San Francisco

Union Squre

Mexican!

We arrived at our hostel (Globetrotters) in San Fran around midday on Tuesday, to find the hallway walls covered in helpful information- lots of maps, pictures of good tourist spots- with written descriptions underneath (including how to get there), lists of close laundromats, restaurants, bars, and anything else you could possibly think of.. However, it is a very quiet hostel- for the first few nights we had some strange roommates who pretty much ignored us! Even at breakfasts everyone was pretty much silent.. Also, San Fran is COLD. 15-17 degrees, but soooo freezingly windy that ou forget to put sunscreen on and end up getting really burnt. Oops. Anyway, on our first day we decided to just spend the afternoon roaming, seeing what was close by. We went to Union Square, China Town, and all the surrounding areas. They have a Westfield Shopping Centre, which is pretty fancy. We walked around SOMA (South of Market Area) which has some cool streets, but a lot of them just smelled like weed, and had an awful lot of dodgy looking people! Matt tried out “the best pizza in America” at Escape from New York Pizza.. and I had some really nice Vietnamese for dinner.

Painted Sisters at Alamo Square

On our second day in San Fran we mainly spent our time at the Golden Gate Park. On our way there we stopped at Alamo Square, which is a nice little park. All the houses in that area are INCREDIBLE. Right opposite Alamo Square there are the Painted Sisters, which are really well-kept Victorian houses. They also feature in Full House!! But all of the houses around there are so clean and colourful, they look amazing. The whole city is pretty stunning, in fact.

One of the many cool flowers
at the Conservatory

Then we went to Golden Gate Park, which is absolutely huge. We started roaming around pretty aimlessly, admiring the wide array of plants; everything from cactus to gum trees! Apparently one of the plants are native, the whole park used to just be sand dunes! We eventually stumbled upon the Conservatory of Flowers. It’s basically like a greenhouse, with different rooms for different types of flowers. It was really cool, reading about where they all come from, how they grow etc. There were some of the strangest plants I’ve ever seen! Very worth the $5! Then, after getting lost many times, we found the Japanese Tea Garden, which was also pretty awesome. Everything inside the Japanese Tea Garden was so immaculately neat and organised. It was gorgeous.

Golden Gate Bridge

After getting lost a few more times, we found the bus to take us up to the Golden Gate Bridge (the gate and the bridge are ridiculously far apart..go figure!) When we got to the Golden Gate Bridge we discovered that it was very foggy! Apparently this is pretty standard. But you can see from the pictures that half of it is not even visible! Bit of a shame (we went past it the next day and there was even more fog!)

Foley's Irish Pub
 (note: Mona Lisa drinking Guiness!)

That evening we went to a really cool (but slightly expensive) Irish Pub which was decked out with paintings of significant Irish people eg Bono. There was even a picture of Mona Lisa drinking a Guiness!

Musee Mechanique



Lombard St



Day #3 in San Fran was spent mostly up at Fishermen’s wharf & all the surrounding piers. It’s even colder and windier there than in the rest of the city! We would’ve liked to have gone to Alcatraz, but it turns out you have to book about a month in advance! Big bummer. But as we got into Fisherman’s Wharf we discovered a little place called Musee Mechanique and, being that it was free, we went in.  It was like a massive warehouse that had been turned into an old-school arcade. There was all sorts of history about “fun” things, like roller coasters and beaches. It was also packed with pinball machines, fortune-telling machines, photo booths, many other games, and some “naughty” machines for men! It was really really interesting! Then we wondered out and had a look at some of the huge ships that we used in the war. On the wharf you also get a nice view of Alcatraz. While Matt had a look inside a submarine, I wandered down to Lombard St, the crookedest street in the world! Not only is it super duper bendy but it’s also really pretty- amazing views, nice houses, heaps of flowers.

Snow White Academy Award

After a quick lunch (courtesy of the hostel breakfast!) we went along to the Walt Disney Family Museum. When you walk in you can see a bunch of Walt Disney’s awards- some 200+! I particularly liked the Academy Award for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The Museum is massive- we had to rush through the last part to make sure we got back on the final bus. It takes you right from Walt’s grandparents/parents upbringings, to the day he died. It’s pretty cool seeing the original drawings of Mickey, and some of the really old clips.

That evening we went to an improvised comedy show (because, well, why not?!). It was called Act One, Scene Two—a playwrite gives the cast the first scene from a script, and they improvise the rest. It was quite funny, and for a very reasonable price they also gave out free popcorn and charged $1 for freshly baked cookies. Mmmm.

Standard shop in Haight

On our last day in San Fran we went to a Cartoon Museum we had passed earlier in the week. It was kind of interesting, but definitely not great. It was more just a collection of Comic Strips- whereas I was expecting more history about cartoons, or maybe something about the process of putting it together.

Cool house in Haight

After that we went down to the Haight area. This area is known as the hippie area! Common stores there included smoke stores, very colourful clothes stores, crazy accessories, tattoo & piercing parlours, and vegan/vegetarian cafes. It was a really interesting place, very colourful! I wish we could’ve spent more time there, but we had to get back in time for our flight to LAS VEGAS!