Note to Time Magazine: This is not an F-Line trolley! This is an F-Line trolley. For those of us who schlep to work, schlep home, drift off on the couch in front of
KOFY dog commercials, and set the alarm at 6 a.m. to do it all again, it's easy to forget that folks come to San Francisco from 'round the world to, essentially, avoid us and do everything we don't. It's true -- German is the lingua franca in Chinatown these days.
So it's entertaining to read the current
Time Magazine and review its "
San Francisco: 10 things to do in 24 hours" article. No doubt, this looks like a hell of a day -- and if we could afford to have breakfast at Mama's, lunch at Sam's Grill, and dinner at the Slanted Door, we'd be having a hell of a day, too.
Here, in a nutshell, is
Time's ideal day in San Francisco: Wake up, get breakfast at Mama's, go to Coit Tower, walk down the Telegraph Hill steps, lunch at Sam's, F-line to the Castro (illustrated, naturally, with a photo of a cable car), ogle gay people and anatomically correct pastries, traipse through the Upper Haight, dodge the burnouts in Golden Gate Park, cab it to the Exploratorium, head to some bridge near there, race across town to the Ferry Building for dinner, and top it all off with a ballgame at AT&T Park.
Aside from the fact that this seems about as geographically tenable as Steve McQueen's famously out-of-sequence
chase scene through the city in
Bullitt, I do have a few quibbles with this itinerary.
- Rather than claw over the backs of other tourists at Coit Tower, why not visit Grand View Park and have arguably the best view of the city all to yourself? And can you think of a tourist who wouldn't appreciate the simple joys of the Inner Sunset? Arizmendi, anyone? A drink at the Blackthorn poured by an actual Irish bartender with crooked teeth? How 'bout it?
- Let's not rant about Muni, but I think it's asking an awful lot of a tourist to wait for the F-line, step off downtown to eat at Sam's, and then wait for the F-line again. Remember, this is an article called "10 things to do in 24 hours."
- If you want to go to the Exploratorium without a kid in tow, that's your business. But if you walk in without paying homage to Bernard Maybeck's Palace of Fine Arts -- and its brave turtles -- then, as pro wrestling fans shout whenever one of the "athletes" botches a ring leap: "You fucked up."
- Sorry, what is this section doing in a travelogue: The Golden Gate Bridge "is so beautiful that some people apparently feel compelled to hurl
themselves off it. The G2B is the top spot for suicides in the nation,
with a person a week, on average, taking a fatal plunge." What the hell? Aren't you pushing us to go to the Ferry Building for an overpriced dinner next?
Photo | Justin Sullivan/Getty
