SAN FRANCISCO AND BAY AREA

STROLLING AROUND - AUGUST 1996

We profited the opportunity of being again in San Francisco to explore a little bit more of the Bay Area. This time, further to the city itself, we went to the Napa Valley, but took no photos, to Muir Woods, and once more to Sausalito. Then we returned home via New York. Time for Di to have a new pair of in-line skates from Bauer, and to try them in Central Park!

***

MUIR WOODS



"THE FOREST at Muir Woods National Monument is simply superb. The Monument, declared by President Theodore Roosevelt on January 9, 1908, is what remains from the coastal redwood virgin forest that once covered a much larger area"


"THE SEQUOIA is an impressive giant tree. It belongs to the cypress family and can reach astounding proportions. It is usually considered the tallest tree in the world, reaching more than one hundred meters in height, and its diameter can reach seven meters in the base. It's also one of the longest living bodies on earth, as it can attain two thousand years..."

***

SAUSALITO



"(SITTIN'ON) THE DOCK OF THE BAY - I learned from John that Otis Redding started writing the song at a houseboat in Sausalito. It seems that it happened after his performance at the Monterey Pop Festival, and the Dock of the Bay was recorded on 6 and 7 December, 1967 in Memphis, Tennessee. Three days later, the airplane that was carrying him crashed into Lake Monona, near Madison, Wisconsin..."




"CRAZY SHIRT was an important supplier of T-Shirts for the whole family, mainly for the young girl. I still remember one smelling chocolate that actually kept the smell even many times after being washed..."


"SCOMA'S - I think the photo was taken at Scoma's Sausalito"


"THE FOG on the Bay was starting to vanish, as we can see from the hills before the Golden Gate Bridge. Anyhow, not enough to be able to see the Bridge. That's why we did not get the same pictures as the ones taken in 1993..."

***

SAN FRANCISCO


"LEGION OF HONOR was the gift of Alma Spreckels to the city of San Francisco, and is now part of the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco. The building is a three-quarter-scale replica of the Palais de la Légion d’Honneur in Paris, and is dedicated to the California men who lost their lives in France during World War I"


"THE JAPANESE TEA GARDEN, located in the Golden Gate Park, is one of my favourite places in San Francisco"


"BUDDHA - This Buddha is already in one photo of the 1982 trip, as well as some of the other photos that follow..."





"THE PAGODE at the garden provides great viewpoints for the shots"



"TRANSAMERICA - The Transamerica Pyramid is the tallest skyscraper in San Francisco, and was designed (and built between 1969 and 1972) by William Pereira and Associates (I just mention this because Pereira is a typical Portuguese name, actually also the name of the pear tree). The building can be seen from many streets in the city"


"COIT TOWER - Finally the fog over the bridge dissipated a little bit and the Golden Gate Bridge could be seen from the Coit Tower"



"LOMBARD STREET is a must see for any tourist in San Francisco"

***

NEW YORK



"IN-LINE SKATES AND TESTING"

THE CITY BY THE BAY

SAN FRANCISCO - AUGUST 1996

FISHERMEN'S WHARF AREA

I like San Francisco!

It's a city with a human dimension and it looks a bit like Lisbon, the city where I live. Of course, San Francisco was not conquered from the Moors on October 25, 1147, after 428 years of Arabian occupation, and cannot claim over 20 centuries of History. And you cannot hear Fado music there.






But it has several hills, trams and the San Francisco Sound, with Jefferson Airplane, Santana and others!



To make it more alike, we even copied the Golden Gate to build the first Lisbon Bridge over the Tagus River, inaugurated on August 6, 1966. With a main span of 1,013 m (Golden Gate 1280m) and measuring 2,278 m from the south to the north anchorage (Golden Gate has 1,966 m of suspension span including main span and side spans), the Lisbon bridge was the longest in Europe and included the world's longest continuous truss. The caisson foundation at the south tower, embedded in rock 79 m below water, is the world's deepest bridge foundation.

It seems that San Francisco also likes me. The first time we were there in 1982, the temperature reached record highs, just to contradict the joke credited to Mark Twain, but not confirmed: «the coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco». When we got back in 1993, the weather was also perfect. And finally - it’s incredible, more than ten years passed since the last time I was there – in 1996 I can’t complain, though the fog was present on the Bay, for the first time during my visits. The only annoyance was that sometimes we could not see the Golden Gate Bridge from our room at the upper floors of the Mark Hopkins Intercontinental Hotel, Number One, Nob (from the Hindustani word naváb, plural of nayab - viceroy - or nawwab that also generated the Portuguese word nababo) Hill...


"BAY, FOG, SEAGULLS in a sunny blue sky: San Francisco at its best..."



"GHIRARDELLI SQUARE - Come in! The site was home, over a century ago, to the Ghirardelli Family's chocolate factory. It seems that everything started with Domenico Ghirardelli, who was born in Rapallo, Italy, in 1817, and started learning about chocolate at the age of 20. By 1893 his sons purchased a property by the Bay and started to construct the buildings: Chocolate in 1899, Cocoa in 1900, Clock Tower in 1911 and Power House in 1915. Ghirardelli Square was born!"



"RESTAURANTS, SHOPS - Today you still can eat, drink and buy chocolate at Ghirarderlli Square, but there is much more to do..."



"VIEWS - When you're tired of shopping and eating, you can always enjoy the views"


"THE ROCK, a small island located in the middle of the Bay, saw a lighthouse to function there from the summer of 1853 until it was torn down in 1909. It also saw a military fortification since 1850. But it only became world famous when the United States Department of Justice acquired the barracks in 1933, and transformed it in a federal prison in August 1934 - ALCATRAZ! It was used until 1963 and hosted some notable criminals as Al Capone, the same of the «best American sound film», so it was named by Jean-Luc Godard in Cahiers du Cinéma: «Scarface» directed by Howard Hawks in 1932! «Don't call me Scarface; I'm Capone, C, A, P, O, N, E, Capone...» I don't remember whether this is a quote from Hawks' film, but I perfectly memorized the scene, seen probably some thirty years ago..."


"SHIP at the San Francisco Maritime National Park, I think. Today is a maybe day..."


"SKYLINE - San Francisco skyline is unmistakable: the Transamerica building on the left and the Nob Hill skyscrapers in the middle cannot be missed; but the Roy Lichtenstein swatch that goes pretty well with Guida's pull also deserves to be mentioned..."


"PARK - Maybe Fort Mason Gardens..."



"CABLE CAR - The best way to go uphill"


"THE CANNERY, the former site of a Del Monte's Plant, was once the world's largest place in the world where peach was canned; today, is another marketplace, modeled after old European piazzas, featuring shops and restaurants, and even a jazz club"


"FISHERMAN'S WHARF - Said to be San Francisco most popular destination. I remember a seafood meal at Alioto's: crab, shrimps, seafood risotto were perfectly acceptable, though the risotto was not so good as mine «shrimp and aspargus»!"


"WAX MUSEUM -Madame Tussaud in the West Coast..."


"BUS disguised as cable car"




"PIER 39 - More than 110 stores, 13 Bay view restaurants, sea lions, street performers, there is always something for everyone, so says the publicity..."



"SEA LIONS - There are hundreds of sea lions basking in the sun. They rest at the marina near Pier 39 and are a big tourist attraction"

FOR THE RECORD...

FROM APRIL 1990 THROUGH APRIL 1995

The last post ended the travelling period up to December 1994. The next will deal with Eurodisney in April 1995. Meanwhile there were a lot of trips that left no photo tracing, though some of them have been recorded in video. As they could not generate posts, the purpose of this post is to register them pro memoria futura.

In 1990, the air flight trips that left no trace at all - photo or video - include:
Brussels in July, September and October;
Geneva in July and October;
New York in August and December;
Faro twice in August;
Zurich in August;
Basle in October, and
Paris in November and December!

Meanwhile I found a black and white photo of a reception in Washington D.C., in April 1990,


"IMF STAFF and white wine"

and some lousy photos from Brussels, in June 1990, including the only one with the Manneken Pis. See:


"GRAND PLACE - La Chaloupe d'or, where many filet americain sandwiches were eaten and many Kwak drunken; anyhow, the fatness effect came only much later..."


"MANNEKEN PIS"


"THEATRE - Some operas and concerts seen, but not many..."

The year 1991 was a curious one. I could not find a single photo of the trips made during this year. There are, however, some video recordings from New York, in April, May and August, as well as from Switzerland in November.
Anyhow, I flew 36 times, accounting to 70172 miles, during that year...
Here is the register of the photo-traceless trips:
Brussels in January, September, twice in October and three times in November: In December 1991, the European Council approved the Maastricht Treaty, which was signed in February 1992!
Paris in February, March, April and September;
New York in March (the first time I flew the Concorde, and the only with Air France - flight AF001), twice in April, May, August, October and November!
Amsterdam in April, and
Zurich, twice in November.

The year 1992 started again with Brussels in January (final details), and the city was repeated in April and November.
In late January, I attended the oddest Conference I've ever been too. I flew through Munich and Salzburg and was driven from there to Waidring. It was supposed to be some kind of a Law Conference on «Corporate Insolvency», organized by Dennis Campbell and the Center for International Legal Studies. It started on a Sunday, and as soon as I arrived to the Salzburg airport the first question from the lady who was taking care of the transfer was: where are your skis? The funny thing was that the Conference sessions started at 7:00 a. m. till 9:15; then, there was a break until 4:30 p.m., when the Conference resumed till 6:00 p.m.! In the meantime, Conference participants went skiing.
I profited the opportunity to visit the area, including Zell-am-See, Kitzbühel (to where the Waidring conferences were moved some years later, with much profit for tourists), and even revisit Innsbruck. There is a short 21' video of this trip, but no photos whatsoever...
The return trip was made through Zurich and Paris, but there are no photos of any of these stops!
Some more photo-traceless trips include:
New York in February, March, first time in April, May, June and December. From the second April trip, I found these photos:


"JAPANESE RESTAURANT - Between February 1990 and April 1992 I had many meals in most of the New York best Japanese restaurants. This was the only photo taken on one of such occasions"


"RECEPTION hosted by Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy at the top floor of One Chase Manhattan Plaza!"

Traceless are also:
Paris in February, March, May and November - Neither photos nor videos;
London in April - Nothing left;
Strasbourg in September - Not even memories, may be some Riesling...

In 1993, further to the trips covered by the posts, there were also these:
Brussels (as always): twice in January, once in February, March, April, May, June, July, first time in September, twice in October, twice in November and three times in December. Ugh...
Paris in January, March, May, June, and November. From the September trip there are some photos, taken from the top of the Triumph Arch. I think it was the first time that I went up there, after 24 years visiting Paris...


"TRIUMPH ARCH Commissioned in 1806 by Napoleon, shortly after his victory at Austerlitz"


"LA DEFENSE - View towards the modern Arch and the skyscrapers of the Defense quarter"


"CHAMPS ELYSÉES"


"SACRÉ COEUR at the distance"


"EIFFEL TOWER"

No photos, no videos from:
Rome in February;
New York in August and September;
London in October;
Geneva in October and December; and
Basle in December.

However, I found some amazing pictures from the Golden Gate Bridge, taken in September. Here are some of them:




"GOLDEN GATE"

Anyhow, 1993 generated many video tapes: in fact, there are, at least, four hours of video recordings of the trip through Brazil - Salvador, Brasília, Belo Horizonte, Congonhas, Ouro Preto, Iguaçu Falls and Rio de Janeiro -, as well as seven hours from the trip to the Canadian Rockies and the US in August/September 1993, and more than one hour of the Chamonix/Mont Blanc/Lausanne/Villars and Geneva trip in October.

The year 1994 has also lots of photo-traceless trips. They started - guess - with:
Brussels twice in January, and then once in February, and March;
and then
Paris in January, June and September;
Ponta Delgada (Azores) in March and twice in December;
London in April;
New York also in April;
Buenos Aires in September; and
Brazil in October/November: Recife, Olinda, Natal, Genipabu, Pitangui, and Salvador!

At least there are video recordings from London in April, Brazil in Fall, Buenos Aires in September, Paris in December - further to the photos, some of which were included in the post Paris, Always Paris -, and, of course, from the trip to Kenya and the Seychelles!

Finally, 1n 1995, before the next post dedicated to Eurodisney in April 1995, there were these photo-traceless trips:
Paris in January and March;
Barcelona in February - more than two hours of video recordings;
Azores - Ponta Delgada twice, Terceira and Pico - in March; and
Brussels in April!

No wonder that by those times I had an average of more than 150 nights a year slept abroad...