Saturday in San Francisco

A visit to Alcatraz, the small island that used to house one of the most notorious prisons in the whole world, is generally considered to be a “must see” experience for any traveller visiting San Francisco. Before we arrived, friends and relatives told us that walking round the spooky old prison was going to be an unforgettable experience and something not to be missed. My lovely colleague Emma, even gave us the money for tickets as a wedding present. What we didn’t realise is that the tickets to get onto the island are about as plentiful as sensible policies emanating from the Department for Education. In the other words, they are few and far between and we didn’t get any. Note to anyone else planning to visit San Francisco – book tickets to Alcatraz at least a week ahead!

So it was with some regrets that we settled for what seemed to be the next best option  - hiring bicycles to cycle over the golden gate bridge, returning via a ferry that passed close to the island of Alcatraz. Having not been to Alcatraz, I can’t really compare the two experiences, but I can say that I really enjoyed the cycling and I would highly recommend it to anyone else. The hills of San Francisco are pretty intense, but the city is surprisingly well equipped for cyclists, with plenty of cycle lanes and very sensibly designed cycle routes. My favourite part was a bit called “the wiggle” which leads you up one of the steepest hills on a route that wiggles its way through various streets, mixing some intense uphills with some restful flatter sections.

When we got to the bridge it was shrouded in fog and caked in tourists. The world and his wife, his three children and his mother-in-law, all seemed to want to cycle the bridge. I felt pretty smug at this stage seeing that most people had hired bikes from very close to the bridge, which seemed a bit of a cop out, whereas we had hired bikes from the town centre and had already tackled some quite significant inclines before getting anywhere near the bridge. The smugness soon disappeared however, when I got on the bridge.

 It is big, it is high up, and there are GAPS. Gaps in the sides, gaps in the floor, gaps where you can see alllllll the way down to the Pacific Ocean, some 200 ft below. Eeeeeek! Vincent managed without batting an eyelid, and I pretended to be equally sanguine, whilst focussing intently on the other end of the bridge and humming, bizarrely, "I want you back", by the Jackson 5 (it was the first song that came into my head). In the photo on the left you can see me looking quite relieved to have got to the other side!

Once we got to the other side, the little town of Sausalito was like another country; warm, sunny and with plenty of terra firma. The smugness returned as we watched most tourists join the ridiculously long queue to get the ferry straight back without cycling any further, whilst Charlotte and Vincent the adventurous set off on a cycle tour of the rest of the bay. We were fortified in this endeavour by a lovely lunch at an American diner, where we tucked into some classic American burgers. A shout out to all my colleagues in the DGS maths department for their contribution to our American diner experience! :-)

We headed up to a place called Mill Valley to find the fabled Giant Redwood trees – the tallest trees on the planet. Naively I thought these would be quite easy to spot and the map suggested that the Redwood grove was well signposted, but  despite their giant size, they actually proved to be quite elusive. Thankfully, Americans are incredibly friendly folk and every time we stopped to look at the map, someone came over to see if we needed directions. In fact, most of the time I was fairly sure of the way, I was just looking at the map to be certain of where to go, but opening the map seemed to automatically attract friendly and helpful Americans who wanted to give us a hand. 

In the photo on the right here, you can just about make out our bicycles in the middle of the image, leaning against the base of a tree. They really are huge!

We finished the day by getting the ferry back to San Francisco from a small town called Tiburon. The ferry passed very close to Alcatraz and the fabled prison and we certainly felt a shivery chill wind pass over us and we sailed by.

San Francisco Part 2b

After the Wild SF tour, we stretched our legs by climbing to the top of a pretty steep hill to see some more murals – this time on the inside of the Coit Tower. Most people go to the Coit Tower to get the elevator to the top so that they can see some good views of San Francisco. It’s true that you get some pretty good views up there, but in my opinion, most people are missing a trick by not paying more attention to the murals in the lobby at the bottom, which celebrate ordinary working life in California at the time that they were painted: 1933-34.

I have to admit that when I first looked at the paintings, I wasn’t particularly interested and I actually completely ignored them and started to read the guidebook instead. I had a cursory glance and decided that they weren’t very well drawn and quite childish looking. Nothing much to see here I thought.

The guidebook kindly informed me that I was being a bit of an idiot – the paintings were actually very interesting, so I decided to pay a bit more attention. It turns out that the murals had been created by 27 different artists and in fact the deceptively simplistic style was intentional and not simply a consequence of lack of artistic talent. I also read in the guidebook that because the murals celebrated ordinary workers, they were considered to be communist images and caused quite a lot of controversy when they were first unveiled. I thought this was hilarious, and a very American reaction, especially considering that the murals include stockbrokers and lawyers alongside farmers, fishermen and miners. 

What I really love about them is that each fresco celebrates gives us an insight into the social history of the 1930s. It’s striking that, even though it shows California less than a century ago, so much has changed in that time. You can see horse drawn ploughs working the land, people still panning for gold by hand, and farmers milking cows by hand too. I love the thoughtful details that have gone into the paintings – in the photo here on the left, I zoomed in to the image of two farm workers carrying boxes of produce. You can really see them straining as they carry the boxes. The other photo on the right here is part of the fresco depicting lawyers and the legal system. The artist had a lot of fun thinking up titles for all the books on the shelves and there is some pretty clever satire going on in these four titles. 

I also really like the fact that some female artists were involved in creating the murals and one of them, Maxine Albro, created one of the biggest and most impressive murals in the entire sequence.  For centuries there has been a dearth of female artists and I have always thought this is due to lack of opportunity rather than lack of talent. The photo on the right is part of Albro's painting and this section shows women working on a flower plantation.

 

San Francisco Part 2a

Day 2 in San Francisco had another inauspicious start, beginning as it did with our first marital tiff. The contentious issue was what to do first. Vincent wanted to head back to Fisherman’s Wharf for a boat trip; I wanted to go on a walking tour of the city. So by 10am sharp, we were patiently waiting at Union Square for the beginning of a “Wild SF” walking tour. 

“Wild SF Tours” is a small company set up by two college friends and they run free, alternative walking tours of the city. If you ever get a chance to go San Francisco I HIGHLY recommend going on one of their tours, because they were fantastic.  The tour we took on Friday covered the history of the city from the gold rush in the mid 19^th century, up to the mid twentieth century by which time San Francisco had almost completely rebuilt itself following a devastating earthquake and fire in 1906. I don’t want to give too much away in case anyone actually does go to SF and goes on the tour, but I’m going to mention a couple of my favourite bits. 

Part of the tour took us into an art supplies shop, which seemed a bit random until we went downstairs to find the entrance to an underground network of tunnels, used during the 19^th century to smuggle illegal items in and out of the city. These items included people, specifically sailors, who were “Shanghaied” out of the city, meaning that they were tricked into taking opium, and then kindnapped when they fell asleep and forced to work on ships leaving for China. I think it's absolutely fascinating that such an extensive network of well engineered tunnels could have existed without the knowledge of city officials. 

 

Another part of the tour took us past some beautiful murals. If you know where to look, San Francisco is full of poetic murals, many of which have very striking and significant stories.  The murals in the photos here are actually outside the famous City Lights Bookstore, which was founded by the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and, in 1956, published Allen Ginsburg’s poem “Howl”. The publication of this poem was a seminal moment in American history. The poem describes people in the “beat generation” – people who were being stifled by the conformist era that they lived in. It also describes heterosexual and homosexual acts in graphic detail and for this reason Ferlinghetti was arrested for publishing what the police claimed was an “obscene book”. Ferlinghetti won the subsequent trial and this was a watershed moment for literary censorship in America. In the UK, the obscenity trial for D H Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, took place just a few years later in 1960. 

I was also really pleased to see a quote from Maya Angelou engraved onto the pavement near these murals.  I now know the Maya Angelou was born and grew up in San Francisco and it’s great to see that the city celebrates her work. I tried to take a photo of the engraving, but the light wasn’t quite right, so here is the quote: “Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency”.

You also might have noticed that these pictures seem to have been taken in the sunlight, so where was all the fog I was complaining about last time? Well it turns out that the fog rolls in for the evening and stays over night and into the morning until about 10 or 11am when the sun manages to burn it off. So we did have good Californian weather in San Francisco and here is a picture of us in the sunshine to prove it :-)