After Karen & George moseyed on home last night, I figured I'd kill some time and maybe talk to somebody back in Ireland in realtime come morning there, so I accessed my DVD collection and settled upon A Wind Named Amnesia, which I'd picked up in China and hadn't gotten around to watching yet. So I watched it and it killed an hour and a half, but damn, what a crummy ending. Well anyway although it was good to have that chat when the time came around, it sure was about 3 a.m. when I went asleep. And far too early when I woke up as well.
Anyway, I headed into downtown San Francisco to meet Lara at midday, and when she arrived punctually at the Powell Street cable-car turnaround (which seems to be San Francisco's equivalent of under-the-clock-at-Cleary's) we agreed that the weather was much better than we were expecting so we'd try for the walk across the Golden Gate bridge. She wanted food first, and asked me what kind of stuff I wanted to eat, so it occurred to me that I hadn't yet had pancakes with maple syrup, so we got the bus to a place on Haight Street and I ate a stack of those (it is actually called a stack) and it was great. From there we walked to her house and took her pick-up truck - the same one she'd been driving in '97, now missing its stereo because during the anti-war protests all the cops were keeping an eye on the demonstrators and apparently the rest of the city wallowed in rampant crime, and every car on her road had its stereo stolen - to the Golden Gate bridge.
The sun was shining, the breeze was pleasant, the view was fantastic, and the distance wasn't far enough to be tiring - it was an exceedingly nice excursion. And we made it all the way across this time, and spent maybe twenty minutes just inside the border of Marin County leaning on a wall and looking out at the Bay. Lara seemed to enjoy it too, because it's good to take a few steps back and look at things from afar sometimes, and although it might not seem such when going about day-to-day life there once you're used to it, San Francisco is a very beautiful city in a very beautiful setting, and she talked a bit about how she ended up there and how much she likes it. Probably the best thing is the fact that you can see all the things that are to be seen in the area from there - you can pick out the Presidio, Coit Tower, the Trans-America building, Alcatraz, the Bay Bridge, Oakland, Berkley... it's a very good place to go for a walk.
After that we headed to the Mission district to take a look at some grafitti. There's what seems to be a semi-official project to get some alleys painted up with murals, presumably for the benefit of poor would-be artists. There's no artistic grafitti in Ireland at all, to the best of my knowledge, unless it's that up-one-side-or-the-other stuff in the North, so seeing this was pretty interesting. We went back to her house for a while then and checked out the roof (it's cool) and then I got the BART back east.
Despite being full of pancakes, I couldn't say no when it was declared that instead of doing anything with the ample chicken leftovers from yesterday, we'd be going out for Vietnamese food instead...