boy oh boy, do i have a picture-heavy entry for you lucky dames and fellas!

yesterday, i went to telegraph hill and coit tower. telegraph hill is the highest (i think?) place in the city, and coit tower is a very tall tower on top of the hill, so the view = amazing.

I mapquested the route from the BART station to t-hill, and it was only about a mile, so i figured i could walk it, no big deal. first of all, i must have crossed into a different micro-climate at some point, because, wow, all of a sudden it was noticeably hotter. also: IT WAS ALL UPHILL. and not just kind of uphill. observe:


this is obviously looking down from the top, post-climb. those are stairs on either side, because otherwise this hill would be a death-trap. ok, so i powered my way up this one, and i was feeling pretty good. the street ahead of me looked like this:


and i thought, man, i'm gonna be ok! but then:

GAH ANOTHER HILL ALMOST AS BAD AS THE FIRST AND IT WAS HOTTER THAN EVER.

by the time i reached the top of this hill, i was panting and sweaty. everyone else who had driven up to t-hill looked at me like i was a moron. i looked at them like the pansies they are.

here is coit tower:


so i went up to the top. there is no roof at the very top, and all the sides are windows. because the tower is old, they are predictably old windows with padlocks on them and they still allow drafts in. all of the windowsills (outside the windows, on the outside of the tower) were covered with coins.


at first, i was really perplexed by this. did people throw these coins up from the ground? was that possible? was there some coin launcher somewhere? i spent a lot of time thinking about this. then i saw a guy slip a penny through one of drafty gaps in the windowframe on to the sill, and i felt dumb for having spent all that time imagining amazingly accurate coin slingshots.

well anyway, here are some pictures of views from the tower. i took a lot more, because it was beautiful and i really liked it.






there are murals all over the walls of the tower on the entrance level. they were painted by artists during the depression. a sampling:






for some reason, i really identified with this girl, and i became convinced that, if i were in the mural, i would be her. i dunno, i was dehydrated and tired.


i took a very roundabout route to get back to BART, as evidenced by the above, very small map. the green dot is where i started. the 1 is where the hills got baaaad. 2 is telegraph hill. then i walked through north beach, had a cappuccino at cafe trieste, and stopped at the shrine of st. francis of assisi, where a really cool priest told jokes and taught a girl who didn't really speak english about the phrase "fo' shizzle." then through chinatown, which had a whole array of interesting odors. 3 is where the street (stockton) became a tunnel that i did not want to hoof my way through. so i turned, and, yes, eventually found my way back to BART, ie the red dot. that map looks a lot better if you right-click on it and open it in its own window, i just discovered.

it was such a beautiful day, and i felt really at peace and alone and happy. it was one of the best adventures i have had the whole time i've been here. i was worried that it was going to be touristy and dumb up there, but it was just peaceful, even though there were definitely tourists there. i'm glad i was there on a sunday; it's probably more crowded on a saturday.