Go west, young man:  2013 vacation, Day 9

Sunday morning L wanted to sleep in, and M had been agitating to find a bookstore to replenish her reading material.  I got online and started searching for bookstores in San Francisco that might be open on Sunday.  There was one bookstore near the hotel, but it didn’t keep Sunday hours.  I finally found Christopher’s Books over on Potrero Hill which claimed to open on Sunday; we got directions on how to get there by bus from the concierge (amazing fact:  there are NO chain bookstores in San Francisco; they all either failed or moved out, leaving the field to the indies).  A couple of blocks’ walk brought us to the 10 bus stop at Second and Mission.  A twenty-minute ride put us at 17th and Connecticut, and a couple of blocks’ more walking brought us to the bookstore at 18th and Missouri.

It was closed.

This was actually OK; we were early.  It was only 9:45 and the shop wasn’t supposed to open until ten.  We went back down the block, found a bench, and sat and watched the Sunday morning life of a San Francisco residential neighborhood away from the tourist influences.  It looked like an area I would like to go back to.  Across the street from our bench there was a French bakery, a Mediterranean joint, an Asian fish place, and a goat-cheese pizza place; on our side there was a little Mexican hole-in-the-wall.  People walked dogs, got coffee and pastries, and generally acted like Sunday morning.  It was peaceful.

House fronts on Missouri.  The shapes say that there are some serious oldsters underneath the remodels.

This was the only non-peaceful thing:  a sign warning trucks of a steep hill and that it was probably better to go another way.

The shop opened a few minutes after ten and we were the first customers, although several more followed only a few minutes later.  M found the book she had been after and one other, and I found a John Green title I hadn’t read.  I chatted books for a few minutes with the clerk at the register, we paid for our purchases, and walked back down to the bus, which came along about fifteen minutes later.  The ride back was a mirror copy of the ride out, passing by the Adobe office on Townsend street, the Caltrain commuter depot, and close enough to AT&T Park for M to get a picture of it down the street.

(Which reminds me of a joke:  Q:  What do you get if you cross an anthill with a nuclear reactor?  A:  Gi-ants.)

The bus decanted us at Second and Mission, and we walked the two blocks to the hotel, spotting this sign along the way:

Piano dealerships, handling only pianos, just aren’t common any more.  I remarked to M that that was something killed first by the radio, then by stereos and finally by iPods.

On the way back to the hotel, I noticed the Contemporary Jewish Museum was right there on Mission Street, and since I had been seeing advertisements all over downtown for an exhibition of photographs by Allen Ginsberg, I decided to do that in the afternoon.  I went over and spent an hour or so there, learning that Ginsberg was a rather interesting portrait photographer, with enough of a sense of history to write long captions for many of the photos describing who he was shooting, where, when, and what they were all doing at the time.  The museum didn’t allow photography, but click the link above to take you to the Ginsberg project site, with many of the same pictures.

By suppertime, M and I were pretty much agreed that we were tired of eating at the diner (Mel’s Drive-in) near the hotel, so we went to the food court at the Metreon Center instead.  And that was it for the night; we came back and crashed out to get ready to leave Monday morning for Colorado.