Friday, August 12, 2005

Sunny (and cloudy and windy and rainy and foggy and COLD) San Francisco!

Well finally I get around to some posts about San Francisco. Siobhan and I arrived on the 14th of July at about 11pm local time and promptly fell into bed in our travelodge by the airport. The next day we went to our hostel on Mission st which was our main base in California. It was a really nice hostel, with a bus stop literally just outside the door for easy touring around the city. Their website is www.elementssfcom if any of you would like to take a look. There's a bar/restaruant on the rooftop terrace which we made use of while we were there. Here's a view from there in the morning, with the fog rolling in from the Pacific.



So our first day was spent mostly at Fisherman's Wharf. We got there by cable car

and we looked at all the sights and went to see the acquarium. And look.... I found Nimo...!

They also let you touch some of the fish and being the big brave type, I touched one of these:

and one of these:

So when you're at Fisherman's Wharf, there's loads of touristy things to see and do. Every second shop is a souviner shop and in between them there are seafood restaurants, take aways, cafes and so on.... Pier39 is the major attraction and you can check out what's available there at www.pier39.com . There's plenty to take photos of too... so I did. This one is of Alcatraz with one of the boats from the Blue and Gold fleet in the foreground. These are the only boats that actually go to the island and you can get a guided tour around the prison too.



This is one of the Sea Lions that stays at pier 39. The Sea Lions haven't always lived here. They arrived shortly after an earthquake in 1989 and have been there ever since. In winter, there can be up to 900 of them at the pier. In summer, most of them migrate, but there is a population that stay there year round.

On the Sunday, we went to see Mission Dolores, the oldest building in San Francisco, founded in 1776. This is the mission that the city was founded on and was one of the few buildings to survive the 1906 earthquake. See http://www.sfmission.com/sfbirthplace/ for a wee bit more info and history.


Later that day, we went to see the Golden Gate Bridge, but it was very very foggy there, so I didn't get any great photos, as you can see:

Here's a crazy surfer under Golden Gate Bridge:

Monday was our alleged shopping day, but we discovered that a lot of the small, interesting shops were closed that day for some reason, so not so much shopping was done.

This post is getting a bit long now, so I think I'll start another one...

posted by Maz @ 12:02 pm

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