We Visit San Francisco: Seeing the People

One of the best things about traveling is visiting with other people, and we did a fair amount of that while we were out there. Some of it was just hanging out with Geoff and Dave, of course. We would have breakfast together (Dave makes a marvelous homemade granola), for example. I was usually the first one to hang out at the table – somehow I have become an early riser in my late middle age, and my parents would probably laugh themselves silly about that were they around to find out – and eventually everyone else would filter in. There were dinners as well – sometimes homemade and sometimes not. One night we got takeout from our favorite Pakistani place just around the corner, and also got takeout from a nearby sushi place. That’s the thing about being adults – if you want to get food from multiple takeout places at once nobody will stop you no matter how incompatible those cuisines are. Maybe they should but they don’t, and yet the sun rises the next morning without fail.

Sometimes we just hung out doing whatever came to mind. It’s nice to be able to do that with people.

There were also cats. Geoff and Dave have an elderly cat named Sniffy whom Kim helped with her veterinary skills while we were there, which Sniffy seemed to appreciate.

It must be said that the cats back home in Wisconsin were a bit less thrilled, however. Midgie was still adjusting to the lack of Mithra (at least we think she was – she’s kind of sweetly dim even by cat standards so it’s an open question how much this change has really occurred to her) and was at the same time confronted by David S. Pumpkin – Max’s cat, whom we were watching over semester break. DSP, as he is colloquially known, is normally a pretty friendly cat but he gets a bit stressed in unfamiliar environments that smell like other cats and the upshot of it was that one morning Oliver sent us this.

Midgie was okay though slightly scratched. DSP was mostly just annoyed. Oliver managed to calm things down pretty quickly and it all went back to whatever counts as normal in our collective lives these days. It’s hard to be a kitty in a strange place, and harder still to watch over one. DSP has returned to Max now that the semester has started again, and both cats are happier for it.

Cats aside, we also got to spend some time with good humans as well.

We spent most of a day with my friends from college, Josh and Sarah, for example. They live not too far south of San Francisco and were willing to trek up into the city to see us, for which we were grateful! They picked us up one morning and we went down to the Embarcadero to wander around and catch up. This is the best way to visit, I think – just spending time together without any particular agenda. We walked along the waterfront for a bit and found both sculptures and crabs, which is an interesting combination when you think of it.

 

And then we found Red’s Java House. If you are looking for a place to sit by the water and enjoy a reasonably priced and tasty beverage with friends, look no further, dear reader! Also, they have great signage.

 

We wandered around the Ferry Building, which is now more of an artisanal mall than a working transportation hub, and then we went inland a bit to a nearby restaurant for dim sum. It was one of those places where you sit down and the servers wander by pushing carts full of food and you just sort of point at things even if you don’t really know what they are and they hand them to you and add them to your total and you end up sharing them all around because that’s kind of the point of it all. It was remarkably tasty, and there is nothing better than good food in good company.

Our final stop with Josh and Sarah was the Botanical Gardens, which is full of Nature in various forms, not all of it botanical.

We spent a while wandering through the various sections of the place, which are organized by habitat and well signed so you know you’re looking at a specific sort of plant rather than just some random greenery (a necessary feature for me, whose ability to discern different forms of plant life is limited to “Is that a tree or not?” and even then there are blurred edges) and we hung out on benches occasionally, chatting about The Great British Bake Off and B. Dylan Hollis.

The other big social event of our trip came a few days later when Geoff and Dave hosted a Cheese Party For the Cheeseheads at their house. We spent the previous day and much of that morning preparing for things – making cupcakes and arranging all of the various cheeses, some of which we brought with us from Wisconsin, gathering ice from a nearby store, and so on. It was a lightly rainy day so we didn’t get to spend as much time as we wanted out on the back porches, but you could still go out if you wanted to and enjoy the view.

Of course, the star of the party was the food. Geoff converted an entire dining room table into a vast charcuterie board, and I learned that the secret to this is to cover the table with plastic wrap beforehand so you can just lift it up and everything’s clean when it’s over. Genius! It was quite a spread of cheese, sausage, chocolates, and cupcakes.

It was a good-sized crowd in the end. Josh and Sarah came by again, which was lovely. We hung out with Geoff and Dave’s friend Cracker, whom we’d met years ago and had hoped to see again. And there were a pile of other friends whom we didn’t know before but now we do and you can’t ask for more than that really – I think the person I spoke with most was named Angelo, and we enjoyed discussing genealogy and related points over our cheeses. Good food in good company, once again the theme of events. It gets no better than that.

There was no particular dinner that day. We just spent the day grazing on cheese and sausage, thus bringing a sense of Wisconsin to the West Coast. Works for me.