Today was supposed to be our special „SF Beautification Day“, our mandatory visit to the fancy „Barber Lounge“ in SoMa for a hair shave/beard/mustard trim (P.) and a manicure/pedicure (M.). We've made this appointment a long time ago, but they cancelled on short notice. Pretty disappointing! Have been there for the last four years for services and were really looking forward to it, especially after having been on the road for over three weeks...
As sort of a compensation we got excellent chocolates at a new tiny little chocolate store - Chocolatier Blue, on Market Street – for breakfast and a whole bag to take with us, and bought red (!) Levis Jeans at a sale in the Levis Store for only $ 16 for P. Wished I would have a more common size myself.
The cancellation gave us more time to „re-explore“ the city, mostly by bus today. Not too many tourists take the busses, but ALL take the cable cars, standing in lines at the turntables forever and paying $ 6 per ride. Sometimes they are adventurous and take the historic streetcar on Market Street (F Line), but almost never the busses. And yet they allow to reach more remote neighborhoods as Mission/Noe Valley, Haight-Ashbury or Golden Gate Park.
We covered many miles in different busses today: first to StrEAT Food Park, a „food truck village“ in SoMa, where we grabbed a bite and a Guiness because of St. Patrick’s Day and because of our frustration about the Barber Lounge cancellation.
On to the Mission District, where a gentrification is noticeable, but slow. Phantastic murals are the main attractions here besides the mission (Mission San Francisco de Asís, founded in 1776) and authentic mexican restaurants and markets.
In the afternoon we had a tour in the new SFJAZZ Center in the booming Hayes Valley neighborhood, close to the SF City Hall.It’s the first freestanding facility built for jazz presentation and education in the U.S. Afterwards we took a bus to Haight-Ashbury. The neighborhood was the nucleus of the 1960s hippie movement and still nowadays there are many shops reminiscent of the „flower-power generation“: smoke shops, vintage/2nd hand clothing, asian/tibetan shops, Goodwill Store etc. And, there are still many weird people walking the streets.
Think we have never seen that many street people as today - bums, druggies and other poor creatures of all ages with their whole life in one big backpack or one shopping cart. Seems like the city doesn’t get a grip on dealing with this problem. In Tenderloin - always a problematic neighborhood - numbers even seem to have increased again.
Back to the Financial District for dinner in a french seafood bistro (Plouf) on invitation of the owner. Other than yesterday not too many guests, not too fancy, but good food: calamari with fennel and aioli, mussels/clams and butterfish. We took the bus back to the hotel where we soaked our tired feet and backs in the only bathtub in the hotel, an old clawfoot tub which apparently nobody is using besides us, and had a glass of wine.
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