza outside the Cesar Chavez student center.

It rained almost our entire trip, which was good for the California drought and not so good for walking around.

It may be a relatively small city, but it's very easy to get lost, even with GPS. And since when are GPS voices supposed to have attitude. I'm fairly certain that not following the exact directions being shouted at you at the last minute does not call for the otherwise friendly but increasingly annoying voice to say "If you don't want to follow my instructions you should just stop driving."

Whoever said that there is world-class dining at SFO has not had to wait for a Northwest Airlines flight. On the other hand, Northwest Airlines gets my vote for their decision to hold the last flight of the night 15 minutes to allow us to make the plane.

There can only be one explanation for the fact that Pier 2 and Pier 14 are only a few hundred feet apart. The competing reasons are: Piers 3 - 13 sank, OR, Pier 14 is really Pier 1.4 and the decimal point fell off a few years ago. Why anyone believes the latter is beyond me, but evidently I am just that good of a liar.

I had a terrible headache one morning and after realizing that copious amounts of caffeine were not helping, I asked the cashier at our diner where the closest convenience store was so I could go get some aspirin. She told me there was a small store across the street, but when we both looked over it started to rain again. So she reached into her purse and gave me two wax-paper wrapped packets of powder that she told me had Vitamin C and other good things in it that would clear up my headache. She gave me a glass of orange juice, told me to mix it in and I'd feel better. First, I hate orange juice. Second, she's asking me to take an unknown powder that looks like it was packaged at her dining room table. And she was generous enough to give me another one for later if I needed it. So I took it. I'm not sure whether that, or the Aleve that I took an hour later was the cure I needed, but it turns out that you can take drugs from strangers.

1 comment:

Emily Pearl Goodstein said...

oh my! this is an amazing story. i thought you were going to write about those fried sesame dessert things at the dim sum place at SFO. this was way better.