Colorful Neighborhoods

Not much sun on this Sunday morning, but pretty warm. When we waited for the bus, I took the picture of the historic F-Line street car (running along Market Street) in front of the Ferry Building. Considering our big meal last night, we skipped breakfast and first stop was the UN Plaza with its sunday farmers' market - a more "regular", reasonably priced farmers' market with a lot of asian vendors. The market takes place closeby City Hall (to be seen in the background of the picture), in the vicinity of the Asian Art Museum and the Public Library, both architecturally interesting buildings, which were pivotal to improve the neighborhood. The area is called "Tenderloin" and has always been sort of the Achilles' heel of the city. Matter of fact, we got confirmed today that it's still a sore spot with lots of homeless people laying in entrance ways and on benches. Having been to San Francisco over a dozen of times since the early 1980ies, we watched its constant ups and downs. New in the last years, is the enormous development in SoMa: highrises (condos) coming up like mushrooms.

Mission district - the Latino neighborhood of San Francisco -, our next stop, in contrast, picked up in regard to attractivity, but for some strange reason not many tourists visit here. It's a little further away from downtown, but fully worth the visit, alone for the quantity and quality of murals. In the old days the Mission District was mostly known for "Balmy Alley" (pic), one alley with great murals, but now, as part of a mural project, there are paintings all over the neighborhood now (see pictures at the end of this blog), on fences, fassades, garages etc., concentrated along 24th Street starting at Mission. Besides that, many of the authentic mexican restaurants and marketplaces are still existing and cater for a colorful atmosphere, though a couple of fancier places mix in now (which is probably good) and it's fun to stroll along Mission Street to the famous mission San Francisco de Assis, San Francisco's oldest standing building from 1791.

We've become "religious" today, too: on our way through the neighborhood we already had watched a Palm Sunday parade (pic) with a cross bearer and his following, and then, in the new Mission church we followed the beginning of a catholic service, special because of palm sunday. While its pussy willow what people in Germany get blessed (at least I believe so...) it's real palm leaves here. We visited the old cemetery on the mission grounds, with a statue of "famous" founding father of the missions in California, pater Juniperro Serra, who forcefully had convinced the native Miwok and Ohlone indian tribes about the supremacy of the Catholic church.

After church, we hopped on a bus again criss-crossing through town through Lower Haight, Fillmore (the afroamerican neighborhood) and Western Addition (japanese) to Cow Hollow, one of the "newer", up-and-coming neighborhoods with lots of fitness studios, dog bakeries and spas, and fancy boutiques and cafés. We noticed again, that Americans are very patient when it comes to waiting in line to get a table in a restaurant. We would never ever. In the meantime it had started to rain, but nevertheless we took the bus to the new Golden Gate Bridge Welcome Center: info center, shop, restaurant and an observation platform. Theoretically the place would have offered a gorgeous view towards the famous bridge, formerly only available from the Marin County side, across the bay. But, not much of a view today: it rained out of buckets and visibility was bad. Didn't take any photos.

The rain gave us a little more time to catch up with work in the hotel before we started again by streetcar towards SoMA's south side, to a terrific dinner at 25 Lusk (pic above by Fortune PR), probably the best dining adventure we had on our whole trip! Great atmosphere and highly creative food. We got three different kinds of caviar with blinis and grilled octopus (incredibly tender) as appetizers after an amuse-gueule of tuna tartare, followed by two little courses of rabbit ravioli in broth and a basil sorbet and as entrées we had ordered filet mignon with steak frites and ahi tuna with asparagus. The grand finale was a sampler plate of three different desserts and the whole menu came with a perfect cocktail and wine pairing (and a good looking, eloquent server...). What a wonderful last dinner in San Francisco! Thanks to our long-time friend Tom, whose clients are always top-notch.