Day 38 - 39: San Francisco

On Tuesday we went to have breakfast in Lori's diner, which was just around the corner of our hotel. The breakfast was again amazingly big. Basically you can survive the whole day with that kind of breakfast. We had some scrambled eggs, hash browns and toast. With the breakfast giving us sufficient energy, we started walking towards the wharf. We walked through Chinatown which provided a bit less hilly walk to the harbor. On our way we spotted the crooked Lombard street, lots of Chinese shops & banks and of course the nice townhouses of San Francisco.

Various foods from SF

When we got to the piers, we first walked to the pier where the Alcatraz cruises take off. We were able to get tickets for the morning on the next day. Apparently in the summer/holiday time the lines can be as long as week to get there, so we had quite nice timing! As remembered from last times when visiting SF, there were lots of homeless people again on the streets. One person had few bushes that he was holding in front of him, and sitting behind them. From a distance they looked like somebody had planted them on the sidewalk. When people would walk close enough, he would scare people by suddenly shouting 'boo' from the bushes. It was like watching candid camera, when people would always jump two meters when this happened. He also managed to probably collect quite some tips :)

On our way back to the center we took the tram, which got us to Market street. This was a good point to start our shopping trip. One of the most lucrative stops we made was a place called 'Designer Shoe Warehouse' - perfect! After quite some trying-ons and one boyfriend parked on the bench of the shop to play games in the mean while we actually managed to get out of there, with quite some more shoes to pack to our suitcase.

For the evening we went to a nearby Italian restaurant, with a really nice atmosphere. We managed to say practically hello's, when the waitress asked whether we are from the Netherlands. It turned out she was from Haarlem, and the owner of the restaurant was also from the Netherlands. We got nicely service in dutch for the evening, and the food was also really good. After this we still stopped by at our corner pub, which also has the organic apple cider. Lekker!

Almost like being in the Netherlands with dutch service & dutch people all around.. 

Wednesday morning we got up early and went to a breakfast place near the piers. The breakfast was again very good, and this time we tried to regulate even better not to eat half of the food, that worked. The cafe was for some reason filled with dutch people. It feels like they are everywhere in San Francisco.

After this we wondered to the starting place of the Alcatraz cruise. After 20 minutes boat trip we stepped to the infamous prison island and spend nice afternoon there. We walked within the main cell building and got a very thorough guided audio tour (in dutch!) and learned all about the routines in the prison, the prisoners and multiple escape stories. Our favorites were a guy who starved himself in order to fit through the iron bars and a another guy who was called "Creepy" because he would always creep around on his toes. At the same time there was Al Capone's niece giving autographs to her book he had wrote about his rather famous uncle. We tried to do the math and could not exactly get to him having such a young niece, but who knows..

After Alcatraz we took the old fashioned cable car back to town and got to hear and witness some interesting stories varying from stressed Italian tourists to a 89-year-old local lady who was still going strong and doing her groceries around the city. Once at the hotel, we booked our airport shuttle at the front desk. We did not go and see any stand-up comedy, but hanging out at the lobby was enough comedy for us. The most amazing conversations took place there between a bit strange hotel staff and maybe even stranger guests. This was also the only place where the wifi was working so we spent every now and then some time there to check where to go next. The hotel staff was amazingly skillful in making everything sound like it is somehow the customers fault. One lady was changing money, and it took quite some time and in the mean time the hotel clerk picked up the phone. The lady then said that well it would be nice to finish this transaction since it has already took quite some time now. The answer to that was "Well if you would have provided your room number right in the first place it would have been lot faster". Another one of our favorite was a long conversation with lots of misunderstandings when checking in with two rooms. It ended up with absurd conversation where the customer was suspecting the hotel clerk was getting mad. She kept responding in a tense 'on-the-brink-of-a-nervous-breakdown' voice "No, I'm not mad at all now. But if you want me to be mad, I can do that."

For the last evening of our trip we went to a nearby sushi restaurant, which was very popular, and we enjoyed some very good sashimi & sushi.