… and a windbreaker, because it’s frickin’ cold. That wind blasts in right off the coast. Still, it’s mostly sunny and summerish right now. The streets are steep, with rolling cable cars bulging with tourists and the bell being pulled and the clackety-clack on the tracks. Everyone vanishes over the hill to Fisherman’s Wharf, where clam chowder and boat trips and sea lions on the dock await.

If you’re going to San Francisco
You’re gonna meet some gentle people there…

… and some crack addicts, if you linger around Union Square. Apparently homeless drug addicts are more prevalent here than anywhere else in the States. The SF Chronicle devotes an entire section of their site to it, with sensitive, illuminating articles.

Meanwhile. suits pace in the Financial District, shoppers bustle through markets selling herbs and teas in Chinatown, hipsters sip espresso and ponder life in North Beach, while tourists scurry to galleries in Soma and face the wind heading over the Golden Gate Bridge.

For those who come to San Francisco
Summertime will be a love-in there…

Really? I’ll have to look for the love-in. It wasn’t on my walk today.

All across the nation such a strange vibration…

The two major earthquakes here were in 1906 (followed by a gigantic fire) and 1989. Haven’t felt a tremor yet…

In The Art of Travel, philosopher and writer Alain de Botton notes that before we visit a place our expectations are unrealistically molded by images of it we’ve already seen in another context, either on TV, on postcards, in films etc. My impressions of San Francisco were thus founded on the following:

A giant, green, angry, scantily-clad man running up steep hills (Incredible Hulk). A deadbeat dad masquerading as a Scottish nanny (Mrs Doubtfire). A teenage girl from Russian Hill being rescued from the ordinary by her grandmother, who informs her that she is a princess of a small European country (The Princess Diaries). Privileged kids living by Alamo Square in a picture-perfect Victorian house (Full House). A lost soul leaping off the pier next to the Golden Gate Bridge (Vertigo).

Vertigo aside, I’m cringing at that list of ‘entertainment’.

What about you? Have you visited San Francisco? What were your impressions?