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Archive for Jun, 2013

A Morning Stroll from Noe Valley to Mission Dolores

Posted in San Francisco, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on Jun 6, 2013| Leave a Comment »


I have already referred in part to our first full day back in San Francisco (early rising and the trip to the Church and Market branch of Safeway) in the previous two blog articles. With a full month to play with, this was no time for dashing from one tourist attraction to another, but rather to acclimatise ourselves to the neighbourhood.

After breakfast in the apartment, inevitably of granola and sourdough toast, we ventured up the hill on Church Street to 24th Street, the principal retail and dining area of Noe Valley.

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What struck us immediately were the luxuriant flower displays, especially of bougainvillea, draped over shop fronts and garage forecourts alike. Accustomed to visiting in the spring, we had not witnessed their splendour before now.

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Our already full event calendar acquired another entry when we discovered that the Noe Valley Summer Fest was to be held on Saturday 15th of the month, the same day as the first day of the North Beach Festival taking place over that weekend. With the Stern Grove Festival in Golden Gate Park on Sunday, we were going to be busy! Thankfully, the Giants game against the San Diego Padres on the following day was an evening affair.   

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After coffee, served in large bowls, in La Boulange on the intersection of 24th and Sanchez, and a brief reconnaisance of those shops that held our interest, we embarked upon the steep climb up Noe Street to Dolores Park for one of the stellar views across the city.

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Aside from the obvious photo opportunities it affords, Dolores Park is a hugely popular venue for picnics, sunbathing and people watching. And what people watching! There has been a long running feud between members (literally!) of the gay community and city authorities about nude sunbathing, rendered sensitive by the presence of the fun and funky Helen Diller Children’s Playground in its centre.

But the still relatively cool morning meant that the occupants of the park comprised nothing more threatening than a couple of fully-clothed ageing hippies, impossibly cute Shih Poos and workmen (not so cute).

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We made our way courageously (adults are not permitted without being supervised by a child) over the spongy bridge in the middle of the playground towards the majestic Mission Dolores, oldest surviving structure in the city, before branching left to the J Church MUNI Metro tracks that wove alongside the western fringe of the park.

We had a lunch of peanut butter (Janet) and turkey, egg and cheese (me) bagels and iced lattés at the Church Street Café. I am under strict instructions not to post the photos of our respective half-eaten meals, so readers will have to make do with one of your author instead (which some might say was more likely to frighten those of a sensitive disposition).

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Observations and photographs from the afternoon stroll down Castro Street to follow.

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Linguistic Atrocity Perpetrated in Supermarket Horror

Posted in San Francisco, tagged , , , , , , , , on Jun 5, 2013| 6 Comments »


Many readers will be familiar with George Bernard Shaw’s quip that “we really have everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language”. And we can all cite examples of words and expressions that mean different things to, say, a New Yorker and  a resident of Birmingham (that is the city in England, not Alabama).

The problem is compounded by the ugly, boorish impact of business speak (mostly the fault of Americans but, going forward, I will not belabour the point).

A tannoy message this afternoon in the Church and Market branch of Safeway in San Francisco trumped them all:

Guest Attention in the Liquor Display Case

Immediately this raised a number of questions in my mind.

For starters, when did we start calling customers buying their groceries “guests”, unless the poor subject of the announcement was one of the gentlemen of the street that haunt the vicinity, who saw the premises, specifically the “liquor display case”, as a potential resting place for the night – a case of “killing two birds with one stone” if ever I heard one?

And I know everything in America is meant to be bigger, but how large must this “case” be if a “guest” has, deliberately or otherwise, found themselves inhabiting it, unless they have ejected its intended contents first? And that’s not going to happen is it?  

But what if the individual is an unsuspecting shopper of smaller than average stature who has inadvertently got trapped in the case whilst trying to reach the Southern Comfort bottle on the top shelf? Will this not render Safeway liable for huge compensation payouts under equality legislation?

And come to think of it – how many of those words that I have used above, for example “quip”, “tannoy” and “trumped”, would be readily understood by my American friends?

Possibly all.

Or perhaps none.

I just don’t know – unless they tell me of course.

We both trot out our own everyday expressions in conversation with each other without a thought (and why should we?) of whether we are going to be understood. This is more of an issue for my compatriots because we naturally assume that residents of other nations should be conversant with our god-given language.

But in the final analysis I just hope that that poor “guest” – bum, dwarf or whatever he or she might be – has been rescued by now. If not, they’re likely to be approaching severe frostbite.

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Back in the Land of Granola and Sourdough

Posted in San Francisco, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on Jun 4, 2013| Leave a Comment »


After an all too brief week in the area last year, we landed back in the southern San Francisco neighbourhood of Noe Valley yesterday. Well, we didn’t actually land here – that was further south still at San Francisco International Airport, but I’m sure you know what I mean.

After the frustrations of recent flight delays to both San Francisco and Las Vegas, our journey went astonishingly well. But it started ominously as, alone of all flights out of Heathrow that morning, we were delayed by an accident on the M25 motorway which halted the progress of Virgin Atlantic cabin crew. Which begs the question: why was no other airline company affected?

But never mind. We took off fifty minutes late, but with a remarkably short flight time, touched down at San Francisco International Airport fifteen minutes early. The twenty minute wait to collect our luggage afforded us ample time to contemplate, fresh from stories of friends experiencing hours in line at other American airports, the anticipated horrors of actually getting into the country through U.S. Immigration, especially, as there had been significant cuts to staffing in the service in recent months.  

We needn’t have worried. The entire process – waiting in line, one last, frantic check of our customs declaration form, having our photographs and hand prints taken, and explaining what we planned to do whilst in the country – took less than ten minutes!

And the Eurasian guy who saw us was chatty, friendly and intrigued by both our love affair with SF and also the fact that we waited 30 years before getting married, and then doing it in Vegas! I think the story would have been repeated over a beer with his mates later that evening.

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A short taxi ride brought us to our spacious apartment an hour and a half after landing, and we were quaffing Sierra Nevada Pale Ales and Coors Lights in the Valley Tavern on 24th Street less than an hour after that. A typical American sports bar – voluminously stacked shelves behind the bar and lighting provided by around a dozen TV sets all showing the (Indiana) Pacers and (Miami) Heat NBA play-off game. After a shop for essentials at the 24th Street Wholefoods market we settled down for a plate of pasta and bottle of wine, followed by some mellow Jerry Garcia licks on the ipod as we struggled to stay awake (no reflection on Jerry, mind).
It was a little too cool by now to take advantage of our outside deck with views of Bernal Heights to the east and Diamond Heights to the west. Forecast is for bright, largely sunny weather for the duration with temperatures varying between the lower sixties and early eighties.
Despite, as ever, gaining minimal sleep on the plane, I needed only six hours sleep before rising at 4.30am to await the sunrise over Bernal Heights – and sate my craving for peanut butter granola and sourdough toast (though not at the same time). The cloud cover, however, and the fact that the sun was hidden by the hillside anyway, rendered this an uninspiring event. But I’m sure there will be more spectacular mornings to come. 

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Heading Noe where

Posted in San Francisco, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on Jun 2, 2013| 4 Comments »


‘Tis the night before the start of our our tenth – and longest – stay in San Francisco. And the first to be spent in summer in the enchanted city.

We spent a week in the southern neighbourhood of Noe Valley last spring, and whilst much of that time we were elsewhere, we enjoyed its relaxing, civilised atmosphere so much that, when we had to decide where to rent an apartment for four weeks in June this year, we chose it above other likely candidates such as the Mission and the Sunset . This will enable us to acquaint ourselves more with the neighbourhood and adjoining districts as well as providing a good base for visiting other parts of the Bay Area, familiar and previously unexplored alike.

So where is Noe Valley? And what we have let ourselves in for by living there? It sits immediately south of the Castro and east of the Mission in a sunny spot protected from the fog by steep hills on three sides. Its borders are broadly defined as between 20th and 22nd Street to the north, 30th Street to the south, Dolores to the east and Grand View Avenue to the west. Our apartment is on 28th Street between Church and Dolores.

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A look at a map of the greater San Francisco area would suggest that it is relatively remote, and it is undeniably off the tourist trail. But public transit and local roads render it easily accessible to downtown and the South Bay respectively. The J Church MUNI Metro line was our constant companion on our previous trip and will be so again, at least for the first half of our stay before we hire a car for the trip to Tahoe.

Noe Valley is a quiet but cosmopolitan residential neighbourhood with a classy small town feel. Its preponderance of comfortable, even affluent, young families has lead to a change in its nickname from the hippie-inspired “Granola Valley” in the seventies to “Stroller Alley” today. But it also attracts couples and singles of all persuasions, notably gay and lesbian migrants from the Castro. A healthy number of artists and writers complete a sophisticated demographic. The population of approximately 21,000 comprises 70% white, 15% Hispanic and 7% Asian, with the remaining 8% coming from all corners of the globe.

It is blessed with a significant number of classic two storey Victorian and Edwardian homes. Broad streets and brightly coloured exteriors have the writers of guidebooks reaching for words like “cute” and “quaint”. Property prices are inevitably expensive.

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The neighbourhood gets its name from José de Jésus Noé, the last Mexican alcade (Mayor) of Yerba Buena, the original name for San Francisco. He owned the land as part of his Rancho San Miguel but sold it to John Meirs Horner in 1854. Horner laid out many of the wide streets we enjoy today, and the name “Horner’s Addition” is still used for tax purposes by the city assessor’s office.

The main development of what was traditionally a working class neighbourhood came in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, notably after the 1906 Earthquake and Fire. Today, its interest for outsiders lies essentially in the eclectic shopping and dining experience to be found along the stretches of 24th Street from Castro to Church and Diamond to Dolores. Coffee shops, restaurants, one of a kind clothing and gift stores and bookshops abound, along with one of the best farmers’ markets in the city.

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This will be our fourth apartment – the first two were in Hayes Valley and North of the Panhandle (NOPA) – and, as with previous years, our aim is to blend as far as possible into the local community for the duration. With four weeks at our disposal on this occasion, our “live like locals” strategy has more chance of success than in previous years where we have stayed for no more than a fortnight. We are particularly looking forward to hiking up Bernal Heights, Twin Peaks and Buena Vista Park, as well as reacquainting ourselves with the Mission.

But the extended stay still enables us to satisfy our tourist cravings and revisit the usual suspects such as Golden Gate Bridge, the Palace of Fine Arts, Golden Gate Park , Beach Blanket Babylon and Haight Ashbury, and, of course, three pilgrimages to AT & T Park to support the Giants in their (currently faltering~) hunt for back to back World Series titles. Any trip would not be complete without expanding our understanding of the Bay Area, so Berkeley, the Zoo, Castro Theater and the de Young Museum, all places we have criminally neglected until now, are on our list.

Having always , with the exception of our first visit in October, visited in spring, we will be also be able to throw ourselves into four of San Francisco’s celebrated annual events – the Haight Ashbury Street Fair, North Beach Festival, Stern Grove Festival and San Francisco Pride.

Our last two vacations have coincided with Crosby and Nash and Elvis Costello gigs at the Warfield. This year, we move to the waterfront at Pier 27/29 where we have tickets for the concert being given by the Steve Miller Band and the Doobie Brothers at the America’s Cup Pavilion. And finally, a short detour to Tahoe is also scheduled.

I hadn’t actually realised until I wrote this just how busy we are going to be!

San Francisco – your “wandering one” is coming home again.  

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