Travel Writing | Pant Hoot | Online Travel Magazine

pant hoot travel
Travel writing should be about experience not kickbacks and arse kissing. Bring on diverse perspectives not homogenised sheep opinion. Travel can be good or bad but one thing it should never be is boring. Welcome to Pant Hoot.
Search Archive

Rants, Raves & Occasional Inspiration

Home
Golden Gatecrashing - San Fran 2007 PDF Print E-mail
Written by Seymour Monkey   
Wednesday, 25 April 2007
Image
San Francisco harbour. Sausalito ferry.
Image

THE SEYMOUR MONKEY CHRONICLES:

Flags at half mast. Gun nuts on the rampage in two cities.  Talk shows navel gazing and blame shifting. I arrive in San Fran amazed no one is saying – “Just get rid of the bloody guns guys!”  The Virginia Tech and NASA shootings - Sound bite terror de jour.

I need sleep. Fingerprinted and photographed at customs, bags under the eyes and plane hair - Not one for the album. In line for two hours.  Japan Airlines flight Itchie Nee San (123) pips us to the finish line and we wait through laborious interpreter sessions as the Yokahama Senior Citizens Club struggle to complete the immigration forms.  

The customs guy looks like Shaquille O’Neal’s sumo brother and I recall the US entry horror stories so gleefully told to me in the days leading up to my departure. The big mischievous grins and mimed rubber glove thwack – That’s all I need more delay. I hope they don’t expect a cuddle afterwards. 


The Qantas tardis has delivered me precisely 15 minutes prior to my departure time from Melbourne. The courtesy bus speeds along the freeway past Candlestick Park, Monster Stadium, AT&T Park or whatever the Hell they are calling it these days.  The road signage can’t seem to make up its mind with all variations covered at various exits along the way. I hope to catch a Giants baseball game if I can work out how to get there and back and the fixtures allow, either that or I could just take some beers to the park and watch the grass grow, a mate tells me it is a similar experience.

ImageThe advance party have been here a week already. Preparing for the conference. I am lucky and arrive after the initial teething problems have been sorted.  It seems the American love of spin and euphemism to gloss over unpleasantness does not end at the well worn chestnuts like Surgical Strike and Friendly Fire delivered straight faced by the Barbie and Ken dolls on the cable news networks.  This irony extends to the naming of parts of the city with the Civic Center, where the Holiday Inn Hotel was located, obviously being code for bum armies, junkies and crack whores mobbing around like zombies in a George A Romero horror film.  They moved hotels. I was spared.

At times here you feel like you are on safari in some game park filled with Americans.  The extremes are obvious and in your face.  Opulence and poverty. The sacred and the profane. You can’t say God or Hell on TV but the Virgin Mega Store has a hardcore porn section.

There is homelessness in some degree in every city but in San Fran every corner has a beggar.  Some well spoken and polite, some filthy and drug fucked - Some obviously scamming. It almost seems that bumming in the city of the Golden Gate is sponsored by Starbucks with every dirty hand being extended from the shadows rattling a coffee cup. Vente size for the humble, Grande for the ambitious.  As soon as you give in and lob a note or a few coins in the cup then the hordes descend on you from nowhere like seagulls sniffing out a thrown chip on the beach. You harden your heart quickly.

Out on the town. Indian food and beers. Pop in to Lefty O’Tooles a bar and restaurant named after a team mate of Babe Ruth. Baseball and other historical memorabilia cover the walls. A cheesy pianist in a Hawaiian shirt sings Perry Como standards. We beat a hasty retreat.  Further up Geary we find a cool bar called Swig for Millers. Damo warns me that this is about as far to the left or our hotel that any of us should go on our own - Sounds overly dramatic but the chorus of agreement from the others implies that downtown Baghdad awaits a block or so away. So we drink on fumbling through notes in the dim lighting. Cursing the sameness of the currency. Immersing ourselves in the wildlife.

Sin Francisco Part 2 >>>

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
Last Updated ( Monday, 08 June 2009 )
 
Next >
[ Back ]