SAN FRANCISCO BLOG: 18/3/18

San Francisco = new ideas.
From the Gold Rush to 1960s music, drugs, free speech and gay rights, to Silicon Valley's Google, Apple and Twitter generation, it happens here.

BEAUTY AND THE BAY
It's a beautiful city.
The Golden Gate Bridge frames skyscrapers next to cliffs, beaches and pin-prick kitesurfers – it’s up there with the world’s epic harbour views. New York, Sydney, Rio.
Perspective stuns as straight streets roll down hills almost to the horizon, flanked by immaculate wood-clad three-storey bay-window mansions.
100 sea lions bark beside a pier restaurant serving awesome clam chowder soup inside a bowl made of bread.
1,000-year-old giant redwood trees tower over lush gorges just north of town.
Little-known quadruple-span Bay Bridge’s night-time twinkles rival the Golden Gate vista.
And the world's biggest city park even has a herd of buffalo.

GOLD FEVER
I stand on the spot the Gold Rush began in 1848, as nuggets from the nearby Sierra Nevada were shown to a crowd.
I read the handwritten diary of the sawmill worker first to find gold: “Boys, I believe I may have found a gold mine.”
Possibly the biggest blunder in newspaper history followed. The editor visited the find location, didn’t pan water correctly and reported there was no gold.
£10billion-worth in today’s money was found in seven years.

With no law, San Francisco became the wildest of boomtowns.
California’s non-Indian population, 500 in 1848, rose to 300,000, via the overland route west, and by boat across disease-ridden Panama or round Cape Horn.
San Fran had hundreds of brothels. Ethanol and food colouring served up as wine. Murders every night. Runaway Australian convicts pillaging the city. Possees raised for vigilante justice.
Even women drugging men’s whisky with opium and selling them unconscious as sailors (victims woke up on boats bound for Asia). Not dissimilar to British Royal Navy's outrageous press gang recruiting tactics.

ALCATRAZ
On Alcatraz, we meet an ex-guard who worked with Frank Morris, played by Clint Eastwood in Escape From Alcatraz (three prisoners spend year using spoons to scrape concrete from air vents, leave paper mache heads in beds, climb from ventilation shaft, never seen again).
The guard’s verdict on the escapees? Drowned.
My verdict on visiting Alcatraz? Gripping.

CHOO CHOOS AND DING DINGS
No, not a shoe designer section (sorry, Nati).
San Francisco has every form of public transport imaginable. ‘Cable cars’ are old uphill trams. ‘Street cars’ are old flat trams. Muni is a new tram. So basically everything is a tram. Apart from Bart. That's a train.
Now you know why Leo has spent a week shouting ‘choo choo’ and ‘ding ding.’

THE CALIFORNIA WAY
Car accelerators and brakes must wear out fast here. In a grid-layout city, traffic lights or compulsory stops at every junction seem bonkers. Journey times would surely would be halved if one road had priority.

It sometimes rains every 10min. But it’s sometimes sunny enough for an end-of-winter Golden Gate vista picnic.

No wonder Yanks think the Brits are tight. 15-20% tips are standard, even from takeaway sandwich shops.

But we're learning the American way and the lingo.
“You're all set” = “Here’s your receipt.”
“In the back” = “Over there.”

And the popular “Right!” = “Yes!”
Probably what James Marshall exclaimed when he saw something glinting in the river on January 24, 1848, starting San Fran’s transformation from Mexican village to one of the world's great cities.