San Francisco: Enjoying A Summer Day

Yesterday we checked into our room on the 17th floor at the Serrano Hotel.  Woo hoo! Penthouse!  Not really, but it is much quieter up high and we can see a lot of rooftops and things way down below us.  It's a fine smallish room with everything we need.  A slightly reduced rate we found on the internet landed us there.  Very ornate lobby, with exterior of the building currently undergoing refurbishment, was built in 1926.  It's about three to four easy blocks off Union Square with three very close-by parking garages that you can use yourself without having the valet do it, which will save you $15.  

We walked over to Max's Grill about three blocks away. There's comfort food, large portions, with a menu that covers all the bases.  Unfortunately, our waiter was young and foolish and had to be asked to fill my coffee cup, my water glass, bring a fork, bring a bread plate and our bill even though we were definitely done for a while.  He also brought the wrong salad with the entree and spent a lot of time in the kitchen yukking it up with his buddies.  The food was actually good, but the silly server put a blot on the experience.

Back to the hotel to change and then cab over to the Orpheum Theater to see Wicked, a musical stage play.   Theatergoers thronged the lobby before the show looking to see who was looking at them and also looking for cast members.  Turns out, this play is becoming a bit of a Rocky Horror Picture Show type cult experience.  When the main players made their first appearances on stage, the audience shrieked and applauded in delirium and loved every big scene exuberantly.  

Lots of fun, no catchy tunes really, not compared to the Phantom or Les Mis, but still very imaginative.  My favorite character was Glinda the Good by a mile.  Elphaba (the Wicked Witch of the West) was great, too, but Glinda was hilarious.

Took a while to get a cab back to the hotel.  Lots of barricades going up along Market Street were for the next day's Gay Pride parade.  Note to self:  Try to catch a glimpse of it some other year.

Luxuriant sleep in a king-sized bed was blessedly wonderful.  I plan on carrying the bed home on top of my car when we check out in the morning.

This morning, we walked over to the cool Italian-style espresso cafe on Union Square plaza.  We pretended we were back in Paris as we enjoyed a petite dejeuner (sweet roll, cappucino, OJ) and watched the city awaken.  The weather was spectacularly perfect.  No breeze, gentle warmth, blue skies and lots to see including a few shrieking schizophrenics and unfortunates tuning into their own time zones and scrambled wavelengths.  It's all part of the deal when you walk around downtown.  Beauty and ritz right next to the broken and blitzed.

We made our way along Geary across town in our car to meet friends at The Cliff House Restaurant (actually called Sutro's Cafe), listening to the incomparable KFOG radio.  The clear sky seemed to lend a finishing sparkle to city parks, brass railings, chrome handles and the thousands of windows in buildings all across the avenues we traversed.  The whole city gleamed and beckoned as great cities do when they are just stretching awake for the day.

The Cliff House is the third iteration of that building and was last remodeled in 2004.  The first two versions burned down, sadly, as they were much more elegant-looking buildings back then.  Nearby, the Sutro Baths (big indoor swimming pool where folks lounged around alluringly in baggy woolen swimming suits) lie in ruins, and the one-popular Playland that occupied a large area opposite the Pacific Coast Highway and Ocean Beach is now replaced by a large housing development.

The Cliff House is home to three dining spaces, and on Sundays you can also opt to have a buffet brunch in a fourth.  We snagged a table for the four of us on the airy and modern Terrace level right by a window and watched the restless ocean currents tugging and shoving against craggy rocks offshore.  My chicken cobb salad was light, well prepared and delicious.  The mimosa was very gentle, shall we say.

In contrast to last night's dinner, our waiter remembered everything and had one of those clever crumb scoopers to keep our table linen crisp and clean).  Replete, we organized ourselves and headed for the DeYoung Museum to see the Great Impressionists exhibit from Paris.

In a nutshell, the place was packed and everyone was tall.  We all noticed it.  Somehow, we got peeks of all the famous paintings on display done by Cezanne, Monet, Manet, and others.  There they were, Whistler's Mother, The Birth of Venus and The Dance Lesson.  Each piece was brilliant in its own right;  we saw about 100 works, I think, which was dazzling.  The viewers were all rapt and respectful, but there were lots of them.

Pooped by then, we left the museum display, sagged into cafe chairs on the wide veranda.  We refreshed with a glass of mineral water and a bowl of cherries.  Good-byes all around then, and we split up to head in our separate directions, satisfied with a fine afternoon spent with interesting friends.

Sunday in Golden Gate Park is unusually quiet and refreshing as one main avenue running the length of it is closed to cars.  The weather was still perfection itself, so walking back to our car parked a half mile away was a pleasure.  Bicycles, skaters, walkers, joggers and humans moving in lots of other ways formed a gentle stream along the route.  The park looks lushly green everywhere thanks to frequent and deep spring rain this year.  

Dinner at the Daily Grill on Geary was good but more expensive than we'd wanted.  It was stuffed full of people not too long after we arrived, proving again that getting places early in the city pays off well.