San Francisco Roadtrip Part 1

Coit Tower from the top of Lombard St.

Laughing Sal

The wizard tells your future.

Portlanders just have to do this sooner or later... the road trip to San Francisco!  Our trip was quite an adventure.  I'm going to share details of all the good stuff we discovered in three posts.  Practically the first thing we did after driving over the Golden Gate Bridge was to drive down Lombard Street.  Hikers will immediately recognize this design- switchbacks for cars!  Tourists were backed up for blocks just to drive down the "crookedest street in the world", which isn't really even the crookedest street in San Francisco.  But the views are tremendous and Jasper couldn't have been more excited by this silly drive.  It was far too congested for us to get out at the bottom for a good photo of the twisting street.  A word of warning-  do not even think about driving here with a stick shift!  On the way up the hill, while stopped at a light with the nose of your car pointed skyward, some fool is sure to stop just behind your bumper.  You know they will.  

Watching a Tom Mix movie.

We went to the Musee Mechanique, got as many quarters as our pockets could hold, and went crazy.  It's a private collection of zillions of very old arcade amusements.  There are lots and lots of mystical fortune tellers, love meters, strange musical instruments which are as likely to be played by unseen hands as orchestras of monkeys, and whole worlds of miniature carnivals that come alive with the drop of a quarter.  Some of these things are downright indescribable.  Jasper especially loved the "movies", flip books that turn with the crank of a handle.  And everyone loves Laughing Sal.  Drop a quarter and the giantess shakes and hoots with laughter!

Buy a drink for Dan!  Put in a quarter and he slowly fills his glass and takes a drink, wiggling his eyebrows at you.

Not far from the Musee Mechanique is the Aquarium of the Bay.  This is one of many places you can pick up City Passes.  They saved us money on many of the places we were planning on going to anyway, and were good as free passes on MUNI and the cable cars. Parking just about everywhere in the Bay Area is a nightmare, so much so that there was  a grassroots movement a while ago in Berkeley to repeal the law of gravity so as to help cars to float in the air, so people could thus avoid having to park them.  Getting around on public transit is safe and an excellent choice whenever possible. Jasper loved the Aquarium of the Bay.  It's not huge, but it has some lovely exhibits that are well presented.  His favorite thing was the touch pool filled with very exuberant stingrays that kept leaping out of the water and splashing everyone.  

California toads.

While we were there, we had some great food.  Some of the places we visited:

• Shalimar, Pakistani food, with two locations in San Francisco and one in Fremont. Horrible atmosphere.  Food to make you forget everything else. The lamb chops will make you cry.  Please note that nothing comes "mild" here.  
• Cha- Ya, Zen-inspired vegan Japanese cuisine, in San Francisco near Mission Dolores and in Berkeley near the UC campus.   The food is really beautiful.  Inside and out.
• Cinderella,  Russian food.  Just north of Golden Gate Park.  Just a couple of tables, but a full cafe menu. Piroshkis to die for. If you are a meat-and-potatoes kinda person, you will love Russian food. 
• Vik's Chaat Corner, in Berkeley.  Chaat is Indian street food.  Vik's is a legendary place, which started small and is now keeping up with the demand in a gorgeous spot that looks positively posh.       They have some unique offerings you won't find in most Indian restaurants.  And now they have a  big case full of high quality mithai (Indian sweets), something else that's pretty hard to find.  Vik's is a hop away from University Avenue in the heart of Berkeley, where you will find Indian shops selling the latest Bollywood music and DVDs, sari shops, and grocery stores that sell the inexpensive stainless steel food storage tins known as "tiffins" that I love.  
• The Berkeley Bowl. This is a grocery store extraordinaire, and a great place for the hungry traveler to grab some inexpensive, healthy snacks.  The produce section alone is bigger than my entire local supermarket, and the kinds of things that you can find there are startling.  The name comes from the former bowling alley where the business started out.  Near Crixa Cakes.
• Tucker's Ice Cream, in Alameda.  Homemade ice cream decadence in a charming old-fashioned ice cream parlor. Near Burma Superstar (which also has locations in SF and Oakland).
• Fenton's Creamery in Oakland.  They also offer homemade ice cream, in gigantic servings, as well as a full diner menu.  

Mithai from Vik's.