DeadpanAnn (old blogger version)

I don't really have the energy or the giveadamn in me to give you a really well written description of the Sixty Dollar Meatloaf, the Fifty Dollar Hamburgers, or even the Golden Gate Near Death Experience, but I'll give you the basics. If you're from San Francisco and are easily offended, you might not want to read this post. I'm totally about to talk shit about your town.

I'm sick of this fucking city and I want to go home. It's the land of disappointment. Disappointment and fifty dollar hamburgers. We have been unable to find a decent meal since getting here, and even when we try to keep it simple by getting burgers for lunch, we end up getting a bill of fifty bucks.

Left My Wallet in San Francisco

Seriously. We paid nearly $50 for burgers and fries at a place called Knuckles. It just looked like your typical bar/restaurant casual dining type place. It was nothing impressive-- just a bar that served bar food. Everything is just too damn high here. Why? There's nothing special about any of it. In Chicago, we had some high priced meals, but they were delicious. Everything I've put in my mouth since getting here has been substandard, with the exception of some kickass sweet and sour chicken in Chinatown which wasn't expensive at all compared to the rest of it, by the way.

Nobody eats vegetables here, and that's where the Sixty Dollar Meatloaf came in. For the sake of my colon and my unborn child's health, we were looking for a restaurant where we could get some vegetables, and the hotel manager recommended this place called Rex's. He assured us it was a laid back place where we could go in our t-shirts and blue jeans, but as soon as we walked in, I realized I was completely under dressed in my Southern Miss shirt. We thought we were going to a bar. There was indeed a bar, but it was a fancy schmancy bar. And those vegetables that were supposed to be on the menu? Well they had three options-- grilled asparagus and two other things I'd never heard of before. And GET THIS-- they didn't come with any of the entrees-- you had to pay an extra $6.99 for a side. Can you believe that shit? What kind of restaurant charges you seven bucks for a side? I mean give me a fucking break already!

We ordered a spinach salad, split it, and each ordered meatloaf with mashed potatoes. The meatloaf was okay if you don't like your food to have any taste, and the potatoes came out of a box. They also don't know how to do iced tea here. I'm pretty sure I was drinking water with brown food coloring in it. Anyway, the bill for that meal, if you want to call it that, was over sixty dollars. The only decent part of it was the salad.

Golden Gate Near Death Experience



They nearly killed us on the tour bus across the Golden Gate Bridge. Thinking we could see more if we sat on the open top of the double decker bus, that's what we did. We sat in the very back seat, which happened to be a few inches higher than the other seats. First of all, we couldn't hear anything that the tour guide was saying into his microphone, so we didn't get the warning to "duck" the first time we went under some low branches. That sucked a little. There were more than a few of those low branches along the ride, not to mention really low hanging cables for the cable cars. Really low cables with six hundred volts running through them, by the way.



The only reason I wanted to go on the tour was because it was the only one that would actually cross the Golden Gate Bridge. Sounds fun, right?? Well, they tell you that it's going to be windy on the bridge, but they don't tell you that it feels like it's about 30 degrees, or that the bus sways back and forth so wildly that you're too busy hanging on for dear life to take it all in, much less take pictures. I did get a few that turned out okay considering that I couldn't tell what I was taking pictures of when I did it. Halfway across the bridge, Tim dubbed it the Golden Gate Near Death Experience, much to the joy of all the passengers around us, most of whom were German.

Everyone's German, by the way, or at least most of the tourists are. They've got Germans like cockroaches around here. German tourists everywhere, hocking out their German words and spitting on everyone.

Tour de Ghetto

We took another tour on the same bus a day later because we got some kind of package where you get a tour of downtown and a tour of the bridge area. The downtown tour was a hop on/hop off deal where you could supposedly get off at points of interest and just get back on when another bus came around. We happened to be on the tour during a time when the cops were closing streets to accommodate the gay pride parade, so the driver had to take detour after detour. We ended up being driven through the ghetto. This time we had a different tour guide, sat in a different spot, and could actually hear what was being said. The poor guide didn't even know what to say when we got re-routed through the 'hood. She just started talking about how at least we were getting to see some San Francisco culture. Right. And you can imagine how many people wanted to get off the bus. Nobody got off on the whole route; everyone just took the bus straight back to the starting point and gave up.

So the Golden Gate NDE was Wednesday, the Sixty Dollar Meatloaf was Thursday, and the Fifty Dollar Hamburgers must've been Friday or Saturday. Since then, we've done pretty much nothing. Sunday was Gay Pride Day. Hu-fuckin-ray for that.

After a week here, I now understand why so many people jump from the Golden Gate Bridge every year. If I had to live here, I think jumping would come to mind at least once a week. The people here are a bunch of nut jobs and the whole experience of San Francisco is vastly, vastly overrated. Nothing is as impressive as you would imagine, and everything is too damn expensive. I've wanted to get on a plane for Memphis since about Friday.

Thank God we're finally leaving tomorrow morning-- HOPEFULLY. It all depends on how many other people are trying to get on the flight. Standby tickets are a bitch, but hey, free is free. If we can just get to Dallas, we might rent a car and drive to Memphis. I just want to get the hell out of California.

I think I'm done with big city vacations. We've done Austin, Chicago, and San Francisco. That's enough. I now have no desire to see New York or anywhere else for that matter. Gatlinburg is looking pretty damn good at this point.