Pink ’ n ‘ Pride

Yesterday was the Pink party in San Francisco. I went there with a friend of mine. First to a block party. There they nearly close one street block in total, to celebrate and drink on the street. At this point of the day it was very easy to get a parking spot for the car. Again I met very nice and friendly people. In the bar were we went in, was next to a flipper also an ATM. Very wired! After 6pm we moved on.

Pink Saturday is a street party held the Saturday night before San Francisco Pride (Gay Pride Day) in San Francisco's Castro district, attracting more than half a million people. It is all organized by The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.

 

A leading-edge Order of queer nuns. The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence (SPI) is a charity, protest, and street performance organization that uses drag and Catholic imagery to call attention to sexual intolerance and satirize issues of gender and morality.

 

The whole district was closed (around 10x10 blocks) and we drove several rounds till we finally got a parking space. It was very crowded. The people were celebrating on the street. One of the “Sisters” told us: “Be save!” “Oh, we will, I am German!” “I went to Berlin, I know what is going on there! Be save!” 

There were gorgeous people. Everybody was dancing, cheering, drinking and celebrating in the streets. Some in their normal clothes, some in costumes, some are in pink, some are naked. Funny thing, the naked guy was Dutch and we talked a bit. I figured out, that it is at anytime allowed to run naked to the city. They are completely tolerating this. Actually all were very impressed by his little Dutchy. There were other men also running naked around and what shall I say. The Dutch man scored.

Drinking stuff… Funny thing I drank in a bar a Heineken – “non domestic beer” is better but more expensive.

 

Later I found a empty Beck’s bottle drooling around. So the Americans like good beer. Very good to know. Their beer is tasting like water.

I met a couple of very nice people, they are all very open minded, don’t judging you by anything. They are also very interested and love to make lots of small talk

 

Till midnight we celebrated under the full moon in San Francisco, then we drove back home to prepare ourselves for the next day. 

I was laughing a lot when we got back to the car. In Germany usually the people who are interested in buying your car are putting their cards to your car window while you are not there (actually you never call them, they pay bad prices and are not very serious). Here the car window was filled by flyers of gay clubs, bars, saunas and other gay things. Very funny!

Today was the Gay Pride. The San Francisco Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Pride Celebration, usually known as San Francisco Pride, is a parade and festival held in June each year in San Francisco to celebrate the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people and their allies. 

It is one of the most famous and best-attended pride parades in the world. It is the largest parade of any sort in United States. The San Francisco Pride parade is a world-renowned LGBT pride parade. It is held on Sunday morning of the Festival. The route is usually along San Francisco's Market Street, from Beale Street to 8th Street. 

The parade starts nominally at 10:30 am, though it is hours before all the contingents are able to get onto the parade route, and the last contingent doesn't leave the parade route until 2-4 pm. The parade consists of hundreds of contingents from various groups and organizations.

 

The city was completely crowded, no parking space, we drove into public parking. There was no chance to find a free one. Most of the streets in the city were still closed.

 

Dykes on Bikes, PFLAG (Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays), Politicians frequently participate in the parade, as a way of making themselves visible to LGBT prospective voters, Churches of many denominations, Dance clubs and LGBT-oriented entertainment businesses contribute several contingents (Google was walking, too!) and the Leather Contingent consists of lesbian, gay and pansexual leather and BDSM groups. 

It is very funny to see all the politicians sitting in their open cars and waving to the masses of people. The parade feels like a bit of Carnival and Sinterklaas. So many funny groups running around, giving you stickers, rainbow bracelets, hearts you can smash, bags and condoms. We left the parade before the end had reached us to go to the festival.

A two-day (Saturday and Sunday) festival has grown up around the Sunday morning parade. It is a collection of booths, dance stages, and vendors around the Civic Center area near San Francisco City Hall. On the Sunday of the parade, an area of the festival called Leather Alley features fetish and BDSM oriented booths and demonstrations.



Another Alley is full of kinds of different food. We took “original greek gyros” what was very overpriced for the size. It was totally crowded and all around were drooling this really crazy people, celebrating themselves and have lots of fun! And we did too!

And I Geocached a Bit...

Monday I met another Geocacher, LJGhere. He is 69 years old and cached a lot! We cached around a golf court but it was very exhausting. No shadow at least, long road. We were very dehydrated and decided to spend the rest of the day by driving around. So we drove to the Mount Hamilton. Mount Hamilton is the tallest mountain overlooking Silicon Valley, and is the site of Lick Observatory, the first permanently occupied mountain-top observatory.

There was a free tour which took us with a guard inside the old telescope. I was really impressed how it worked in total and also which technology they had build and how. The road to the observatorium is 32 km long. 

All the stuff they needed were transported by horse trails up to the top of the mountain. It was built in 1875–76 in anticipation of the observatory, and the need to carry materials and equipment up the mountain in horse-drawn wagons, the grade seldom exceeds 6,5 percent. The original telescope is still working, they also have build a few more. 

Yesterday I went with 4 other geocachers to the Almaden Quicksilver Park. So far, I only “met” one of them via Facebook and with the other I had already mailed for 14 days. We started around 8.30 am at a Taco Bell (for meeting) and then drove to the Park. At 3 pm we were home again.

The park takes up 4157 acres of steep hillsides, cool forests, open meadows, and deep valleys. It borders two long reservoirs and contains several small ponds. It is crisscrossed by trails. There are also remnants of mining structures throughout the park. The park is mostly undeveloped, but its history includes intense mercury mining operations that date back to the Gold Rush Era.

All mines and adits have been sealed. Almaden Quicksilver County Park was once the site of extensive quicksilver (mercury) mining. The mercury mined from here was used in gold and silver mines in the Sierras to extract the precious metals from the ore. 

Sediments that contain mercury have been deposited in some of the local reservoirs and streams. The hills here are honeycombed with tunnels that run for thousands of feet, some below sea level. All mining has ceased, and most of the tunnels have been sealed up. The vast majority of the park, though, is undeveloped wildland, filled with wildlife and covered with trees, grasses, and beautiful spring wildflowers.

So I learned lots of the nature. Figured out what wolf spiders are, looked out for rattle snakes, poison oak, cougars and other poison dangerous creatures who are drooling around there. Also what poison oak is doing to other plants. In my opinion it is acting like the “Borg” - by assimilation. 

Unless I wear a sun blocker, I am really burned. Arms and face too, my head was protected with my new shiny sun hat. In the middle of nowhere stands a bath tub on a hill.

 

We also passed an old mine. Lucky us, there just arrived a park ranger who opened the gates for us and made an historical excurse by explaining how it all worked. 

Funny thing, that one of my group members was very familiar with the whole area and had have just explained all of that to me. This was very cool indeed to have him with me, I learned a lot about the area there. Also about the workers, the mines, the cemeteries out there. At this moment, he is the “typical American Man” for me.

The caches are very nice made and hidden. Some are so obvious when you looked at them and others also reflected the name of itself. But in total it was very exhausting for me.

Around the Bay

During the last week we did a few activities.

At the moment, I feel very at home in a gigantic Maya style computer shop, because my laptop is making trouble. But I am not the only one with technical issues, I am also very familiar with one of the apple shops, because Bossy’s laptop was broken, too.

Tuesday, after we visited these shops again, we drove to the Halfmoon Bay on the other side of the mountains, at the Pacific Ocean. The road though the forest was very winding. The temperature was getting colder and we had a lot more rain. Near the road there is a sort of garden center “Spanish Town – arts and crafts”. There are huge, rusty, metal animals outside dinosaurs, elephants, lions. Also some giraffes, Donna would have loved them!

Inside it is like a bazaar, a mixture of India, Spain, northsea… from every part a bit. Very impressive. As were the garden figurines outside. I need to hire a huge container for when I go back to bring all these impressive things with me.

We did 2 more geocaches on the seaside while we waited till the restaurant was open. We had an amazing view over the cliffs. I really love the sea.

Thursday we drove again to San Francisco to do a few business things. I had from the 24th floor at the department of the “Deutsche Bank” a wonderful view over the bay till the Golden Gate Bridge. The comment of the bank employee was: "I think she likes the view." But it was not only “like” - it was breathtaking, once again! Later I took more pictures from a different office view and was told that you can "pay for the view" to get a good one.

After that we went again to the pier. This time we walked in the other direction, to the tourist zone. There are lots of funny shops, also one only for left-handed-persons. Home of Olaf!

You can take a speed boat through the bay and you also have a good view of Alcatraz.

There are platforms were lots of sea lions are laying lazy in the sun, not even caring about all the people who are watching them. I thought of my very best friend, Nickel, and was happy and also sad, that she wasn’t here with me. Happy, because now we could easily go on, sad because she would loved them and had tried to adopt them for sure. And then we would never have gotten out of there.

This time we took dinner in the “Rainforest Café”. The whole place is styled as a gigantic rainforest cave. I ate coconut shrimps and watched the fishes swimming around me. They even simulated a small thunderstorm, where all the robot animals (not the fishes, they were real) came to life. I took a lot of frog pictures for Claudia. I think she would have loved this place.

On the way home we took the long way, over the Bay Bridge to the other side of the bay. This bridge has two floors. The down-level is the way out of the city, the upper one the way in. Bossy made the pictures, I tried to handle a 6 way crowded lane.

 

Saturday we drove to Monteray. There is a huge aquarium. And it is also at the sea, but on the other side from Halfmoon Bay. This is a very charming place. Small houses, rough seaside. Mostly build from wood. And good weather.

 

The aquarium was very nice, there are many spots for kids to try things out on their own. Also the employees were running around with small wagons and explained the animals inside, like starfishes, to the kids (and me) and let us touch them.

I also made a movie of the jellyfishes. If I would become a marine biologist some day, I would spent my time with seahorses and jellyfishes. Amazing things!

Top of my favorite cities in the world

Yesterday we went to the science center in San Francisco, which is located in the Golden Gate Park.

Lots of exhibits are there, also a huge planetarium which was making me very dizzy. It was interesting but on the other hand I felt very sad for the animals put into –imho- tiny plastic boxes. We stepped on a scale (both of us at the same time) to discover how many of us is the weight of one blue whale. It will need 826 for it. Not so bad at all. We both didn’t feel very bad after that, at least we didn’t stepped on it alone.

After this we (ok, mostly me) started a new run on the Geocaches there. Bossy was twittering all the time while sitting on a parkbank, sharing his geocaching experiences with the world.  He was very amused to see me running through the woods and bushes, crawling over the ground – with no success. He checked the spoilers and logs with his Ipad and I was getting more and more confused. Then another Cachinggroup arrived. So we were 6 people – plus bank-sitting-Bossy – who were searching for the box. And I found it. Hurray for me! After a nice chat with these people I gave them my personal coin – now it is on its way back home I hope and will not get lost in the hands of coin-ninjas.

If I ever thought Amsterdam was a beautiful city and Belgium a wonderful country, I had no idea of San Francisco: This is a wonderful, amazing, beautiful, breathtaking, fantastic, fabulous, great, excellent, perfect, exquisite city! I was so amazed, staring around again, totally stumbled by the beauty of this city. We drove to the harbor, there is a market hall with the flair of an oriental bazaar. This hall was located near the Bay Bridge, not the Golden Gate, the other one. The view over the bay with nearby island there, the smell of the ocean, the sailing ships,… I am really out of words to describe it.

I have shown Bossy a “Virtual Cache” near the harbor, saw a man who had fished very large fishes out of there. And we went on through the Market Street, back to the car. On the way back we picked up 2 more caches, Bossy found one of them. This one was very close to the Cable Cars, we didn’t take a ride with them but I was again staring and impressed with this city. He showed me where he had lived. In a park nearby I found a Nano by crawling on the ground.

Then I thought we would drive back – ok we did, not the direct way but through the city. Riding is very exciting here. Not only that you really feel like you are in the mountains, it is very steep, and at intersections the one who arrived first there, is the one who can go on first. We drove to the Pacific, there is a sort of cliff, where till the end of the 1960’ a swimming pool in Victorian style was located. It burned down, and now there are only ruins left. It was impressive: this area is still San Francisco but you don’t have the feeling you are in the big city. A breathtaking view over the ocean all the way to a part of the Golden Gate Bridge.

There we did a very short multi. Counting steel pipes in a cave near the ocean where the originally pipe system fed the swimming pool with water.

I finally took of my shoes: Barefoot in San Francisco! There was too much sand inside and outside my shoes. 

Sadly we had to back over the sunny, warm and cliffy road. Both of us were out of breath. Apparently I switched 3 numbers of the final coordinates – so we needed to go a few 100 meters back. But Bossy, with his new sense for finding Tupperware in the woods, got him! Hurray to Bossy!

The way back up to the car made us both feel like we were getting a heart attack soon.

Back to the car we drove back, along the crowded beach, though the hills back to San Jose.

I decided to make San Francisco the very top of my favorite cities in the world.

PS: More pictures are on Facebook again!