Tuesday – Day 5

Tuesday we decided to take things a little easier. We had breakfast and got going around 9:30 with the goal of walking the 3 miles to the Palace of Fine Arts, which now houses the Exploratorium, San Francisco’s excellent hands-on science museum.

We wandered a different series of streets on the way to the Palace of Fine Arts, which included a brief but worthwhile detour to check out Grace Cathedral, an Episcopalian church. It is huge, and it has copies of the brass doors of the Baptistery in Florence on the front door. Inside, the church has beautiful modern stained glass windows, and under the windows, all around the church, are murals of San Francisco’s history. They were very well done – the church was a nice mixture of traditional church architecture with modern touches.  We spent a too-brief 15 minutes looking around.

We managed to get to the Exploratorium after about an hour or so, about 30 minutes after it opened. The Palace of Fine Arts is a recreation of the original meant-to-be-temporary Colombian Exposition building that housed the, well, arts, back around 1910 or so. The rest of the Exposition was torn down, bu the people liked the Palace well enough to save it, and then to rebuild it from more sturdy material. Today, it houses a small(ish) science museum built around the idea that all of the displays should be interactive. It is quite remarkable.

The Exploratorium is small enough that you can see most (but not all) of it in one day. We had a great time mucking about with various displays. The main focus of the museum (at least right now) seems to be with the human senses, especially hearing and sight. They threw in a large section on the mind as well. These exhibits were fun in that many of them liked to mess with your senses. The mind section dealt with superstitions and learned behaviors (like why should it be gross to drink from a toilet-shaped drinking fountain?).  It linked closely to the light and sight section where the displays kept throwing you curves in perspective. There was a room that had strange proportions, but looked to be symmetrical because the mind wants to see it that way. There were displays on how the mind fixes on general things – there was a huge picture where something in the picture changed every 3 seconds or so, but I rarely saw what it was. This included the replacing of an entire tree with another tree, right in front of me, but I did not notice it. Very effective, and very strange. There were lights you could shine into your eyes to let you see the blood vessels in the back of the eye (that your brain usually ignores) and one that lets you see the blood cells whizzing about in your eye (something else your brain ignores). There were exhibits on the eyes’ blind spots (you cannot see where the optic nerve leaves the eye, but normally the brain fills this section in for you), there were displays dealing with optical illusions and others dealing with how we see color. The sight section was where we spent most of our time.

We spent most of our last hour in the hearing section of the museum. In this area, you got to mess with different musical instruments, try to guess environments just based on sound, try to determine where sounds were coming from, hear how different object resonate at different frequencies, play name-that-tune when the tune was being played several octaves apart (harder than you might think), and so on.

When we entered the museum, one of the first displays I saw was a cloud chamber. Cloud chambers were used in early particle physics to show paths of small particles, like electrons. When a cosmic ray hits an atom, it scatters particles around. The particles can cause a gas (like gaseous alcohol) to condense around the particles. These trails are small, but still big enough to be seen with the naked eye. It was really really cool! There were a TON of cosmic rays in this two-foot-by-three-foot cloud chamber. Neat-o.

The only downside to the museum (no surprise here) was that the food was expensive. We split a small pizza, and it still cost $7. It went to an excellent museum, though, so no hard feelings. I really liked the Exploratorium – highly recommended.

We left the Palace of Fine Arts around closing time (5:00), and headed off in search of a (steady, now!) bus so that we would not have to walk the several miles to the Golden Gate Park, which we wanted to visit, even if only briefly. We did manage to find the correct bus, so after $3 and 30 minutes, we got off at the edge of the park.

It turns out that Golden Gate Park is huge. Really huge. We walked around in it for a little over an hour (so about 3 – 3.5 miles), and we just managed one little corner in the northeast section of the park. I even had to pass up going up a large hill in the middle of a small lake because of time concerns, and we still only saw a little of the park! We got there too late to see any of the attractions (the art museum, the tea garden), but the park is still very pretty. And did I mention large?

Once we wandered out of the park discouragingly close to where we had entered, we decided to take a bus back to our hotel, and go on from there to supper (it being almost 7:00). The bus route we were near was not the one Mer had originally wanted to take, but I did not want to walk another mile to get the “right” bus, so we took this one (a Number 5). This bus was going close to an area our tour book had mentioned as sketchy, but it was still daylight, and so we decided to try it.

The bus ride was fine. We even made it just within the 90-minute “transfer” time from our first bus trip and so did not have to pay for another fare. The people on the bus were very respectable looking, and the areas we were driving though felt safe enough. I did notice more iron bars on the windows, there was some street trash around, and some of the buildings needed some paint – that was the extent of the “bad” that I saw via the bus.

The bus let us out a few blocks from the cable car terminus, which was five blocks from our hotel. Cities are strange things. We were let out on Market Street. It should be a beautiful street – it is wide, with wide (ten+-foot) sidewalks of brick, with lots of trees. For four blocks or so on Market, there were closed businesses, businesses with lots of bars over the windows, and a few strip clubs. Then, we crossed one street, and we were in shopping central, one block from the cable car terminus and three blocks from Union Square. It has always amazed me how quickly neighborhoods can change – very often in just one block. Weird.

After a short regrouping (map checking) at the hotel, we struck off through Chinatown to head to North Beach (Little Italy). We wanted to check out a restaurant our book recommended. It was a bit of a walk away (about 30-40 minutes), but it was a nice evening. We found the restaurant without too much trouble. But we found it closed and locked up. We had left the tour book at the hotel, so we swung into a nearby store (a liquor store) to ask directions to our backup restaurant. The men in the store were helpful and steered us to the restaurant, a few blocks away.

It was a small, family-run place. Even at 8:00 on a Tuesday, there was a 30-minute wait. So, we waited at the bar and enjoyed the female bartender bantering with a couple of her customers. When we did get our table, it was happily right in the window where we could watch the street. We were pretty beat at this point, so our dinner (mine was good, Mer’s was excellent) was largely quiet.

Meredith had a baked-goods craving (that I was happy to share), so after dinner, we struck off on the 25-minute walk to Union Square to go to the Cheesecake Factory that we had seen signs for. We got a little turned around, but found our way without any detours. We were looking forward to dessert, only to be confronted with closed doors. It turns out that the Cheesecake Factory is inside the Macy’s store, which was closed. Morale was low. We checked out a Border’s cafe, but that did not seem too exciting; however, spirits rallied when we found an open Walgreen’s that had Ghirardelli’s chocolate on sale. We snatched up three bars and went back to the hotel, where we munched on two and saved the other for the airport on Wednesday.

All in all, another fantastic day in SF. I think we managed about another 7 miles on our “easy” day. 🙂