"You'll love it !"
"You'll want to spend loads of time there"
And as i'm prone to do, i believed the hype and forwent my usual 3 days per city rule and gave myself 4 nights in the city by the bay. I shouldn't have. It was just the same as any other city. Yeah, it was pretty and there was some cool stuff to do but it was no nicer than anywhere else I had been so far. It was just another big city with some well known tourist attractions.
It also didn't help that my hostel was located on Crack Alley aka Ellis Street which is slap bang in the middle of Tenderloin - one of the worst areas of the city. Not once but twice while walking down that street I saw people sitting in the middle of the sidewalk smoking crack pipes in broad daylight. Broad daylight, in the middle of the pavement. It was not a narrow pavement. It was very wide and there were plenty of doorways that could have provided perfectly adequate cover for their crack smoking, but no, the crack heads in San Francisco like to do it in the middle of the pavement for everyone to see.
As for the touristy stuff I did it all. Alacztraz Island (I highly recommend the night trip which comes with loads of extras and the added bonus of seeing the city lit up at night as you take the boat back to the main land.
I rode the cable car to Lombard Street the crookedest street in the world and walked across the Golden Gate Bridge to Sausalito. I also found my way up to Alamo Park to take photos of the Painted Ladies.
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