Because Fandom Has Yet to Truly Fail Me

[itsallovernow]

Unlike men, parents and pets, fandom has yet to seriously disappoint me.

Therefore, I throw myself upon your mercy and bontiful knowledge and ask:

What the hell should my mom and I do in San Fransisco on Saturday?

Friday is a tour of Muir Woods and ajoining wine country (we will be shuttled about by bus, and I shall wear my sheep shoes). However, she has determined that I should make Saturday's plans.

So, suggestions from the crowd would be most welcome. I'm not opposed at all to cheesy tourism. I am more or less opposed to Alcatraz. Just sayin'. My mother has a keen interest in touchy feely hocus pocus and mumbo jumbo. Also, chinese herbs.


Suggestions for food and drink also welcome!

Comments

[cretkid.livejournal.com]

Go to the Wax Museum! It's near the wharf! Home of the infamous "Which of these Jesus is not like the other" singing of 1998! Hee!

Marin Headlands near the Golden Gate bridge! Lots of trails in there if you want to do nature vs chintzy tourism.

Chinatown, of course.

The Thirsty Bear for food/beer -- though, hmm... well, no, I know they have veggie options there.

[thassalia.livejournal.com]

Ooh, I bet my mom would love to go hiking!

And yeah, Chinatown is a given!

Thanks hon! (Wax museums creep me out beyond belief:)

[cretkid.livejournal.com]

hehehehe... there are a lot of places down by the wharf (not just the wax museum).

There's a wonderful italian restaurant, not that I can remember where it is near one of the hotels I stayed at for a meeting years ago...

Pretty much, you can walk around and just find a place to eat and if it's not to your liking, you can find another place within half a block.

[thassalia.livejournal.com]

I have very fond memories of eating by the wharf as a teenager and seeing the seals/sea lions hanging out there.

[danceswithwords.livejournal.com]

The Ferry Plaza farmer's market is on Saturday, and although it's insanely crowded, it's well worth checking out if you like those sorts of things.

I always bring people through the Mission, both because I used to live there and know it pretty well and because it's got some really interesting artsy shops, cafes full of local art, murals, and cultural hodge-podge. It's also pretty grimy and smells like pee in a lot of places, though, so I'm not sure it's the greatest mom-destination.

Chinatown in San Francisco is... not that interesting, in my opinion, unless you're looking for specific groceries, but that's probably just me. It's also not that big--the main part of it is probably a four-by-two block stretch.

As for food and drink, there are so many wonderful restaurants, both cheap and expensive; what kind of food do you want and how much are you willing to spend? :)

[danceswithwords.livejournal.com]

Oh! And there are a number of walking tours you can do; some are historical and some are based on architecture (art deco office buildings, Victorian homes, etc.).

[thassalia.livejournal.com]

Those sound like a fantastic idea!! Thanks.

[thassalia.livejournal.com]

My mother LOVES farmer's markets. Loves them like whoa. And the Mission sounds interesting. As it's not LA, I do not have to impress her with the cleanliness and safety of our surroundings:)

She mostly wants to look at herbs and thing in Chinatown, so I'm sure we'll go anyway (we've also got something of a history about Chinatown in our family - it was the one place she wanted to go when I was a kid and my father drove through it instead of stopping and letting her look. Unsurprisingly, they separated soon after:)

And food, well, I desperately want to eat at Chez Panisse. Which isn't going to happen, so anything you can rec would be great - from cheap to moderately expensive, and we'll eat most anything.

[cofax7]

Yes, go to the Ferry Building on Saturday! In fact, if you plan ahead, you might be able to get lunch at the Slanted Door, which has awesome fusion Asian-Vietnamese cuisine, with a killer view of the bay. You can then get gelato in the Ferry Building (I recommend the Blood Orange) or buy some fancy chocolate or cheese, and then burp genteelly and walk up to Chinatown. *g*

Other non-Fisherman's Wharf options include City Lights Bookstore in North Beach, which is excellent. And The House--it's a small restaurant in North Beach with great food. North Beach is really fun, although it can be touristy. The Salt House on Mission (at 3rd, I think) is near your hotel, and the seafood stew there is awesome (I went there with Vanzetti). I second the recommendation for the Thirsty Bear: I've had some great meals there, although it's loud and the decor is nothing to write home about.

If you really want an excellent meal, see if you can get a reservation at Boulevard--it's the best restaurant in SF by some accounts, and the decor is lovely.

There's also thrifting in the Haight, or visiting the historic carousel at Yerba Buena Gardens. The Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park, the new Asian Art Museum (the food in the cafe is very good), MoMA, the Oakland Museum of California (there's an exhibit of photography of Yosemite right now; the museum is right by the Lake Merritt BART stop in Oakland), taking the cable car up California (NOT the Powell line) to Grace Cathedral and walking the labyrinth, going out to Cliff House and Sutro Baths on the other end of the city and having lunch or a drink at the Beach Chalet (good food, good beer, amazing WPA-era murals). Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill, wihch has views (and tourists) and more murals, and if you're lucky you can spot some of the parrots (I never have).

There are excellent bookstores in the Mission, many of them used, as well as a number of good restaurants.

Hope that helps!

[danceswithwords.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, I enthusiastically second the recommendation for Boulevard. Amazing, and it's in a really beautiful building.

[thassalia.livejournal.com]

That helps tremendously!! Thank you dear. (Are you perhaps around Sunday at all? Maybe for brunch?)

[cofax7]

I am totally around!

[wearemany.livejournal.com]

i second City Lights and you can enjoy the best cappuccino in the world at Cafe Greco right next door

[vee-fic.livejournal.com]

If it's Saturday morning you're looking to fill, dim sum might be in order. Last time I was in SF, I met a bunch of people for dim sum at a place just off the main drag of Chinatown, and then walked south through the neighborhood, stopping to shop for semi-precious beads at a jewelry store.

(I'd also advocate a visit to Coit Tower, while you're in the general area -- the murals on the ground floor are an excellent 1930s style.)

[danceswithwords.livejournal.com]

(Reposting with hopefully 100% less fucked-up HTML...)

The Ferry Building and Chinatown are not very far from each other. The Ferry Building farmer's market is truly amazing, both in scale and variety; the Slanted Door, in the Ferry Building, has truly world-class Vietnamese food, and there are a lot of other good options there, both in the building and at farmer's market booths, for lunch-type food.

As for other places to eat... uh... San Francisco has more restaurants per capita than any other city in America and we are total food snobs, so the options are limitless. Off the top of my head:

* If you want to eat Italian in North Beach, skip straight past the tourist traps like the Stinking Rose and go to L'Osteria del Forno, which has lovely food for reasonable prices. They don't take reservations or cash.

* In the Mission, Ti Couz on 16th & Valencia has delicious French crepes, and I've always had very good meals at Delfina on 18th & Dolores, although it's hard to get a table without booking well in advance on a weekend night. I've had one good and one seriously overrated meal at Foreign Cinema, which I'm not sure is a huge, ringing endorsement, but the space is really interesting and other people I know have had better luck with the food.

* Zuni Cafe on Market Street is a San Francisco institution and has wonderful food, although it's probably not going to be easy to get a dinner table without a reservation.

* The Grand Cafe in the Hotel Monaco isn't very trendy, but they always have excellent food and the space (an old hotel ballroom) is really beautiful; it's pretty easy to get a table there at the last minute.

Really, you can't throw a rock without hitting a restaurant in this town, and I could go on and on.

[sophia-helix.livejournal.com]

I just got back from a two-day jaunt there. I would recommend two things:

- Take her to the Haight. They're celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Summer of Love and she'd probably enjoy it. Plus, you can drag her to Amoeba Records.

- Go to Park Chow, on 9th Avenue just below Lincoln. It's very close to the Haight and yummy.

Parking is always the key thing in the city. For the Haight, there is a pay lot on Stanyan, somewhere between Haight in the north and Frederick in the south (that's like a two-block area, I just forget what the cross street is). If you go to Amoeba you can even get validated. If you're not adverse to walking, it's .8 miles to to Park Chow (Lincoln and 9th, halfway down the 9th Ave block on the east side). Otherwise you could try to find parking just inside the park, on Martin Luther King, but that can be tricky on a Saturday.

If you also want to go to the park, I highly recommend the De Young Museum (newly redesigned and awesome) and the Japanese Tea Gardens. This will also require some parking-fu, but I will now impart to you the absolute best secret I know about San Francisco.

You should look at a Google map for this part. You can see that MLK Drive loops westward in the park, towards Concourse Drive. What you do is follow it to the second Stow Lake turn (that loop is one-way, and goes counter-clockwise). Follow it all the way to the very pointy bend at the extreme east. Notice that at the top of the lake there's actually an intersection -- be careful to make a right there (it actually points kind of backwards at that point, and it's easy to miss, and if you do you'll get stuck on JFK drive and have to come all the way back around again). Park at the pointy bend, by the little blue arrow on the Google Map, just past the red pagoda at the base of the island in the lake. Discover a magical, magical set of stairs that takes you right down to Tea Gardens Drive, where both the Tea Gardens and the De Young are. Feel very, very smug.

You can also walk to Park Chow from here, if you so choose. (It's not that far). Go to the Gardens after 5 and it's free. Voila.

[thassalia.livejournal.com]

That is EXCELLENT advice!

[sophia-helix.livejournal.com]

Hopefully it's follow-able. I just reread it and it kind of sounds like the instructions on a pirate map -- "Take a hard right down the hidden fork, past the red pagoda, and then ten paces down the secret stairs!"

[paian]

You could take a sail around Alcatraz for an hour or so, if it's decent weather and you and your mom don't mind a little rough water and spray.

I've never taken a ghost tour in San Francisco, but I've loved them in some other cities. There are a lot of them offered -- I Googled 'ghost tour' 'san francisco' and a ton came up, altho your eye would be as good as mine in finding the cooler ones among the hokier ones. The Haunted Haight caught my eye, but, yeah, hard to tell. Even the hokey ones can be fun, tho.

[thassalia.livejournal.com]

I am a sucker for ghost tours as well:)

[kernezelda]

Zoo? Zoos are terrific.

[cofax7]

And there are gay penguins at the SF zoo!

[thevaliumsofalj.livejournal.com]

Ghiradelli square?? i'm a sucker for chocolate :D

[thassalia.livejournal.com]

Hee - the one thing I distinctly remember from childhood is going to Ghiradelli Square:)

[cofax7]

Skip Ghirardelli--if you want really good chocolate, come to the East Bay and we'll go to Scharffenberger. *g*

[fourteenlines.livejournal.com]

Hee. The last time I was in San Francisco, I was 14. We went to Golden Gate Park and the Imaginarium. At night, on Fisherman's Wharf, a homeless man stepped out in front of me and tried to spirit me off to be his cardboard-box bride.

My family still thinks it's hilarious, but you know what? At the time it was freakin' terrifying.

The next day, my parents drove us past Haight-Ashbury and went into paroxysms of geekery.

The end.

SF

[randomfreshink.livejournal.com]

End up at Harry Denton's Starlight Room -- it's the top of the Sir Francis Drake hotel, one of the old hotels. If it's foggy you get a view of the Golden Gate breaking through the mists. It's live music and looks the place that spies and lovers meet.

Sir Francis Drake Hotel, 450 Powell St.
www.harrydenton.com

Or San Francisco is a great place for belly dance. Take a class at Fat Chance Belly Dance -- http://www.fcbd.com.

And, yes, Chinatown is a must. And if you get tired of walking stop and get a henna tattoo at hennagarden.com or hennalounge.com