Enjoying San Francisco's values. (Post for September 19th)

Our San Francisco day began leisurely enough, which didn't really foreshadow the rest of the day at all. The 4 of us woke up at about 9, and all showered and put on clean clothes (unlike, say, what we had been wearing for camping from the last 2 days). We think that the street noise in front of Kurt's apartment really made us feel as though we were back home sleeping in our own beds.

In case it hasn't yet been mentioned, my Uncle Kurt has an AWESOME apartment that overlooks the bay and Alcatraz, with tons of light, a cool roommate Fred, and a sweet, accessible rooftop.

Uncle Kurt and I cooked a breakfast of bacon, toast and eggs for everyone, thereby giving us all on the trip our required weekly bacon serving. One must recall Benjamin Franklin's slightly less famous saying: "A strip of bacon a week adds rosy hues to the cheek."

After breakfast and reading the newspaper, we did the first of the two interviews we had scheduled with Kurt. We learned all about the ways in which it was actually not incredibly traumatic to move in work from design into entertainment. I thought his best piece of advice was to remember that we are always going to get bad advice from people who don't really know what they're talking about when trying to tell you what to do with your future. Unless of course him telling us this was bad advice, in which case I am confused.

Directly from our interview at the apartment we drove over to conduct our scheduled interview with Ethan Watters, one of the founders of the Writer's Grotto, which is a space for writers to work during the day and be more productive. Upon arriving, we found out we could also interview Po Bronson, another founder of the Grotto. Ethan has written about repressed and recovered memory, and about urban friendship groups, and Po has written about working in Silicon Valley and about what people should do with their lives. Both are published repeatedly and very well regarded. Po said that Roadtrip Nation had talked to him before about interviewing him, so we thought it was cool that we were able to get to do so!

Ethan and Po were both really interesting in telling us about how the Grotto has changed over time, about what it's like to be a writer as your full-time job, and about things they've learned along the way. Po's best piece of advice was about not selling GOOD opportunities short just because they weren't the one GREAT opportunity you're looking for. Ethan talked about being able to drift into what fit for you, and about how you should use the friendship group that you have coming out of college not just to be friends, but to center your life and job around. They mentioned that the Grotto was one of the things that had come out of their group of friends in their 20s, and how much that had impacted their lives.

We had intruded into Po and Ethan's lunch break, so we thanked them and let them go eat after the interview. We went over to Haight St., poked around Giant Robot store (best items: books written by Bigfoot titled "Me Write Book" and "Me Not Dead"), had lunch in a tasty Mexican dive, and put our heads into the local Amoeba Music store. At this point, we realized that the boat we had gotten tickets on in order to go to Alcatraz. Kurt jetted us over to Pier 33, dropped us off, and we just barely made it onto the boat.

As for Alcatraz - it's one of the coolest National Parks we've visited on this trip. It was a dreary and kind of ominous gray day, but I think that really captured the spirit of the dilapidated buildings and the ominous cell-blocks. I can't imagine what it must have been like living there as a prisoner living in a 5 x 7 x 8 cell all day. The audio tour was actually quite good, though unneccessarily and gratuitously violent in its sound effects. We joked that we should have interviewed someone working for the National Parks there, and we would have been able to see all of the restricted areas. Ah well, next time.






One of the really funny things about Alcatraz, and something we've all been meaning to mention for like 10 blog posts, was the crowd there in comparison to other places we've been. At Alcatraz, we heard at least 5 different languages, and people were of all races and ages. In comparison, the vast majority of tourist-y places we've been, we've been the youngest people by like 50 years! Probably because most normal colleges (and high schools, etc) are in school right now. I often wonder what the retired tourists think of us young whippersnappers wandering around national parks when we should be getting an education.

After getting off the boat, we met Kurt for another chance to wander around the city, eat chinese food at Sam Wo's in Chinatown (our waitress was NO nonsense and even less English-speaking; it was an experience), and get dessert at a cafe. We ruminated about our interviews and what we had and had not gotten out of the trip so far. Uncle Kurt's been an interviewer by trade in a live talk show he'd been running in San Francisco, and he asked us really good questions and shared some tricks of the trade.

By the time we got back to the apartment it was just before midnight, and we were BEAT. Just enough time to check politics, news, and baseball (Sox are back up to a 2.5 game lead over the Twins!) and now we are going to bed right now the end.