Good morning! Here I am in bed, just waking up. I was so full from last night's dinner...
Here's a picture of me with and Jennie's younger brother Jeff at dinner. We're at a Vietnamese restaurant where we all had Phở.
It's is served as a bowl of white rice noodles in clear beef broth, with thin cuts of beef (steak, fatty flank, lean flank, brisket). Variations featuring tendon, tripe, meatballs, chicken leg, chicken breast, or other chicken organs (heart, liver, etc.) are also available.
I'm just waking up, but I'm ready to go to work with my hosts, Jennie and Max. While everyone was getting ready for a busy day, I got online and started reading about the City of San Francisco. The City and County of San Francisco is the 4th most populous city in California and the 14th most populous city in the United States, with a 2006 estimated population of 744,041. One of the most densely populated major cities in the U.S., San Francisco is part of the much larger San Francisco Bay Area, which is home to approximately 7.2 million people. The city is located on the tip of the San Francisco Peninsula, with the Pacific Ocean to the west, the San Francisco Bay to the east, and the Golden Gate to the north.
The City of San Francisco is divided into a number of different districts. Each district has a number of different neighborhoods. Each neighborhood has an architecture, history, personality and life of its own. Jennie and Max live in District 1 - the Richmond District - specifically the Outer Richmond District. The San Francisco Chronicle's neighborhood guide has this to say about the Outer Richmond:
"Before 1900, most of the San Franciscans in the Richmond District were the deceased inhabitants of the municipal and Chinese cemeteries. It's taken over a hundred years for the Outer Richmond to blossom from a giant vacant lot into prime (albeit foggy) real estate. At the turn of the 20th century, it was little but sand dunes and potato fields and was dubbed "The Outer Lands" and "The Great Sand Waste" until streetcars opened it up to the public. Early in its history, those eager to sell homes and property in other parts of the Richmond tried to rechristen it "Park Presidio," but the original moniker stuck fast, though the origins of "Richmond" are uncertain. The most common explanation is that an early settler saw in its stark, gently hilly landscape echoes of his old home in Richmond, New South Wales, Australia.
While the Inner Richmond is a restaurant haven and one of the city's more difficult parking areas, the Outer Richmond retains a neighborhood feel along its main shopping streets. The many waves of immigrants who have settled have put their stamp on it; whole blocks along Geary Boulevard hum with Russian and Cantonese speakers, and you can find Mexican, Russian, French and Italian restaurants with ease, not to mention a plethora of establishments serving food from every corner of Asia."
After breakfast, we took a quick walk around the block to catch a ride on the bus - gotta love public transportation! Founded in 1912 , the San Francisco Municipal Railway (Muni), is one of America’s oldest public transit agencies and today carries over 200 million riders per year. Included in their transportation fleet are Trolley buses (also known as "trolley coaches" or "trackless trolleys") - which are rubber-tired vehicles with motors powered by electricity from overhead wires. Most of the busses operating in the city. San Francisco has the largest trolley-bus fleet of any transit agency in the U.S. and Canada. San Francisco's trolley buses (as well as its streetcars and the cable motors for the cable cars) are almost entirely pollution-free, since their electric power comes from the city's hydroelectric Hetch Hetchy Water & Power Project. For many people, trolley buses' quieter, cleaner service outweighs the unsightliness of the overhead wires necessary for their operation.
Above you can see a bus with the long poles running from the back to the power lines above. Now, during rush hour the Muni runs regular busses - designated as "Express Lines" - which typically have only a few stops at the end of each route. These busses let the broader range of travelers get where they need to faster during mornings and evenings. That's the kind of bus we took to where Jennie and Max work.
Here's Max and me waiting at the bus stop..
...and here's a view from inside the bus. Pretty clean, and it doesn't get really crowded until a few stops later - so we were pretty much guaranteed a seat.
Jennie and Max both work in the District 3, in what's called "The Financial District." Since it's home to the City's largest concentration of corporate headquarters, law firms, banks, savings and loans and other financial institutions - the Financial District is the main central business district. The area is marked by the cluster of high-rise towers - two of which are home to the companies that Max and Jennie work for. In fact, they happen to work in some of the tallest buildings in the City (by height).
Max works for Grant Thornton LLP, the U.S. member firm of Grant Thornton International, one of the six global accounting, tax and business advisory organizations. Their San Francisco office is located at One California St. - a picture of which is above. The building is 28th tallest in the city.
Across the street, Jennie works at Booz Allen Hamilton, a global strategy and technology consulting firm,with more than 19,000 employees on six continents, providing services to the world's leading corporations, government and other public agencies, emerging growth companies, and institutions. Above you'll see the building that their San Francisco office is in at 101 California St. - which is tied with another building as the 5th tallest.
We all got together for lunch. Above you'll see some large sitting steps outside of Jennie's building, which I thought were pretty interesting. A lot of times people will sit on them to have lunch or just get out of their office building to enjoy the weather. Today it was about 52 degrees - which is great compared to the 32 degrees it is back home!
We went to Taqueria Pancho-Villa for lunch. They're not a chain, like Chipotle, but an individual store that serves great Tacos and Burritos.
Here you'll see the staff working on everyone's orders. I had the shrimp tacos and they were delicious!
Our lunch spot was near the Ferry Building. The Ferry Building is a terminal for ferries that travel across the San Francisco Bay and a shopping center located on The Embarcadero. Until the completion of the Bay Bridge and Golden Gate Bridge in the 1930s it was the second busiest transit terminal in the world, second only to London's Charing Cross Station. It served as the embarkation point for commuters to San Francisco from the East Bay who rode the ferry fleets of the Southern Pacific and the Key System. A loop track existed in front of the building for streetcars. A large pedestrian bridge also spanned the Embarcadero in front of the Ferry building until the late 1940s.
After the bridges opened, and the new Key System trains began running to the East Bay from the Transbay Terminal in 1939, passenger ferry use fell sharply. In the second half of the twentieth century, although the Ferry Building and its clock tower remained a beloved part of the San Francisco skyline, the building interior declined. Over the years, the ticketing counters and waiting room areas were partitioned into office space. The formerly grand public space was reduced to a narrow and dark corridor, through which travelers passed enroute to the piers. Passengers had to wait on outdoor benches, and the ticketing booths were moved to an area on the pier.
In 2004, the building reopened as an upscale gourmet marketplace, office building, and re-dedicated ferry terminal. The restoration project spanned several years, with an emphasis on recreating the building's 1898 ambience.
From where we ate lunch you can also see the San Francisco - Oakland Bay Bridge (not to be confused with the Golden Gate). It's a toll bridge which spans San Francisco Bay and links the California cities of Oakland and San Francisco in the United States, as part of Interstate 80. It is one of the busiest bridges in the United States, carrying approximately 280,000 vehicles per day. The bridge was recently in the news because a container ship collided with the tower base - resulting in a 58,000 gallon fuel oil spill. You can read about it at the San Francisco Chronicle - which is providing full coverage.
On the way back to the offices, Jennie and I jumped onto one of the historic cable cars to pose for some pictures. The cable cars were invented here in 1873 and dominated the city’s transit scene for more than 30 years. There is no engine or motor on a cable car. The power source is centralized in the cable car barn and powerhouse at Washington and Mason Streets - also home to the Cable Car Museum. There, powerful electric motors - originally a stationary steam-powered engine - drive giant winding wheels that pull cables through a trench beneath the street, centered under the cable car tracks. That cable is what’s in that slot between the tracks.
The driver of a cable car is known as the gripman.
This is a highly skilled job, requiring the gripman to smoothly operate the grip lever to grip and release the cable, release the grip at certain points in order to coast the vehicle over crossing cables or places where the cable does not follow the tracks, and to anticipate well in advance possible collisions with other traffic that may not understand the limitations of a cable car.
I also snapped this picture of a building which I though looked really cool with the light shining down the way it was. That's one of the things Max says he likes best about the city - everywhere you look you can find something beautiful to admire.
I agree!
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