Day 3 Sunday

San Francisco continues to impress. What a great city! It is very nice to walk around (and we walked a LOT of it today), and the people are super-freindly. We were looking at our guidebook or map on two different occasions today and random people stopped to ask if we needed help – nice going, SF!

Meredith was in charge of the day, and wanted to surprise me, so I had no idea of what we were going to do. We ate a nice breakfast (French toast) at our hotel, and headed out around 10:00. We started by going to church (it was Sunday, after all). Meredith took me the several-block walk to Glide Church, which is well known as an activist church concerned with social justice and the poor.

Glide was a thought-provoking, interesting, and complex experience for me. The church is way out there in helping and loving people – a homeless man told us they had 65 programs in SF, including owning two large buildings for low-income housing. The church was open and friendly and had created a wonderful community where people were accepted and loved. The music kicked butt with a great choir and band.  The service was called a celebration service, and it was a celebration. The hard part for me was the theology, or almost total lack of it. God was rarely mentioned, and when he was, it was in a very general sense. The service opened with the proclamation that “God is here! The Lord is here! Allah is here! Krishna is here!” There were times where a leader said, “God be praised! Goddess be praised!”  A man who is going through tough times with his relationship, his health, his home, and his job got up to give a testimony where the only mention of God was to thank God for Glide Church – he spent most of his time giving praise to Glide Church and his therapist rather than to God. I am NOT mocking the man’s pain at all – there was just little evidence of relying on God in his troubles. The sermon had three parts, which did not seem too related, did not mention God, and only mentioned Jesus once to say that Jesus never rejected anyone (which is not true – Jesus at least rejected some of the religious leaders of his day). The minister even went so far as to say that he did not know if God heard prayers or not, but that he was going to continue on.

So, here is a church that is doing the real work of the church, but seems to have little idea of who they are doing it for. They are putting many or most evangelical churches to shame in their ministries. It should be a wake-up call to more conservative Christians elsewhere – we need to be doing more for social justice. It seems to me that Glide shows love without much truth of the Gospel, but that most conservative churches show the truth with few practical displays of love. We need to work on that. James points out that works without faith are pointless, but also warned that faith without works is dead. Meredith pointed it out well with the story of Jesus and the woman caught in adultery. Jesus told her, “I do not condemn you. Now go, and sin no more.” Glide is great at the not condemning, but misses the sin-no-more part. Many evangelical churches are great at the sin no-more-part, but miss the not-condemning part. It needs to be both: works and faith. I want a church with conservative theology and liberal social outreach. Going to Glide was very much a worthwhile experience. (As an aside, we were there for the 102nd birthday of Mother Ruth Jones, an activist who was active in the Black Panthers and other social justice causes).

After church, Mer and I walked down to the terminus of the cable car line. As efficient public transportation, cable cars are lousy. As fun things to do, they are great! A one-way ticket costs $5.00, and we waited in line for about 20 minutes (on busy days it can reach 2 hours). We made sure we got on the “pretty” line instead of the faster, more direct line. Mer wanted to stand on a sideboard, so we did that. That is a bit of an adventure. We were on the right side, which passes very close to parked cars or moving cars passing the cable car. You are warned from time to time to watch for mirrors. The people on the left side of the car had to watch it when they passes very close to cable cars coming the other way. People can use the cable cars for transportation, but our car was very full, and we bypassed several stops that had waiting passengers because we had no room. The views from the cable car ranged from interesting to breath taking. It was also much fun to watch the operator run the car. Cable cars work by grabbing a cable under the car (and pavement). The cable is always moving, and provides the locomotion for the car. The cable car has no motor of any kind. This means the operator really needs to put his back into pulling the lever that grabs the cable, especially when you start from a stop going up hill. The cable car ride was about 20 minutes, and it was a great time – highly recommended.

We got off the cable car at the end of the line, which is the piers on the bay (the far northeastern side of the city). We wandered down Hyde Street Pier, where we had a great view of the Golden Gate Bridge, and ran into two of Julie’s friends, Kerry and Chris. They had swung into SF just so Chris could see the city for the first time, and had stopped at the pier to get a few pictures. They were on the pier for about 15 minutes total, and that was when we showed up. I love things like that!

Meredith wanted to see if we could get a tour of Alcatraz, so we walked a fair ways to Pier 33 (after fortifying ourselves with a Ben and Jerry’s stop), where the tours leave from. The next available tour was for Friday, so we got tickets for the 5:30 bay cruse that would take us around the bay, including by the island. We had two hours until we had to be back, so we wandered the neighborhood streets to downtown to the Transamerican Building (the famous pyramid one). It took about 30 minutes to get there. We then wandered back up through North Beach (SF’s Little Italy, which is right next to Chinatown), where Mer pointed out interesting houses and places: a few buildings that survived the 1906 earthquake, a few houses or offices where famous authors lived or wrote, a few bars or clubs where bands or comedians got their start. That was interesting, but mostly I enjoyed wandering the pretty neighborhoods of the city. After the walking tour, we still had about an hour to get back to the pier, so I was able to indulge my curiosity. I saw a sign for Coit Tower, which turns out to be on Telegraph Hill, one of the taller hills in SF. A tower! Up a hill! Up a steep hill! Of course we had to go!

That was a pretty climb up to the tower, If you ever come to SF, it is worth going to, but walk – do not drive. Parking is very limited, and there was a line of cars waiting for spaces. Besides, the walking route is more direct and pretty. We did not go up the tower – there was a line, and we were on a schedule, so we decided we should go back on Monday to go up the tower itself. Our map showed a road going away from the tower, so we went looking for it. It turned out to be stairs instead of a road – almost 400 stairs that wound down the hill through gardens and really cool houses. What a great walk! It came out about three blocks from Pier 33, so we were back in plenty of time for the bay cruise.

The cruise was great – we had a sunny and fairly clear day, so we could see across the entire bay. The ship was fairly full, but we got standing room next to the upper-deck railing, so we could see well and take some good photos of the city and the Golden Gate Bridge. Word of warning – always bring a jacket where ever you go in SF – even on a sunny day, the bay was really windy and cool – I had a jacket and was still shivering toward the end of the 90-minute tour.

The highlight of the cruise for me was the bridge, We went all the way out to it, and went under it. It is just immense. What a fantastic structure! It was really cool to get to see it from underneath. Nifty.

The cruise did circle Alcatraz three times while telling the history of the fort and prison. It was interesting and I enjoyed it. It was mostly viewable from the other side of the ship, and I did not want to wrangle to get a better view, so I contented myself with limited views of the island, but with great views of San Francisco.

After we got back to the pier, it was about 7:30, so we decided to walk to Chinatown (about 25 minutes) for supper. There was about a 30-minute wait at the restaurant we chose, but that was okay. We had a good rest in chairs while waiting for a table, and we could see the place was a good mixture of tourists and locals. We finally got to our table, and we both ordered a house specialty – beef in a special sauce. It was good – not blow-me-away, but very nice throughout. We did decide to get dessert elsewhere (we are not overly fond of Chinese desserts). We ended up walking back to Nob Hill to our hotel, and went to a diner our tour book recommended (Sears Diner). It may have been a diner once, but it was pretty swanky now. We got a seat right next to a big bay window where we could see cable cars and we could people-watch. We got mousse cakes and I got a (very average) hot chocolate, and we enjoyed watching SF go by outside the window.

We got back to the hotel about 10:00, where I promptly fell asleep in my clothes with my glasses still on. It had been a full day!