City Delights

Living in San Francisco can be a delight. For this old southern boy it's a study in contrasts between our previous home in Charlotte and our new one in The City by the Bay.

For one thing the public transportation is wonderful. First of all you have a great Web site published by the SFMTA (San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency) or "Muni" for short. If you're not familiar with the city's routes you just enter your starting point and destination address, hit the "Plan your trip" button, and voila! It tells you which bus or train to take, where to get it, what the schedules are, and a detailed itinerary. Think of it as "Transit for Dummies!" It's a far cry from living in New York where the subway system can often be a hit or miss proposition (until you learn by suffering or science).

Anyway, here I am wanting to go to a jewelry store in Cow Hollow from West Portal. I take the 28 bus which goes north on 19th. It passes through Golden Gate Park and stops at the parking lot where you can off board (if you want) and walk the bridge. Then it continues down Marina Boulevard to Lombard Street where there's a plethora of motels and restaurants that cater to the tourist trade. (Sidebar: riding the transit in San Francisco -- as in other cities -- is a great way to learn more about the composition of the city. I was early surprised to see that a great percentage of the population is Asian. A far cry from Charlotte where Asian peoples are just not a major part of the urban makeup).

Too early for the jewelry store (it opens at 11 am), I slide over to one of the ubiquitous breakfast cafes cum coffeehouses that populate the city and duck in for a cop of joe. It's still sunny and warm and the place has lots of tables outside where you can sit and read and contemplate your navel. I took a couple of photos that interested me. One is a crate of oranges waiting to be turned into fresh orange juice. The sunlight was hitting them just so that they took on a special, almost sacred quality. Too bad the flash on the camera didn't allow this.

The other photo is of this glorious, wood bear with a salmon in his paws. He's about four feet tall and is probably carved from Redwood, given the gray patina. It's one of those serendipitous things that makes the city such a fun place in which to live.