Day 8 (13/5) - San Francisco
This was our first (and technically only) real free day, so 12 of us went to San Francisco, while 4 went to Oakland. This being a huge group, we didn't manage to do much, but it was still fun.
The BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) ticket is so cute. It's a stored value card which you can topup, and the value to add can be gradated in $1 and $0.05 increments.
'Cute at one. Not so cute at 21'
Some of the girls suggested that they redo this ad with me. Boo hoo.
Monument to workers (?) outside the BART station. San Francisco Financial District
Malaysian Mannikins :(
Montgomery Street, very steep stretch in the distance
Entering into Chinatown
The sheer amount of junk on sale was amazing. I paid $2.17 (with tax) for 6 stink bombs.
Phone booth with activist stickers. Note also the Orientalism inherent in the booth.
Chinatown
Where there're Chinese there're bootleg Sentai toys
Unfortunately we lost one of our number in Chinatown, so we were down to 11.
North border of Chinatown with Little Italy
Little Italy didn't look very Italian, except for the Italian cafes and restaurants. Perhaps in overcompensation, every lamppost had a painting of the Italian flag.
We went into a nice candy shop, which was the shit. With Screaming Flying Monkeys (see below), friendly staff and free samples, it's no wonder it was the #1 candy shop.
T-shirts
Taffy shopping with Chris. There was another group of taffey barrels opposite us.
There's a picture of me with my basket looking like an 'oompa-loompa'. Once I finish my travelogue (hopefully before going to Shanghai/Hong Kong) I will post it and thus contribute to my marginalisation.
New Wife Voodoo Doll
My new girlfriend. Someone asked if it grew big enough to be used as a sex doll. !@#$
Fat cats
B Movie Victims
Maybe the best item was the Screaming Flying Monkeys - you launch them using their rubberised arms, like a slingshot, and when they hit their target they scream. Unfortunately my attempts to get a video were unsuccessfully.
Vinod bought some sex cards with positions and methods. These girls are intrigued by it. Purely for academic purposes, of course.
Huishan is happy with Vinod's sex cards from the candy shop
Outside the candy shop
Washington Square
Cute car ad
Fisherman's Wharf
Retro car
Seagull
Cat man
Scoma's was way too expensive and we had to wait too, so we went to Tarantino's, also along the Wharf.
While waiting for our food to come, we saw this:
Scaring passers-by by hiding vegetation. This isn't a bad idea for busking.
The best Boston (hurr hurr) Clam Chowder I've ever had. Too bad there were no oyster crackers. The sourdough bread we got was nice but it didn't quite substitute for crackers.
Sauteed scallops and prawns in garlic, lemon butter and white wine sauce. The scallops were huge. Unfortunately this means they weren't seared enough - it didn't go all the way through. Other than that it was good. Most of the rest had Fish and Chips, which cost less than half of this. Hah.
Crabs
Fisherman's Wharf sign.
Other bits of my soles started coming out on this day as well as many other subsequent days of the trip. As the saying goes, when it rains, it pours. Luckily I had my glue already.
Seagull
Alcatraz from shore
We decided to go on a $21 cruise which would bring us past Alcatraz and under the Golden Gate Bridge. There were portable sound units providing narration in 8 (?) different languages. However, English language speakers were marginalised since the channel for English did not work, so we had to listen to the indistinct sound coming out from the loudspeakers.
Port from ship
The wind was painful to the eyes.
Windsurfing
Some of them had parachutes attached to their surfboards and in the air above them catching the wind. I wonder what that's called - parasurfing?
Rainbow in the spray from the boat
Alcatraz
Bay Bridge
Shore. The needle building is the San Francisco pyramid. It is the tallest building in the city, with a narrow top so it wouldn't cast a big shadow on the street. Uhh.
Seals
Fake cigarettes. These are chocolate sticks rolled in paper. Amusingly, it doesn't say 'chocolate' anywhere, since these are made in the Land of Pot, Hookers and Euthanasia which has that rule that anything with fat other than cocoa butter cannot be called 'chocolate' (meaning you can't find Malaysian chocolate anywhere); the second ingredient is 'hardened vegetable oil'.
Breakdancing. The Malay kids at Esplanade need to go for intensive remedial.
I didn't know it was possible to spin on your head with your legs perpendicular to your body so many times.
Unfortunately the breakdancing was evidence of a systematic and racist framework of exclusion - only blacks and Cambodians (not even Asians in general) were taking part, and the latter had to shave their heads and pierce their ears, thus losing their Asian-ness, before they were allowed to take part.
Some passer-by was trying to get the performance artists to laugh/move. She succeeded.
There's Menopause the Musical. Hah.
Sea lions
Bubba Gump, at Fisherman's Wharf
EZ-Link in a tram
We went up the tram to go back to the BART and no one paid. When in Rome, do as the Romans do (I doubt all of them had a valid transfer ticket). So only Vinod paid. The tram was from Milan and so had Italian signs (there's another from Birmingham - with so many trams from around the world, it must've been a bitch to fix them all to run on the same tracks and power lines).
Incidentally, the most retarded argument I've heard for inflexible tram services: ""The street car solution is like a marriage," says Dr. Dave Fritze, a member of a group trying to bring street cars back to Cincinnati. "When you put down rails through a neighborhood you indicate you intend to stay there. A bus can be on one route today and leave the neighborhood behind tomorrow.. The difference is commitment.""
It costs $4.65 to leave the same BART station you entered. They call it 'excursion fare'. If anyone is daft enough to do that, he deserves to pay $4.65.
There was a woman running in a bra and pink shirts with many badges pinned on them. She was wearing gloves, listening to music and moaning as she ran. Uhh. California is such a weird place.
Just before dinner, the one who'd gotten lost in Chinatown reappeared and the other girls went to hug her. I passed a comment about how she wouldn't get any hugs if she were a guy, but one girl disagreed with me. Seeking to illustrate a related point by attempting to shatter another convention got me another scream. Boo hoo.
We had dinner at Jayakarta, a supposedly Halal Singaporean-Indonesian (just about the only Singaporean thing was roti prata, though) place so the Muslim girls could choose to eat meat. Unfortunately it was not really Halal since it served beer (tsk) so one ate a bit of chicken and the other stuck to fish. Maybe I should've ordered loempia since I haven't had it since last June or July. Oh well.
Over dinner, the plan to exploit and marginalise me continued. It was suggested that I be dressed up as Obelix. Gah.
Jayakarta had savory desserts. Wth.
Pranking Daniel with the 'cigarettes'. Their giggling gave the game away.
Free unsold books (thrown away, with the covers torn off; unfortunately sometimes some pages had been ripped off with the covers)
Quotes:
[When surrounded by Chinese people, signs and stuff] Are we in Chinatown?