Day sixty-one

I wanted to add about my last post, on the steamboat. The narrator for our trip refused to say "Katrina". It was always "the hurricane three summers ago" or "the last big hurricane" or "the August 2005 hurricane". Even the other American tourists didn't understand why she just would not say it's name.

One thing that has been totally consistent on this holiday, has been the delays. Whether it be plane, train or bus, I can't recall any one trip ever being on time. It almost feels like I should build the delay into my bookings, but that would probably make things on time and screw everything right up.

Ie my plane into San Francisco was delayed nearly two hours. But no matter, I'm here now :). My first full day in SF was good and bad; there was lots of walking, but I ended up with a headache halfway through the day which didn't help. I went right down to the Embarcadero, along the bay to Fisherman's Wharf, then inland to Coit tower before heading back to town. Followed by heading out the other direction through some more neighbourhoods and ending up back at the hotel.

Friday I had a bunch of small things I needed to sort out (ie my watch battery had died the day before), and I had a ticket to a stand up comic night in town which ended up being fairly good. Only "fairly" because a lot of the jokes referenced people and places I had no knowledge of, so a fair few jokes went right over my head...

Friday afternoon on the last Friday of every month in San Francisco there is a pretty neat phenomenon. It's called Bikes Take Over The City or something [edit: it's called "Critical Mass"]. There's no story behind it as such, just every last Friday of the month bike riders get together and ride through town on no pre-determined path, they take over a whole lane, don't stop or slow down to let cars or pedestrians through, and even have police escorts for this now. Out of sheer luck I caught this past Friday's ride, and it went on forever. There must have been over 500 bike riders easily, potentially a thousand. It was surprisingly impressive to watch pass by.

Saturday I went with a few friends to this waterpark an hour out of town called Waterworld California. That was a pretty awesome day, in particular the funnel ride and the horseshoe shaped ride were a scream; literally so. I think all four of us ended up with SOME kind of injury though. Mine was probably the lamest, seeing I managed to stub my toe pretty badly on the most serene attraction there; the "Lazy River".

We had this conversation about food. I had brought some bikkies to snack on. And so of course I called them biscuits. But according to Americans they are cookies, because "biscuit" is already taken. But their biscuit seems to basically be our scone, except they put chicken, or gravy, or other stuff in between and eat it like a sandwich. Gross. They then asked what we call their scones if our scones are their biscuits, and our biscuits are their cookies (just try and follow THAT!) and, well, I had no answer because I have no idea what Americans classify as a scone.

Sunday in the city was the San Francisco Pride parade, and this was a massive event for the city. Something in the order of a million people go to the parade. It goes for like three hours! Oddly enough, it starts at 10.30am on a Sunday morning. There was a definite wedding theme to the whole parade.

Sunday night I had another concert to go to; or more like music festival. It started with the Puppini Sisters, who are this trio who do modern songs in a 50s style, then they had Andy Bell from Erasure, followed by comedian Wanda Sykes. After that was the B-52’s (the whole reason I went) and Cyndi Lauper finished it off, all up it went for about five hours and was mucho fun!

It was certainly quite the exhausting weekend though, and so today (Monday), my last day in San Francisco, was very quiet. I slept in, headed into town to Borders to see if there were any magazines I wanted to take on the bus to Texas with me (nope). I did get a book though; Mister B Gone by Clive Barker - looks interesting :). Might not read too much of it on the bus though, I wanted to save that for reading by the pool/beach in Mexico.

One major gripe I had about California is the showers. I remember this problem from last time I was here and couldn’t remember how to fix it. That time I caved and went and asked the hotel staff, but this time I was determined to work it out. It took me a frustrating ten minutes or so of playing around, and I almost did give up.

So here is a picture of the bottom of the shower/bath combination. There’s the mixer tap, the bath spout, and a little stick-thing. At the top of all this is the shower head (not pictured :P). So you go to have a shower, and turn the mixer tap on. Water starts pouring out of the bath spout. How do get the water to come out of the shower head instead? Think about it for a little while...



You reckon “flip that little switch”? Yeah, that’s what I thought. Turns out thats to stop water going down the drain. Ie to fill up the bath. Wrong answer!! Thing about it some more...

Give up yet? Seriously, the answer is so completely unintuitive. You see the very bottom of the bath spout? Turns out you can pull down on that, and while you’re pulling down on that you turn the mixer tap on, and the bath spout kind of sticks where it is, and redirects water up to the shower head. Voila! Instant shower. The whole bath spout doesn’t move, just the round bit where the actual water comes out of. Completely ridiculous.