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Lonely Planet - San Francisco
If you're exploring San Francisco, be sure to check out these highlights, brought to you courtesy of our friends at Lonely Planet Publications
1. Go gourmet by the bay
Foodies flock to SF in search of that one dish that induces instant nostalgia - the one you'll wish you'd never tasted, just so you could experience that first bite again. Now add to that flavour a panoramic view of the bay with gourmet-minded seagulls circling overhead in the vain hope of leftovers, and the realization kicks in: you may never have it this good again. That is, until tomorrow, when the Ferry Building opens for lunch.
According to a decade-old survey that's passed into urban legend, San Francisco has one restaurant for every eight people - no wonder it's a town of picky eaters. For even a $10 meal, locals expect inventive combinations of fresh seasonal ingredients; for $50 and up, they demand to know where those organic dry-farmed tomatoes were farmed, when that fish was caught, and everything but the nickname of that cow.
That may sound like a tall order, but the Ferry Building delivers.
Want a million-dollar view with your sustainably caught fish taco and organic jicama/grapefruit salad with toasted pumpkin seeds? Mijita awaits. Craving that local Dungeness crab you saw hauled in at the docks, preferably atop Vietnamese cellophane noodles? Good thing you have reservations at Slanted Door.
Nice Saturday for a picnic? Raid the Ferry Building Farmers Market. Savor that flavor by the bay, and let life exceed expectations.
2. Join San Francisco's party of the year
It never fails when the Gay and Lesbian Freedom Band strikes up 'I Will Survive': someone always breaks free from the sidelines and belts out heartfelt vocals. Pride is always most thrilling when it verges on chaos, with paraders clomping over in rainbow platform boots to greet admirers, and spectators spontaneously joining the moms and dads of PFLAG (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays). 'Dykes on Bikes' lead the parade with a pack of Harleys, only to dissolve into Dr Seussian order with 'dykes on mountain bikes' and 'dykes with tykes' pushing strollers.
The crowd cheers for everyone, and goes wild for uniforms - especially LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) firefighters and sailors flagrantly disobeying the US military's 'don't ask, don't tell' policy. Even the sidelines are sights to see: a wheelchair bedecked with pink streamers, an elderly couple quietly holding hands, a teenager in a T-shirt with 'Yes I'm Queer' scrawled in marker.
And so it continues down San Francisco's rainbow-flag-bedecked Market St, from 11am until the late-afternoon fog rolls in. This parade won't quit until tens of thousands of people are hoarse, elated and covered in glitter and smeared lipstick. Counter-protesters bearing signs warning of damnation are no match for the collective wit and sheer bulk of this crowd: all of SF seems present, with an additional 300,000+ people arriving annually for the city's biggest event.
3. Get lit at the Landmark bookstore
A sign in the doorway by poet and co-founder Lawrence Ferlinghetti reads: 'Abandon all despair, ye who enter here.' This is easier than you might think at City Light. Browsers in the Muckraking section meet co-conspirators, lingerers in Lost Continents stumble upon fellow travelers, and the wild-eyed ones in Poetry? That could be love - or seekers of the bathroom.
San Franciscans are serious booklovers, and they don't fall for just any bookstore. They buy more books per person than anywhere else in the US, hoard three times more library books than the national average, and argue passionately about dozens more they've never actually read (ahem). But City Lights proved it was no ordinary pulp purveyor in 1957, when publishing small editions of Beat poetry made it the test case for free speech.
After Ferlinghetti and bookstore manager Shigeyoshi Murao were arrested for having the audacity to `willfully and lewdly print' Allen Ginsberg's magnificent Howl & Other Poems, they won a landmark ruling that books with 'redeeming social significance' could not be banned. City Lights went on to publish Lenny Bruce, Paul Bowles, Noam Chomsky and William S Burroughs, and today gives booklovers a chance to max out freedom and credit cards on incendiary titles like Cindy Sheehan's Dear President Bush, Zapatista Subcomandante Marcos' The Speed of Dreams, and Howard Zinn's A Power Governments Cannot Suppress. When you abandon all despair, you make more room for books.
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