Spring Break, chapter 3

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 Tuesday was City Day.   We got kind of a late start, and it was very cold, windy, and rainy, which put a stop to our plans for the Japanese Tea Garden and a short hike, but we had a great day.

We started in Japantown, at the large mall (perfect for such a wet day), and spent most of our time at the Kinokuniya bookstore, but also enjoyed a very expensive stationery store, a bakery, and the largest Daiso I've been to.  I guess I don't have many photos of the inside of the Japantown mall, though!

Nor do I have pictures of our next stop.  There's a tiny Russian neighborhood way up Geary -- well, these days it's more like a few shops and a lovely Orthodox church.  We wanted to visit the bakery/deli that I hadn't been to in years (which has Ukrainian and Georgian flags in the window to demonstrate their sympathies) and we got several yummy things for lunch, mainly piroshki and a thing full of farmer's cheese.  There's a grocery store down the street too, and we got a few things there.  There was really nowhere to sit and eat our goodies, so we had to go back to the car to eat.

We then drove up to the Palace of the Legion of Honor, which is an art museum inspired by and built after the 1915 International Exposition.  It sits in a lovely park at the top west-northwest corner of the city, and if it hadn't been pouring rain, we would have hiked down to the coastline behind the museum afterwards.  The museum houses a permanent collection of a little bit of everything in Western art, mostly chronologically arranged in two long halls, with a centerpiece dedicated to Rodin sculpture, and a lower floor with exhibits -- all sorts of things, from Sargent to porcelain wildlife.  The two halls start with some medieval pieces and end with several nice Monets, and we enjoyed looking at everything.



We then decided that if we couldn't walk to scenery, we could drive through it, and I drove along the windy roads right along the coast -- the Vista del Mar and through the Presidio.  The Presidio is a lovely park at any time!  We stopped at Point Fort, which is right under the Golden Gate Bridge.  The fort was built around the Gold Rush to defend the bay from any invaders, especially, say, Southerners during the Civil War who might think it a good idea to try to grab the goldfields of California.  The fort had closed by this time, and the area was deserted except for us and three guys taking selfies by their car.  It was very cold and very windy, but nice to spend a little time there.

 
 




The emptiest parking lot in San Francisco

The next stop was the Palace of Fine Arts, which you'll have seen if you've watched any movies set in San Francisco.  It's the only structure left from that 1915 Exposition, and it was falling apart before being completely rebuilt about 50 years ago.  It's highly photogenic and very exposed to the wind!




After that it was time to head for home, which meant driving most of the way across the city.  Very scenic, but when we hit the traffic headed for the Bay Bridge, oh boy.  We spent at least an hour in that last half-mile of road before finally getting onto the bridge.  By the time we got home, I was exhausted from all that city driving!


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