Many of you have asked about visiting SF, and while I've tried to be helpful, the NY Times has an article today about visiting SF "Frugal Style" I thought would be more helpful then me. Enjoy.
http://travel2.nytimes.com/2006/08/16/travel/16frugaltraveler.html And because the Times is registration based and some of you are paranoid:
August 16, 2006
The Frugal Traveler
In San Francisco and Almost Home By MATT GROSS
??Do you have any alcohol pads?? asked the woman on Market Street one crisp, sunny San Francisco afternoon last Wednesday. ??I just got stabbed.? She opened her puffy black jacket to show the bloodstain on her white T-shirt, and looked expectantly at me. I shrugged my shoulders; I hadn??t packed any alcohol pads.
??Well then,? she added, ??could you spare some change??
I didn??t have any, at least not yet ?? just a few foreign coins jangling in my pocket ?? and as I crossed the street, smiling at the clever pitch, I could hear her creaky voice ask the next passerby: ??Do you have any alcohol pads? I just got stabbed ...?
So began the Frugal Traveler??s reintegration into American society. Ninety-one days after I took off from Newark Airport, seeking low-budget, high adventure on a trip that took me through 3 continents, 17 languages and approximately 900 varieties of dumplings, I had returned home. Well, not quite home; I was in San Francisco for five final days of affordable fun.
Which did not, on the face of it, promise to be easy. San Francisco is the third most expensive city in the country, where a single restaurant entrée could devour my entire daily food budget. And hotel rooms, when they aren??t sold out, rarely dip below $100 a night. A former girlfriend did invite me to crash at her place, but I wisely declined. For part of this final leg, I was to have a special companion: Jean, the woman who has spent the summer planning our wedding.
For putting up with my extended absence, Jean deserved something better than a flophouse, a youth hostel or a cardboard box on the brick sidewalk (a disturbingly common sight). And after spending hours in dingy Beijing cybercafes, I finally found a suitable hotel on SFTravel.com, a city guide: the Hayes Valley Inn (417 Gough Street; hayesvalleyinn.com), a tidy-looking Victorian with weekday rates as low as $69 (weekends are $84). Sure, it had shared bathrooms, but the inn said this was ??European-style? ?? a codeword, I would tell Jean, for chic.
But no deception was necessary. The Hayes Valley Inn turned out to be as clean, bright, and friendly as I??d hoped, with wrought-iron beds, Wi-Fi and free afternoon tea. Better yet, its mini-neighborhood, Hayes Valley, was a cheerful, happening mix of new and old apartments, restaurants and boutiques, yoga studios and bookstores. Compared to horseback riding through the mountains of Kyrgyzstan, it was as exotic as a highway truck stop. Still, I spent my first morning just relishing the surroundings, trying to hold onto a trip that was nearing its end.
Discombobulated, or maybe just jetlagged, I did what I always do my first day in a new city: I gathered up every local paper, map and pamphlet and found a place to read them, the homey Arlequin cafe. Over a cup of coffee and a buttery Breton cookie, I watched people walk their dogs, chat with neighbors and tell stories that, in their mundane wildness, blew my mind. One woman, done up in a black-and-white houndstooth minidress, lacy black heels and white sunglasses, chirped into her cellphone, ??I??ve gotta remember that I??m not a dude and that I can??t drink that much tequila.? I began to wonder how often I??d missed overhearing such comments in Galicia, Greece or Georgia.
The next day, I visited the Asian Art Museum and SFMoMA (taking advantage of the $49 CityPass, which includes museum tickets as well as a weeklong Muni pass), then wandered the Mission District, where I took in the Spanish-colonial architecture and defunct movie theaters, browsed the cutesy notebooks at Little Otsu (a bookstore on Valencia Street) and recovered from three months of Mexican-food withdrawal (Taqueria San Jose, at 2830 Mission Street, was my savior). In the evening, I walked back up to Union Square for a free jazz concert and ordered a strong martini at the Hotel Monaco??s Grand Cafe ($7.50).
After a second drink, I moseyed out of the Grand Cafe and into a city alive with people and lights. All traces of jet lag and discombobulation suddenly vanished, evaporating from my mind like the morning fog off the hills. I was discovering what one reader meant when he wrote, ??It??s embarrassingly easy to have a good time here.?
It got even easier when Jean arrived. I showed her my favorite new spots in the Mission, then we progressed to the Castro, up through the aptly named Buena Vista Park, and down through the Haight, whose vintage-clothing boutiques captured Jean??s attention. After three months essentially on my own, I wanted to buy her the whole store.
Alas, the Frugal Traveler is on a budget, so I diverted her attention from shopping the next day by bundling her onto a bus to the Alemany Farmers?? Market, a nest of concrete stalls enlivened with bright murals, where we drooled over the luscious Early Girl tomatoes and polymorphous squash. I teased Jean with some of the recipes I had picked up: Turkish bean stews, Georgian cucumber-walnut salads and pulpo a la gallega.
From there we hiked up dusty Bernal Hill for what one reader called ??the greatest panoramic view of the city.? She was right. As we ate juicy peaches from the market and gazed out on the bridges, parks, pastel houses and glistening skyscrapers of San Francisco, I silently thanked my readers for their good advice.
In fact, it was thanks to the exhaustive list of cheap eats that readers posted that we were to able make out like bandits: the grilled pork at Mi Lindo Yucatán was one standout, as was Brothers, a Korean barbecue restaurant where the portions of marinated beef were enormous (bring friends; otherwise you??re paying for leftovers). The local free papers, meanwhile, were great nightlife guides: One postage-stamp ad in the San Francisco Bay Guardian led us to the ??Three Kinds of Stupid? party at Rickshaw Stop back in Hayes Valley (155 Fell Street; 415-861-2011; rickshawstop.com). The cover charge was $8, but well worth the evening of dancing our pants off to French hip-hop, mashed-up Michael Jackson and indie rock at a club so utterly free of pretensions that it had a foosball table on its mezzanine.
As we ate, drank and made merry, however, I was struck with a strange case of reverse culture shock. Everything I saw reminded me of somewhere else I??d recently been. The pastel Victorian houses evoked the gaily painted apartment complexes of Tirana, Albania. The guitarist strumming outside the 24th Street BART station late one night brought back memories of that busker crooning folk tunes in Zadar, Croatia. And Sunday, when we rented a car from Budget ($43.19), drove up to the Russian River Valley to sample wines, and returned along the Pacific Coast Highway, it recalled all those dramatic, sketchy cliffside roads I??d traversed by bus, and I gained a newfound respect for the underpaid, overstressed drivers who, again and again, managed to deliver me to my destinations alive.
But I wondered, as Jules Verne??s narrator asked of Phileas T. Fogg at the end of ??Around the World in 80 Days,? what had I really gained by all this trouble? What had I brought back from this long and weary journey? Blisters? Felt slippers from Kyrgyzstan? A $10 lithograph from Venice?
It??s probably far too early ?? and too ambitious ?? to expect end-of-the-road wisdom from a trip that, at least for me, doesn??t end until I??m sleeping in my own bed. All I know is this: that I??m physically, mentally and emotionally exhausted. But I also don??t want this trip to end ?? ever. (Sorry, Jean!) I??m no longer thinking of New York City as home; to me, it's just another layover.
Next stop: ??Home.????
