San Francisco Travelogue 2015 – Day 2 (Part 1)

Day 2 — Sunday, April 26, 2015

In the morning, Tim & I popped over to the Haight Street Market for coffee. It’s a charming little high-end market. Their coffee bar features pour-over drip coffee — it’s strong and oh so good.

Love the Jimi Hendrix mural.

Tim makes Moby’s food from scratch, but that’s another post. This morning though, Moby’s breakfast consisted of a chicken back and neck, a couple of melted bone broth & turmeric cubes, and a whole egg.

He polished the whole mess off in under five minutes:

Then Tim set to work making Crabcakes Benedict for the three of us. It was to DIE FOR. You’d pay at least $30 for this in a restaurant.

OMG OMG OMG

Thoroughly stuffed now, I left the guys alone so they could get some work done while I wandered around. First, I explored Haight Street. Lots of transient hippies. Murals. Secondhand pot smoke. Tibetan shops — four in the Haight-Ashbury area alone, plus I spotted a high-end one downtown.

Lots of chunky stone jewelry.

I tried to remember to ask permission for pictures, but sometimes I forgot.

Bolts of fabric and lots of wild, furry coats.

I have a Tibetan singing bowl, but it sits on a wooden stand, not these stuffed rings…

Resin skulls. One had the alphabet, yes/no, good/bad, etc. so it could be used as a ouija board.

Scary carved wood masks.

I ended up going back a day later and getting a ring for our singing bowl. Glad I did, too. The wooden stand it had been sitting on (under the plant to the left now) disappeared under the bowl, and with the bowl now sitting on the ring, its gonging sound reverberates much longer than before.

Got a couple of touristy items from a tie-dye shop:

Randomness on Haight Street:

Architecture.

Architecture.

Loved this old hardware store sign.

Mural.

Then I headed three blocks west to the east end of Golden Gate Park. What a gorgeous place.

My first destination: the Conservatory of Flowers. OMG this place is amaze-balls. It’s an enormous greenhouse and botanical garden housing a world-class collection of rare and exotic plants. Completed in 1878, it survived the 1906 earthquake and is the oldest building in the park. It was one of the first municipal conservatories constructed in the United States and is the oldest remaining municipal wooden conservatory in the country. For these distinctions and for its associated historical, architectural, and engineering merits, the Conservatory of Flowers is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and the California Register of Historical Places. It is a California Historical Landmark and a San Francisco Designated Landmark.

It costs $8 to get in. WELL worth the money.

Random bits of art dotted the place.

A wall of bromeliads.

 

Some doors between climates had to be closed; others were kept open.

 

Temperature and humidity is tightly controlled in each environment.

People have weddings in here, too.

Loved this stone slab bench. Took forever to get a picture without some people in it, though!

A giant bromeliad.

Extremely steamy in here. You can see the condensation on the glass, and some pictures came out foggy.

These strangler fig vines were growing straight out of the tiles.

A pineapple!

Ran across an outdoor swing dance class:

Coming up in part 2 of day 2: More Golden Gate Park ~ More Haight Street ~ Sushi @ Domo