San Francisco - Part One (A Multi Part Rant)
San Francisco is a city that I have always wanted to visit. I grew up enjoying the Athletics and the Giants. The first World Series that I really remember in detail is the 1989 series between the A’s and Giants – the series with the earthquake. I used to root for the Bash Brothers, Dave Stewart’s stare and Carney Lansford picking it at 3B. I remember watching Will Clark frown, Kevin Mitchell catching the ball barehanded and the signing of Barry Bonds. I have wanted to experience the Bay Area for as long as I can remember. After spending just under 12 hours in the Bay Area I can safely come to one crystal clear conclusion:
I DO NOT LIKE IT.
In all fairness, I should state that I am in a bad mood. The question of the morning is:
“Am I in a bad mood because this trip is no fun or is this trip no fun because I am in a bad mood?”
Where to start?
Basically, thus far this trip has been under whelming on multiple levels. For instance, I am typing this update on Microsoft Word because the “free” internet connection isn’t working. We’ve called the third part tech support twice and they are still “trouble shooting.” (Troubleshooting is apparently tech speak for “we don’t know what the hell is going on so we will see what we can do.” Apparently, someone is piggy backing off of the hotel’s wi-fi and they tried to do so via our machine. As a result, our login has been disabled and our IP logged as “being in use.” Good times.
Now sure, you could argue that I am in one of the countries most beautiful cities and that rather than sit in the hotel room on the internet that I should be out, roaming around exploring the Streets of San Francisco. Well, I ain’t Michael Douglas and the only streets I want to explore are the ones that lead to the airport.
Anji has just left for her seminar and I am here in the Orchard Hotel waiting for some fellow tech geek to call and tell me that I can access the internet. Thank God I have the soothing sounds of Saved by the Bell in the background or else I might be quite irritable. Ugh.
Last night, upon checking into what was at first glance a very nice hotel (more to follow on that) we had tickets to the Oakland Athletics/Anaheim Angels game in Oakland. After a nice mile jog to the BART station, we were on our way…to HELL.
The Network Coliseum is a decent enough park. It is easily the worst ball park I have been to in terms of the stadiums that are still active, (Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium was worse) but it wasn’t awful. If you could pick up the stadium and move it to another part of the world it would be fantastic – but I didn’t much care for the Oakland area. I found it to be a little – how should I say…scary? There is nothing like walking through a steel cage to get to the game.
I am thrilled that I was able to purchase a t-shirt of one of my favorite baseball players (Mark Mulder) and I also managed to purchase an inflatable Oakland A’s baseball bat for Grace and an Athletics elephant bobblehead magnet. Our new thing is going to be getting a HUGE United States Map and putting magnets on for all the different places we have been. I think it will be kind of interesting. (In a lame, too much time on my hands kind of way.)
After the game we returned to the hotel to have a late dinner and watch some TV. We ordered a Black Angus burger from room service. Here is the description of that burger straight from the menu:
Ground USDA Black Angus Chuck Burger
Hand Cut French Fries, Tomato, Lettuce, Onion and Pickles
10.00
The burger came about 20 minutes later. Guess what key ingredient was on the burger? CHEESE. Now, we didn’t think to ask them to hold the cheese because nothing about that description indicates that there would be cheese on it. NOTHING. We call back down to room service to ask them to bring us one with no cheese and the response is: “Can’t you just take it off?”
Wrong answer, Moron. I didn’t pay $10.00 for a burger so I could scrape off the melted cheese and hope that I don’t get sick from eating it. After some unnecessary coercing we convinced him to bring us a new one.
The burger came about 15 minute later. It was awful. The one shining light – the fries were fantastic.
All in all - the hotel is pretty nice. I am a lot more generous is making that statement than I would be if I had actually forked over the money to pay for it. However, it’s a larger than usual room for a boutique area and I suppose that if I were interested in exploring the streets of SF than it would be in a fantastic location.
