Huw Pryce
Things have been quiet on this blog for the last few days, a reflection on how busy I’ve been (writing these posts takes a relatively large portion of my time). So, to make up for how lost you must have been without knowing exactly what I was doing, I’ll cover the last few days. Plus there are photos if you read enough.
On Wednesday I finished trying all the different sorts of exotic ice cream that I could find. This was mainly ice cream sandwiches, but the range of ice creams stretched as far as ice cream tacos. My conclusion is that ice cream in the US is very similar to ice cream in the UK, although my sample size is still quite small and I plan on improving upon this research. I might even branch out to frozen yoghurt.
On Thursday I went to a pub quiz, although as Americans are lacking pubs and quiz has connotations of school it was actually entitled a “trivia night” at a “brewery restaurant.” Unfortunately the pond difference did not end there, most of the history round involved knowledge of US presidents. I can probably name about five US presidents and that doesn’t really count as two of them have the same name, so I was fairly useless at history.
The geography round was mainly about US states and you don’t have to read much of this blog to encounter my difficulties with US geography. The sports round covered all sorts of exotic sports I know nothing about, such as Nascar and the world series (I still don’t understand what qualifies it as a world series).
At this point I will stop listing all the things I had no clue about, I think in total I was able to answer about two questions. None-the-less it was an enjoyable evening and the party afterwards was great fun (saying any more than that about the party would be inappropriate, I will leave it to your imagination).
Friday was spent working and having a very quiet night recovering from Thursday. I now think I am fully adjusted to the time difference, mainly due to going to bed early on Friday and waking up quite late on Saturday. The biggest advantage of this is that I no longer wake up at about 5am, a habit which I was not used to at all and is a very bad time to wake up as breakfast is not served until much later.
On Saturday I went with my house-mates to a large shopping centre in the south of the Valley. Americans are very good at doing large, you needed a car if you wanted to get around from one part of the shopping centre to another. The discounts available were also unbelievable, you could pick up brand name items for Primark prices! Other than pricing it was much as you would find in the UK with almost exactly the same shops, and the individual shops were actually a bit smaller than if you go somewhere like Oxford street. This was more than made up with by quantity, another thing the Americans seem to be good at.
After shopping we returned home for a barbeque, something which can happen at any time in Palo Alto as it is barbeque weather all day every day. I must locate some Pimms for this sort of thing, I know where to get the spirit from but not any English-style lemonade. This may be because English-style lemonade is actually horrible, cheap, artificially flavoured fizzy water but that is what a proper Pimms requires. To my horror nobody around me has ever had Pimms or even had any idea of what it is so I must do something to fix this.
Today saw my usual excursion into San Francisco, after church this time I had lunch at a kebab shop. Unlike my usual experience of kebabs this place not only looked hygienic but was very upmarket and was very pleasant. After lunch I used my new-found mastery of the San Francisco public transport (a.k.a. advice from people from church) to take a bus up to the Presidio national park in order to amble towards the Golden Gate Bridge, which is at one end of the park.
On arrival the park seemed very pleasant, although I expected more open space than what I found. Instead there were a load of buildings, left over from when this was a military base, now housing various fairly random seeming organisations. Plus a Disney museum (the boring kind, about the Walt Disney family and not Disney films).
As the national park was not quite what I was expecting I decided to head straight towards the Golden Gate Bridge, my main purpose for the afternoon. What, then, do I discover right in the middle of the national park? A great big road. It seems that not only is this national park (I hope America has some real national parks somewhere) lacking in the park aspect but it was also seen as the best place to send all the traffic wanting to get in and out of San Francisco. Also, continuing on the theme of large and in great quantity this is another fine example.
I cannot fathom who thought this was a sensible place for a road. The biggest problem is that as it cuts the national park in half you can’t really walk across it, to reach the Golden Gate Bridge I had to backtrack and go round the big road where it was possible to get underneath it. This, finally, provided something resembling a park.
I finally made it to the bridge, although it is quite a long way. In photos the bridge looks, to me at least, quite calm and quiet. In reality it is very different. Firstly there are the winds, today was better than the first time I was in San Francisco but it was still very strong and it was quite chilly especially when the clouds came out. Secondly there are a lot of cars going over the bridge combined with a lot of tourists trying to see it. This makes it incredibly busy. Anyway, after seeing the bridge I hopped onto a bus and headed home.
The Presidio is the only national park within a city, and is the only military base so converted. Congress allowed its creation on condition that it be able to pay for its own maintenance within a certain number of years. This requires the leasing of buildings to suitable organizations whose rents maintain the park, and the renting of residential spaces as well. The park preserves its military history, which goes back to the arrival of the Spanish in the 18th century.
I’m surprised it is expected to be self supporting – I was under the clearly mistaken belief that such wonderful open spaces would be supported by the public purse (reading over my post again I realise, after the weariness of a long week, I emphasised my shock at the sight of one of the biggest roads I have ever seen – Crissy Field, in particular, is wonderful and very much worth seeing, I spent over an hour wondering around it). Yet another one of the assumptions I make without thinking that doesn’t apply in the US, I don’t know how any national park would cope without state support.
The Presidio has been state-supported as a military installation for centuries, and as a national park for some years, with a termination date for that support. No other park has so many buildings needing care and restoration. No other park has the assets that the Presidio does, that can be turned into income. That “wonderful open space” was slavered over for years by real estate developers, who would have paid ten of millions of dollars to have it. Congress could easily have sold it for quick cash. No other city in this country has a park like it. Two California senators fought for it, and they got it, on condition that the park take care of itself. The unique privilege, for that is what it is, of having so remarkable a space in The City, has to be paid for, and the price is self-support.
I should add that the national park system, and the national monument system, are very large and extensive. There are millions of acres of national park in the USA.
Yet another note: The Presidio is not actually in the City of San Francisco, and never has been. It has always been (since the Spanish and Mexican period) under federal jurisdiction, never subject to local authority, and never inside the The City’s boundary.