THE STREETS OF SAN FRANCISCO!

2:30 PM: Left the small, foresty, mountainous town in which I live.
4:29 PM: Spotted first seagull.
4:55 PM: Spotted first large building.
5:03 PM: Spotted first low-flying airplane.
5:06 PM: Crossed first large bridge.

All of the above were signs that I was entering the wonderful world of San Francisco, what today’s entry concerns. This will be like a travelogue, I guess.

So, just as promised, I left home and arrived in San Francisco on Thursday. Before going to our motel, our family went to the restaurant El Toritos, a Mexican restaurant, as if there is any other kind of restaurant with a name like that. There is a local Mexican place in my town, too. It’s a really cool place, but it doesn’t have something that El Toritos does: a staff of real Mexicans. At Local Mexican Restaurant the waiters and waitresses are all very white, while the waiter we had at El Toritos barely spoke English coherently. He sort of reminded me of Bruce Campbell’s character in Spider-Man 3.

The plan was that we were going to stay in one motel for Thursday and the beginning of Friday, then switch to a different motel for the rest of the weekend, and that is exactly what we did. At the motel I wasted some time by eating mini-chocolate chip cookies, looking at the airplane pictures on the wall, and watching Burn Notice. When night fell, however, I found myself staring at the view outside the window:

That is the Flying Food Group building. It’s surrounded by pretty street lights! See that road? Lots of cars drive on it! See that sidewalk? Lots of people walk on it! See that parking lot? People AND cars travel around in it! See to the left and behind the building? Lots of identical trucks go in and out of that place! Amazing!

Sorry. I never get to see stuff like that in Small Town Land. I’m such a newb to large cities.

But still, watching people and cars and such travel about was fascinating to me. Where’s that suspicious-looking guy with the black beanie and briefcase going? He might be going into the building to shoot everyone up! Hey! Someone in a lab coat just walked out of the building! Ooh! A man and a woman are walking out of the building together! Adorable! Watching this happen, I started formulating a great betting game for when things get stale in places such as the motel room I was in.

“Guy in a suit! Ten bucks says he’s going into the building!”
“Twenty says he doesn’t!”
“He’s almost at the sidewalk! He’s… he’s… HA! He’s turning toward the building!”
“He might just be going down to some other place.”
“Some girl just got out of the building! Which car is she gonna go to?”
“Twelve bucks on the convertible!”
“No way! Look at her clothes! She could never afford that car. Thirteen on the Subaru.”
“Guy with suit just entered the parking lot! He’s entered the building! Pay up, man.”
“We are sad people.”

Then I watched Unleashed (great movie) and went to sleep.

Friday:

Truck full of Port-A-Potties, because I can.

Hey, look! Construction! Incredible!

We moved into a new room. My dad is an elite member of this particular motel, which basically means he gets free apples and a tiny bottle of water. The new room did not have the amazing view the last one did, but we did overlook some neat hedges and stuff, so I took a picture of them.

Oh, there’s an awesome new feature of this motel: The windows OPEN! And you can, like, lean out of them and stuff. I think it would be awesome if our house was like that instead of having screens on every window, but then I think I’d probably take that back once I let a thousand wasps into my room. Anyway, the new room was much prettier. I mean, look!

It's all circular and tan, and it has a pattern. Ooooo.

Cool ceiling light.

I mean, they're no good for resting your head or anything... but they're pillows! Shaped like sausages!

Sausage pillows: the best things ever. EVER.

The bathroom was also incredibly awesome. It was likely more than half the size of the actual room. All three switches on the wall controlled different lights! The bath and shower were seperate! The shower was in that neat little stall thing that I’ve seen in movies and stuff but never in real life. I looked forward to trying it out that night.

But the shower was not all it was cracked up to be. In fact, I had no idea until that night that it IS possible for a shower to be absolutely EVIL.

So I started by placing my towel on top of the toilet seat, which is at least two yards of tile away from the shower. Usually when I shower the toilet is close enough so that I can just reach through the shower curtain and grab it to dry possibly soapy water from my eyes without the fuss of drying them with wet hands. Not the case here, especially since the shower was not the curtain kind. As I said, it was a stall. With a door. Opening said door, I knew, would probably mean letting loose water all over the floor, and I didn’t want to do that.

Still, that’s no biggie, right? I CAN dry my eyes with my hands, can’t I? I excitedly got into the shower and pulled the little lever towards me to activate it, and twisted it as far as possible clockwise to activate the hottest water. See, at my house it takes quite a bit of time to heat up shower water, and to get it the right temperature I usually turn on the bath, put it on the hottest setting, and hold my hand into the rushing water to find the correct temperature. I figured with this shower the same strategy would work, only now the rushing water would be in a different formation.

But no. See, motels have water heaters next to all water-dispersing bits like sinks and, you guessed it, showers. Also, I did not anticipate that this shower sprays HARD. However, you can control how wide its stream of water is, but right then it was set on the least wide setting, concentrating the painfully powerful and hot stream of water in one small area. I worked hard to twist the little knob that controls the water stream, and eventually got it to a setting that was still as painfully powerful, but at least then it was more widely dispersed. I got the temperature under control, but by then the counter with my soap and washcloth was all wet, and I was worried that the door wasn’t keeping out the water it was being assaulted with. I repositioned the shower head and finally began the actual washing routine, all the while regretting ever thinking of this shower as nifty.

I eventually finished, dried off, took care of the small puddles that had formed near the door (even while closed, it doesn’t quite keep out all the water). Then I sat in the room and gleefully rubbed my toes together. Isn’t it awesome when your toes are clean and they rub against each other all smooth like?

Saturday:

My cousin and uncle had a kidney transplant on Friday. This day we visited them in the hospital. Not much interesting about that, but I did get a picture of this nifty statue outside the hospital:

His name was Something-Crates. It was not Socrates.

We ate dinner at Wendy’s. I used their bathroom and learned that their bathroom sink has two modes: SPAY ALL OVER THE PLACE LIKE A MADMAN mode and SPRAY ALL OVER THE PLACE LIKE A MADMAN UNTIL YOU’VE EFFECTIVELY FLOODED THE ENTIRE BATHROOM BUAHAHAHAHAHA mode.

Sunday:

Went home. Those words don’t quite do justice to the four-hour drive it took to get there, but that’s pretty much what happened.

And, uh, that’s about it. I’ll try to have something that sucks less next week.

~ by krakenzilla on August 6, 2008.