happy13. Yes, parking is as difficult to find as I make it out to be in the Toby books. In fact, it's usually slightly worse; because Toby has magic (and narrative flow), she usually manages to find street parking after only a paragraph or two of driving around. The rest of us usually wind up paying for our parking. Lucky Toby.
12. In areas like Valencia, you can walk for miles without seeing a Starbucks, although you will encounter dozens of small, independent coffee shops and cafes. In areas like North Beach and the Financial District, you can find a Starbucks every two blocks. It's like the city has a median average to maintain, and has decided to dump them all in the same place.
11. Many San Francisco natives rarely, if ever, visit the rest of the Bay Area, and are surprised when interesting things happen in the East Bay. (Not 100% true, but definitely supported by my personal experience.)
10. San Francisco is a city which never met a hill it didn't think "hey, I could put houses there, and people will totally figure out how to park at an eighty-seven degree angle." And because parking is at such a premium, people do.
9. It may be apocryphal that Mark Twain once said the coldest summer he ever spent was in San Francisco, but there's a reason so many people believe it. Thanks to the marine layer, we often have heat waves in December, and cold snaps in July.
8. Despite the hills and the messed-up weather, we still have joggers. Joggers are insane.
7. San Francisco's pigeon population is fairly epic, and most of them are pretty healthy, because there's so much food dropped by the tourist trade. Also, they eat their own sick. It's disturbing and fascinating, like an avian recreation of The Lottery.
6. Cable cars, not really worth it. No, seriously. They're not.
5. Ghirardeli Square sells a sundae called "The Earthquake" which costs around twenty dollars and needs at least five people to eat it. It's a towering monument to gluttony, and all visitors to our fair city should treat it as a mandatory undertaking. Unless you're lactose intolerant or diabetic.
4. San Francisco proper covers a span of 46.7 square miles. That's why we have South San Francisco, San Bruno, and Colma. Because otherwise, we'd run out of space really, really fast.
3. A team of fae without human disguises on could probably run the Bay to Breakers without anyone saying anything but "cool costumes, man."
2. The Ferry Building Farmer's Market is one of the best in the state. It's huge, diverse, and a little bit scary, since who really needs an heirloom tomato the size of a human head? Me, that's who. Now gimme.
1. I do an incredible amount of geographic research when introducing a new location in the Toby books. Half of it gets thrown out the window in the interests of not turning into a guidebook, but I do it. And this city is really weird. That's what makes it so great.
February 16 2011, 18:59:22 UTC 6 years ago
I'm just trying to remember how old I might have been the first time. See, my long-distance love affair with this place is nearly lifelong, due to the artist uncle who lived in Stockton (and took us to the city every time we visited, which was at least once a year) - gosh, easily since I was 7, he passed when I was 19 but by then had saved my sanity more than once before then. There were summers when Sis and I spent weeks and weeks with him and my aunt from BAHSTUN, who literally treated us like treasures from the Fates themselves.
And then we went home and became children of a single parent of four again.
Then the older brother, while he was in the Coast Guard, got posted at the base in Petaluma. More visits. More trips into San Francisco, and I can remember visiting the Planetarium/Exploratorium and seeing the show they did on the night sky as it would have looked in 1776 - in 1976. We then went into Chinatown to buy my then 1.5 year old niece pajamas. Older brother can do a dead-on Bill Cosby, and Lombard Street was a MUST. I remember walking through streets seeing street performers taking potshots at President Nixon and being deliciously scandalized about it.
Mom never took us into Los Angeles, but we spent a ton of time in San Francisco. ^^
About the only thing I would add is that San Francisco is hands down, accept no substitutes, the most amazingly beautiful city. From any angle. Even in the worst parts of town, all you have to do it look up and there you go.
And the sourdough bread really IS specific to the region. Trust me on this.