CHINATOWN
I arrived in San Francisco with no idea what I was going to do now that I was here. I first bought a bus ticket to Santa Cruz on Greyhound for Saturday and then signed up for Veloe luggage storage which turned out to be quite a ways away in the Tenderloin area where unkempt people were sleeping on the sidewalk and wandering the street. Veloe it turns out, like Airbnb, makes you pay for luggage storage in advance before telling you the location of the storage facility, in my case a small, local grocery store, to keep you from making a private deal and not paying Veloe fees. The guy at the grocery store said that Veloe makes most of the money. When I asked him where to eat breakfast he told me that I was in the worst section of town, the Tenderloin, and to climb up and up Nob hill, the higher I got the better the restaurants would be.
I climbed straight up for a while, but then not seeing any eating place, I turned and walked down, to my right which looked more promising and easier and soon was on Union Square with Saks Fifth Avenue on one corner, Tiffany‘s on another, Burberry‘s just in front of me beside the Apple Store and not an eating place in sight. I kept walking and in fifteen minutes I saw a huge green dragon shaped Chinese gate and realized it must be an entrance to Chinatown. So I walked through it and up the street, having given up on breakfast and looking for lunch.
At first Chinatown seemed like a run down tourist trap with souvenirs of San Francisco. But as I walked along I realized that the signs were mostly in Chinese and that the people, mostly masked, were also mostly Chinese of all ages, out grocery shopping. I really was in little China even thought there were tourists around. So I took photographs and looked for a restaurant that wasn‘t a fake Chinese tourist trap and found an elegant restaurant on a side street with quite expensive and very delicious minced pork and eggplant with white rice.
I gave up on my idea of taking a bus around San Francisco for the day and instead wandered about Chinatown instead. And then when it was time to check into my Airbnb I returned to the grocery store luggage storage and with my luggage piled in front of me discovered that Bush street was seven long blocks straight up the steep street that I had declined to climb at first. But this time I had three bags and kept running into cracks in the sidewalk that made it hard to push my rolling bag with the other two bags piled on top and a backpack up the hill. But I did, slowly, slowly, one block at a time. Susie called me half way up and commiserated with me. Tom called me when I had finally gotten to the top and found my Airbnb but didn‘t know how to get in. He told me that I should have taken an Uber. But instead, after finding the key pad instructions for getting into the building, another keypad for getting into the apartment and then third for my bedroom, I took a nap and slept for two hours, ate some trail mix, and went to bed for the night ready to see San Francisco the next day.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 