Orange is not a colour, it's a state of mind

Fleet Week brought the navy to town. There was a big frigatey thing and an aircraft carrier parked outside our apartment in the habour for a week and quite a few airshows – the noise of the Blue Angels buzzing the city was very cool – F/A-18 Hornets. We got to see some of the fly-bys and aerobatics from our apartment but most of the activity was over the Big Orange Bridge.

Yesterday we had our first drive out to Napa Valley. Friends visiting from New Zealand had a couple of days up there so we decided to meet them for a Sunday drive. It’s probably about an hour to get to the start of Napa Valley – about half the trip being on the freeway and some brown farmland before getting into wine country. I think we’ve been dreadfully spoiled when it comes to beautiful scenery having lived in New Zealand all our lives because to be honest, despite the gushes of how beautiful we’d think wine country was from locals when we told them we were going, we didn’t really see anything any more spectacular than in New Zealand.

We were treated to a blend of Martinborough, Marlborough, Hawke’s Bay and French wine country – the building styles definitely reminded us of European buildings and the fields of grape vines could’ve been from anywhere in New Zealand.

We visited 2 wineries – Rombauer and V.Sattui – which I think were at different ends of the cellar door experience. Both charged around $15 to taste about 3 wines, not taken off the purchase price of anything you bought, however a small discount was given on case purchases. Given the volume of people tasting they’d be making a heap of money – usually we’ve experienced higher prices for things in New Zealand purely because of lower volume so on that model I would’ve expected tastings here to be free – free is actually the norm in New Zealand! (well it was last time I went wine tasting which I admit was years ago…) As to the differences in these 2 places – Rombauer had water, you got to keep the tasting glasses, it was a small intimate cellar with someone who’d worked there for years taking the tasting, who knew how to compare the wines to what we have in New Zealand; V.Sattui was a rather large complex with ‘premium tastings’ offered in a different building to what I assume was regular old wine tastings, they had no water for the tasting, there were loads of people picnicking, a wedding was soon to take place in the grounds, the young guy doing the tasting seemed to be rattling from a script and he’d run out of a few things and was reluctant to open more.

We ended the day up at Auberge du Soleil – a gorgeous retreat on a hillside where we sat and acted like the hoy poloy who surrounded us with our glass of wine each and bowl of fries – lovely view over the valley.

The main road running up the valley from Napa had wineries crammed on either side of the road so it’s quite hard to choose which ones to go to and I could see you could make a week out of it if you could stand doing the same thing every day. It was great to see that a lot of places encouraged people to take their own picnic supplies and lounge around in the winery grounds with their bottle of wine.

Quite a nice manageable day trip if you sort out a couple of places you know you want to go.

Drove over to Sausilito on Saturday with Lance who was visiting for a couple of days – guess you don’t really take your brother-in-law for a wander around the shops so after the obligatory tour of the Ferry Building and a cup of coffee we decided that we’d get a Zipcar for a day and take a trip over the Big Orange Bridge and to Sausilito. After a stinking hot day on Friday when we took an afternoon walk down to Fisherman’s Wharf, Saturday was really foggy and it just didn’t lift all day on that side of town. So other than the occasional glimpse of the bridge I’ll have to go visit it another time.

Sausilito is a small seaside town essentially, a bit like Eastbourne I guess, about 10-15 minutes from the other side of the bridge – you’ve got to make the trip out there, it’s not on the main route. I think it survives entirely off tourists – the guy with his orangey parrot insulting passers by, stores of hideous trinkets, jewellery stores, icecream stores, porta-loos, guy singing to his sausage dog in it’s sunglasses, winding lines of people waiting for the ferry and no good coffee as far as I could work out – didn’t try any!

I think the town has stunning views back to the city but no go when we were there. You could actually see the line in the fog as it moved from one side of the sky to the other. It was a really pleasant couple of hours, and we had great sandwiches from a deli and some delicious cookie dough icecream in lieu of a coffee for afternoon tea.

We had a rather mammoth drive back through San Francisco – we had the car for a day and when coming back into town we managed to get onto this huge triple carriage way through the northern part of the city that had no left turn signs for blocks and blocks and blocks and that of course was the way we wanted to go! It was the first long drive through the city that The Mister had done and all went well – even hill starts – just a bit of confusion at 4-way stops regarding who’s supposed to go first!

Have been for a couple of walks in the morning before work during the last week. Lots of people out running and walking their dogs. It’s quite hard to walk passed the Ferry Building without going in for a coffee! We’ve been told that September and October are beautiful months in San Francisco, that we finally get the summer that other places have already have. And that summer seems to have arrived on schedule – during the last week the temperatures have been in the mid-20’s instead of mid teens as it has been the whole time we’ve been here. And there’s less and less fog around in the mornings and evenings. Here’s how beautiful the waterfront was this morning which opened out to a day that hit 30 degrees! Lucky it was only about 25 when we were walking to and from work.

This weekend we saw one of the seals up reasonably close that lives down at Fisherman’s Wharf that all the tourists flock to see. We wandered further down the waterfront than we have before and came upon a couple of them sitting in the marina – the bigger one was quite bullish and barked at a deck-hand that was squirting him with water – not sure if he was offering him a cooling shower or shoo’ing him off the marina.

Further around we saw the main colony of them – I think the port folks have left all the old pontoons in place to give the seals somewhere of their own to sun bathe rather than having them camp out on people’s boats! Drew quite a crowd that we could see across the inlet.

I decided today that even if I wanted to dress a bit more lady-like it’s ridiculous. Today I had a rare visit to a client site. I had to go on the bus. Shoes and socks a must! Had to walk to the bus stop. Get down the aisle of the bus as the guy lurched off up a steep hill. Wrestle my way out of the bus after a couple of stops in Chinatown trying not to trample all the Chinese senior citizens in the aisles clutching their little bags of strange smelling vegetables from their market day. Storm through all the tourists milling around in Union Square to get to Williams-Sonoma. Tromp up 3 flights of stairs at Williams-Sonoma. Walk back to work, several blocks through the day rapidly warming up. Walk home at the end of the day. I know SDF will say no pain no gain but blisters just aren’t worth it. Perhaps another day I could try flats or something but you just never know when you’re going to have to walk to the bank or if the day is going to heat up making my feet all hot and squishy. I’ll keep wearing Chucks!

One side of the block opposite the bus station that we walk passed quite a bit has signs up for car pooling – signs with destination names of towns in the East Bay like Walnut Creek, Oakland etc. It’s on a street that’s one of the routes out of town and mid afternoon people start gathering along the fence, waiting for a ride.

We’ve seen it a couple of times now. As we walked passed, there was a constant stream of cars with just a driver stopping by the curb near one of the signs, where 3 people of those waiting got in the car. Judging by the greetings, body language and silence in the car while it then waited at the lights I would say they were all strangers – just in the car for a ride.

So what’s it all about? Could Google it but we spent the rest of the walk home figuring it out for ourselves. The people stopping to pick people up were well dressed men in nice big cars. It was the start of rush hour. Traffic is really thick here but some lanes in the city and on the motorway are expressly reserved for car pooling, meaning 3 or more people in a car. So in order for someone to drive their nice big car home quickly and not get stuck in the traffic, by giving people a ride, they get to use these reserved lanes. Not sure where they drop them off at the other end, I guess it’s reasonable to assume it’s on their way home otherwise they wouldn’t’ve stopped at this end. Also, how to do they get paid back? Do the people getting a ride throw them a few dollars for petrol? Do they ever give the driver a ride another day … that’s the spirit of car pooling isn’t it – sometimes my car, sometimes yours? Although to be honest, I’m not sure the well-dressed business man would stand on the side of the road waiting for a ride.

The Sunday just gone we were on a bus for a return trip out to Emmeryville (first town over the bridge) and the bus took the car pool and bus lane which totally by-passed the toll gates for the bridge that are typically snarled with up to 12 lanes of traffic. Cars using the car pool lane must have a fast pass (unit for automatically paying tolls attached to their windscreen) but the fare in the car pool lane is about half the price of going through the toll. The fines for improper use of the car pool lane is $277.

This weekend just gone we finally got to ride on the rattly trams (as I’m calling them) – the above ground trolley cars or trams that run along Market Street. I believe these ones are taken by the locals who need to go places, tourists take the ones that look more like street cars, lining up for hours to ride up to the top of Powell Street … hoping they don’t get to relive the runaway tram moments from various movies.

We’d tried to take the tram a couple of times before but after a very long wait decided we were doing something wrong, no trams came. This time, a Saturday morning, we didn’t have to wait long and only had a short conversation with a homeless man at the tram stop “where y’all from? France?” … I know we’ve got an accent but no … before clambouring on to take rather uncomfortable seats for our ride a couple of miles up Market Street – the trams really do rattle along. Our destination was Four Barrel – finally getting out to try their coffee seeing as that’s where we’d been told to go a couple of times if we liked really good coffee.

I was hoping to ride on the orange tram, but a newer green and cream one picked us up. On the way back to town, the same, and I was rather annoyed to see that an orange tram was right behind us and caught us up!

We’ve seen misty fog, sometimes low over the city, but this morning was the first creeping fog we’ve seen – woke to this amazing site!

Today we experienced an hour of American government department to get our Social Security numbers. After the brief visit a couple of weeks ago where there was barely any wait and a lovely lady who explained we were too early, that our immigration status hadn’t flowed through to their system yet, we arrived just after 9am this morning (Monday) hoping for the same. Not so.

• the line was outside the building to go into the foyer for security checking and they were only taking 2 people at a time through the bag scan and metal detector, several ahead of us didn’t seem to speak English so lots of short-tempered mad hand waving and strip-off motioning by the 2 guards to get them to put their stuff on the belt and walk around through the metal detector. One at a time.
• the security guards processing the bag scan and metal detector were worse than TSA – even I had to take my jacket and watch off, I felt completely naked. I wear more through airport screening. They turned away some people in front of us – not sure why but I could lip read “you can’t bring that in here” – perhaps they had guns in their bags. We had to open our laptops and turn them on until they booted. Heart missed a beat when Craig tried to explain his battery was flat. They scanned the laptops twice.
• the room we waited in last time probably had 50 people waiting in it, instead of the 20 that were there last time. We went to the monitor, checked in and grabbed our number, we knew the system. Now, to choose a seat – after a homeless man made the most disgusting gravelly wrenching liquid cough and (eeeeuw I feel nauseous typing this) spat up something brown on the floor then went into the bathroom to carry on coughing for a couple of minutes (magnified by all that porcelain) our seat choice was clear – way the hell over the other side of the waiting room.
• our number was 15 away from the next one being called, and stamped on our receipt, it said “expected wait time 90 minutes”. OMG, I looked around the waiting room, 90 minutes of coughing, elderly Chinese couples who kept dozing off and missing their number being called, several homeless people (educated guess based on their carts and sleeping mats), 4 wheel chairs, several middle-aged men in army fatigues/camoflage-themed sweats with authority attitudes muttering under their breath “what gives you the right to treat me like that” (obviously had a run in with the security guard), a couple from Russia who I could see were filling out the application form all wrong and had to look up in their passports whether they should tick box ‘male’ or ‘female’, was ahead of us – it was going to be a long morning. Pulled out our cell phones. No coverage.
• finally, after half an hour our number was called. We handed the clerk all our papers through the glass window – passports, application forms, marriage certificates, work permit – everything we had. He said hello, nodded and tapped a couple of keys on his keyboard. Then for the next TEN minutes we sat in silence while he scrolled up and down, tapped a key here and there, and stared at his screen. I was desperately trying to see the reflection in his glasses of what was on screen – I was convinced he was reading a newspaper, checking out his horoscope, sports scores or something. While we waited, I listened to everyone else’s business … no-one seemed to be there to get a social security number …
  • someone was in a custody battle over their son and the mother seemed to be taking the child out of the States, he had a court order and was denying receiving something else from the court so was trying to win a he-said-she-said argument with the clerk
  • a guy had been hepatitis free for 12 years but had some problem with his disability/medical payments and was locked in a he-said-she-said argument about which agency was responsible with the clerk
  • a young guy hadn’t paid his taxes and they’d seized his car and his momma had sent him down there
  • an elderly Chinese woman was explaining loudly to a clerk that she had a bank account, had received a hundred dollars into it but the clerk wanted proof of it, but the woman was adamant she couldn’t have proof because she’d spent the money; the clerk explained that a bank statement would show the money going into the account, but the woman said she couldn’t show the money because she’d spent it … and on and on …
  • eventually one of the guys who’d earlier been turned away at security screening came into the waiting room – what did he do? Stash his gun in a bush on 7th street?
• after 25 minutes and finally some typing action, our clerk printed out a couple of receipts for us and after earlier only saying ‘Hello’ we said ‘yes’ when he asked us to confirm our names and addresses were correct – none of the long discussions going on at all the other windows. He said our new social security numbers would be with us in about 2 weeks. We rushed out of there.

I felt so dirty – the creaking of the metal seats, in the waiting room and in front of the clerk windows (all bolted down by the way), the coughing and the smell will haunt me for a while. I was wondering out loud about all the people we knew who live here who’ve had to go through that but The Mister pointed out that if you’re born here you get your number then so perhaps I’ve experienced something special that most Americans don’t get to experience. I want to live and work here – this is part of it, part of becoming a little bit more American. God I hope we don’t have to renew these numbers like we have to for everything else official we’ve got – we didn’t hang around to ask!