San Francisco

I got in to San Francisco a couple of nights ago. It seems a really clean and vibrant city. The rolling hills mean that walking about gets you fit and you get some great views of the rest of the city as you amble around. I am staying in a hostel (commune) in Little Italy, right near Chinatown. It's not the nicest part of the city, but it certainly has some character. On my first night here I didn't do all that much took a walk around the area, saw some of Chinatown. The hostel puts on free food 3 nights a week so I got in on that. I met a guy from Philly who had a hire car (Pedro) so the next day we took a drive across the Golden Gate Bridge past Sausalito, around some winding roads out to the Muir woods. Having been deprived of Giant Sequoia trees in Yosemite (cancelled snowshoe hikes), Pedro and I took a stroll amongst the Redwoods down here. They were incredible. I find it really hard to judge the height of these things, but they must have been 100 metres plus and were a few metres around. They had a cross section of one of the trees which was an average size and it was over about 1000 years old. It's incredible that these behemoths grow from seeds the size of sunflower seeds. On the way back into the city We stopped at a viewpoint for the bridge and looked out over the city. It's really hard to get a sense of scale in the pictures, because they never really do justice to how massive this bridge is. It's very impressive.

Yesterday I met up with my girlfriend Rebecca's Mum and went to her wedding. Yep, that sounds as crazy as it was. They just happened to elope to the one city in the world I happened to be in and I stepped in as witness. It was a really lovely ceremony in the San Francisco city hall and they seemed very happy, so congratulations to Joyce and Phil. Today I pretty much walked across the whole of San Francisco. I walked all the way down Market Street through the financial district, through some of the not so nice areas and down to Haight Ashbury. This part of the city is famous because the hippies moved in back in the 60s and never really left. Lots of psychedelic colours and scruffy looking oiks. In fact I got offered drugs by about 10 different people. I then carried on walking down to the Golden Gate park and into the Japanese Garden, which was nice, if a little small. I then wandered around the botanic gardens, where I met another guy from Eritrea (I'd never heard of this place and now every other person I meet is from there!) who was just sitting on a bench feeding monkey nuts to squirrels. They were so funny, they'd come and take them right out of your hand. One even let me stroke him. I'm all booked up for my Alcatraz tour tomorrow morning which I'm pretty excited about. Just think, I get to go to where they filmed "The Rock".