Action shot of quality parenting on Russian Hill.

These Californians are a friendly people. Also, very prone to giving out advice and commentary. Never before have we been approached in a public place by some random stranger who tells us that (a) they approve of something we’re doing, and (b) here’s what else we should do to be even better, but here it seems to happen all the time.

The first one was Andy on Russian Hill.  We were sitting in a tiny park at the top of the hill, eating our bits-and-pieces lunch, and he was out walking his dog. He opened by telling us that he could tell we were very good parents.  We waited warily for his follow-up, wondering if this was meant for sarcasm (since shortly before the girls had been fighting bitterly over salt and pepper packets for their hard-boiled eggs). Luckily he seemed to have missed that part and was instead impressed that none of the girls were wearing headphones or looking at screens.  (Nadia was listening to this speech and clearly barely restraining herself from sighing and rolling her eyes.)  He went on to tell us that his grandmother always said that you should do one good thing for someone every day – that’s how you earn your place on the planet – and that we should now pass on the favor to someone else.  We have been keeping our eyes peeled for screen-less children to compliment.

This is advice I would definitely take if I were fool enough to drive here.

The next day it was a woman on the bus, who later identified herself as a teacher. She asked how old the girls were, and then immediately jumped to asking me if I had been able to stay home with the kids at all.  It wasn’t clear what she would think of Bob staying home instead, but fortunately she approved.  It’s a good thing, because the kids’ behavior on the buses was not always the best, and I imagine she would have blamed daycare.

Nadia saw this piece of advice on the street in Chinatown and thought it said, “No dumpling”. I can’t quite figure out the crab thing.

Today at the pool we met a man who was testing the chlorine level.  Maybe he’d heard us yelling at the kids or something, because he launched right onto an impassioned speech on how much we would miss them when they were gone, no matter how much we might look forward to that day.  He and his wife had thought they’d be happy, but after dropping their youngest off at college they’d had to pull over to the side of the road to cry. Of course, now they’re living the life, traveling around to various state and national parks as the whim takes them, and volunteering in exchange for room and board. He very much wanted us to recommend this strategy to our parents, and went so far as to come back later with the website address for signing up.  (“Once you’re in, you’re in for life!” he told us gleefully. Clearly he is not acquainted with any of our parents.)

Even though I’m making fun of them a little, we did enjoy talking to all of them, and do like being in a place where people don’t always keep a polite distance. We have encountered many examples of kindness here – various strangers helping us without being asked when they saw us squinting perplexedly at bus maps; the cable car operator who beckoned the kids out of the interior of a packed cable car to instead stand outside with him in the back; the woman at the café who pulled kids onto her lap so as to offer us chairs; the couple who were talking to every person on the beach, trying to find the owner of some car keys they’d found on the ground; the many patient souls who have smiled rather than glared when a bunch of noisy children invaded their quiet park/bus/restaurant/street corner. It seems like a happy place, and we can easily see why.

Grip man’s view from the cable car caboose

…the life out of you, that is.

Sand art at the Exploratorium

We’re not really big museum people, generally. When I was doing a whirlwind tour of Europe during college with my friends Julie and Nancy, we visited a lot of museums.  I don’t know why, really – we didn’t enjoy them all that much.  In fact, we eventually devised a system where we rated various museums on their life-suck potential – as in, how fast they would just suck the life right out of you, leaving you staggering weakly around, with barely enough energy to get to the exit.  And yet the next day there we would go again, marching glumly off to see 15^th-century Hungarian equine portraiture or something.

(Sometimes it wasn’t our fault. One time we signed up for a day-long tour of microbreweries in Belgium.  After we arrived and got on the bus, the tour guide cheerfully announced that they hadn’t had enough people sign up for any of the three tours they were offering – the aforementioned brewery tour, a tour of WWI historical sites, and some kind of medieval art tour – so they were consolidating them all and taking the whole group to a little of each.  I can’t imagine anyone was very happy with this arrangement, but probably no one less so than us.  I believe this was the beginning of our collective hatred of those Madonna-and-child paintings with the gold halos around Mary’s head.)

Very cool wall at the Exploratorium. Every square was created with the method it lists.

Luckily I’ve gotten past the idea that I must go to all these museums just because you’re supposed to.  One of the benefits of going to Italy with the kids last year was that we felt no guilt about skipping the whole lot of them.  Instead of queueing up to see David along with 20,000 other tourists, we were happily wandering around the city, looking at fountains and street performers and eating gelato.

There are exceptions, of course. I could have spent all day wandering around the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, for example.  And there are plenty of quirky little museums out there that are entertaining simply because of their existence.  My friend Ken and I once spent a happy afternoon perusing the many fascinating exhibits of the Museum of Medical Oddities in Washington, DC, which features such items as a giant hairball surgically removed from someone’s stomach.  There’s nothing life-sucking about that. And of course, we’ll never forget the St. Louis City Museum, which is still my kids’ favorite place in the world. But overall I feel like museums have too much stuff and too many people, leading to sensory overload followed inevitably by life-suck.

Sketchpad mirror at the Exploratorium

So, we’re particular about our museums.  And the ones we visited here in San Francisco were all winners.

Zoe has already written about the Exploratorium.  There was much that was cool about this place, but the thing I liked best was that you could really tell that the exhibits were put together by various scientists tinkering away in the central lab area with blow torches and hammers.  They just had that kind of pieced-together-with-what-was-on-hand feel to them. The exhibits spanned a wide range of topics – from physics and chemistry to a big area about sociological research on sharing – but all were really well put together in a way that made you want to read the walls of text that accompanied each exhibit. Also, they had a drinking fountain coming out of a toilet.  Zoe and Lanie tried it; the rest of us passed.

Inside the rainforest dome at the California Academy of Sciences

The California Academy of Sciences was more of a natural history museum and aquarium.  We had about three hours here and wished it were longer – they had to kick us out at closing time.  Among the exhibits were a room that you could go into to see what an earthquake felt like, and an albino alligator.

Claude the albino alligator

Finally, a hidden gem only a few blocks from our apartment – the Cable Car Museum.  I have to admit that we only went to this place because it was close and it was free.  However, it turned out to be so much cooler than I would have expected.  “Museum” was a misnomer, really.  Although it did have various exhibits on the history and mechanics of cable cars, the real highlight is that the building houses the powerhouse of all four San Francisco cable car lines.  The huge open center of the room was all the exposed machinery that keeps the cable cars running along under the streets.  You could watch the enormous wheels turning and see the cables disappearing in various directions as the four lines dispersed across the city under the floor.  It was loud and a little smelly and fascinating – and we were still full of energy when we headed, a little reluctantly, back out the door.

At the farmers’ market

Eating on vacation is a tricky thing.  It can put a sizable hole in the budget, which is not helped by the fact that Zoe, and increasingly often, Nadia, have outgrown the children’s menu.  This is one area where our usual efforts to widen our children’s culinary horizons clash with our innate cheapness.  We sigh inwardly as we tell Zoe to go ahead and get the $17 fish and chips (which she will completely demolish) rather than the $6 chicken fingers.

Hard-boiled egg with a view

On the other hand, food and drink are such important parts of travel.  We would no more skip San Francisco’s famous cuisines than we would skip the cable cars and the Golden Gate Bridge.  So we try to strike a balance.  Bob packed his suitcase with some homemade goodies to sustain us — granola bars, beef jerky, pumpkin seeds, almonds.  We’ve rented an apartment with a kitchen, and procured some basic staples for breakfasts and snacks.  Before we set off in the morning, we load up the backpacks with provisions, and have mostly been enjoying picnic lunches. Our old friend peanut butter has made an appearance once or twice.

The Big Cheese, partially vanquished

Our first day out we stopped at the famous market in the Ferry Building for lunch supplies.  We ended up with a large hunk of aged goat cheese, which had a taste and texture somewhat similar to Parmesan.  Little did we know that attempting to cut the thing would be the ongoing bane of our existence.  Even normal metal knives (never mind the plastic we initially attempted) cower and bend when they encounter this monster.  On the plus side, this has proven to really make the cheese last; after cutting off a relatively small amount we have to retire in exhaustion.  (The other day Nadia actually managed to hack a bite-sized piece off for herself, and was wildly furious when Zoe then bumped into her and caused her to drop it as she was slowly savoring it.)  We may be bringing home the remainder as a paperweight.

Zoe’s teddy bear, pre-baking

Remains of bear after dinner

Another item we have been enjoying in great abundance is sourdough bread.  On our second day here, the girls did a workshop at the famous Boudin bakery in Fishermen’s Wharf.  They created their own creatures out of dough, and then got to take home a sizable creature-shaped loaf.  We’ve been eating this bread ever since, and still haven’t cracked into Nadia’s turtle.  Luckily it goes well with infinitesimal slivers of aged goat cheese.  (Also, we found that if you want to use up some bread by making french toast, and you don’t have any vanilla or cinnamon or sugar, a packet of hot chocolate mix that a previous tenant left behind does the trick quite nicely.)

Zoe in giant garlic hat

Anyway, going low-budget for a couple of meals a day frees us up to live it up for the last one.  We enjoyed a fabulous Italian feast at the legendary Stinking Rose, a garlic-themed restaurant in North Beach, the city’s Little Italy (Zoe’s choice for her 13th birthday).  We had an adventurous dinner in Chinatown, where we just told the waitress to bring us a bunch of different dishes (with the stipulation, for certain children’s benefit, of no seafood or spicy food).  We had seafood (well, 3/5 of us did) across the street from the Pacific ocean.

For Mr. Sadana

We had gelato and pastry in North Beach, hot fudge sundaes at Ghirardelli’s, cappuccino in the Haight, and wine and microbrews everywhere.  (We did enjoy one budget meal, at In-N-Out Burger.  Nadia’s teacher is from California and he gave her strict instructions to eat there.  Nadia was skeptical as she is not a big hamburger fan, but was won over immediately.  Bob and I couldn’t believe we were getting away with $20 for lunch for 5 people, and no agonizing over the order — cheeseburgers and fries, the only options.)

One of our favorite meals was at a little place right down the road from us, the Nob Hill Cafe.  We’d had a long, chilly day of biking and buses, and were relieved to finally arrive.  However, despite its being a Sunday night, the place was packed.  Bob and the girls ran home for sweatshirts while I kept our place in line (which, given the size of the place, was outside).  In the end, the “25 minute” wait turned into more like 40, but was made more bearable by the fact that we could sit at a little sidewalk cafe table and drink wine while we waited.  We chatted with the equally cold and hungry family sitting next to us (people are very nice and friendly here) and the time went by pleasantly.  The array of breads, pastas, and pizzas that we ordered to share was well worth the wait, although I think the girls were a bit disappointed with their caramel flan dessert (which they said tasted like alcohol).

Tomorrow we set off down the coast, and already have our next target in our sights — a little taqueria in Santa Cruz that our friends have been raving about ever since they were here a few years ago.  After that it’s down to Big Sur, where culinary options are presumably more limited, so we’d better live it up while we can.

I’ve been in San Francisco this week, at a conference for work.  I love this city.  (Even apart from the fact that as I was arriving amidst the sunshine and palm trees, the news was showing a cheerful-looking reporter (probably drunk) standing in the snow in Bangor, ME, talking about 12 more inches in the forecast.)

Here’s the coolest thing about the conference: recognize this guy??  Yes, he’s gotten a lot older, but is still hilarious.

John Cleese! John Cleese!

Much of his lecture was about the value of making mistakes, which came in handy when I got lost on my morning run the following day.  I looked at my map before I left, and thought I would run along the water for a while then take a left and cut back to my hotel.  Unfortunately, the map failed to show a several-story-high cliff in the middle of this route, and sadly I had forgotten to pack my grappling hook.  I tried to get around the hill, past the hill, and eventually even resigned myself to going over the hill.  I found one of those cool San Francisco staircases winding upward into hidden gardens, past beautiful homes looking out over the Bay.  It was beautiful.

However, all that winding meant I totally lost my sense of direction, and the series of turns that I needed to make to get off the hill completed the process.  I was desperate enough to start attempting to navigate by the sun, and found myself taking quite a tour of the city — Telegraph Hill, North Beach, Chinatown. (Know how many joggers are in Chinatown at 7 am?  The same as the number of non-Chinese people — one.  I did not exactly blend in.)  Eventually I spied Macy’s in the distance and, better yet, managed to find my way down to it and the
n on to Union Square.  I don’t know how many miles I ended up running, but my fitbit buzzed for my 10,000 steps before I got back.

Late Wednesday night, after the conference ended, the rest of the family arrived.  We’re ensconced in a cozy flat in Nob Hill and looking forward to five more days in the city.  I’m glad to be done with the conference, except for having to put away the corporate credit card.