San Francisco Day 5

After our delicious coffee at Blue Bottle Ferry and meeting we had another meeting cancelled on us so we had the whole day to ourselves so decided to use the time to explore a bit more of the area south of Market Street and head over to Ritual Coffee which meant going on the BART.

SoMA is a little bit like the Auckland viaduct area perhaps – modern mid-rise buildings, most of them apartments with office space in re-fitted warehouses. Lots of tech companies in that area too – Yammer, Twitter, Adobe … It seems quite spread out in terms of living there – again like the Viaduct – park your car in the basement and drive to the supermarket or main shopping town and we didn’t see any good coffee anywhere – well, except for The Creamery on 4th that we already went to. Quite nice tree-lined wide paved streets.

We caught the BART over to The Mission area to go to Ritual Coffee and that was a whole other world. Shouty people hanging around the station exit, dirty streets and lots of run down shops with crammed neon signs for electronics, fix-its, massage, shipping and fruit. We’re told there are lots of great restaurants in the area but I didn’t feel all that comfortable there.

However we did find 2 of my favourite things – something orange …

… and a cat (snugged in a shop window of junk – fan belts, electric oven elements, dead insects and newspapers)

Back in town we wandered around Bloomingdales a bit and went on an errand for our Short Dark Friend and got some fruit and yogurt for lunch and by now I was craving non-restaurant food and didn’t need any more pastry!!

Then it was on the BART and back out to the ‘burbs to Bev and Dan’s place for 3 days. So excited to have Chinese in a box for dinner! Our first failed attempt was in New York when our order came in round polystyrene dishes so after everyone else had taken the fried rice they needed I ate it right out of the box. Just like on telly 🙂 And it was good Chinese too – the man delivered it right to the door in a white plastic bag with red characters on the front.