San Francisco - 5th October
[From: playoust@maths.su.oz.au (Catherine Playoust)]
Danny Yee's Postcard VI.
Picture
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[This card was produced by Smith Novelty Co.]
Portrait mode. Two photos, day on top and night below. In the middle is CHINATOWN in pseudo-Chinese writing.
Top picture shows a street with a slight hill. Day. Shops and pedestrians along sides. In the foreground is a heavy Chinese arch spanning the road. Green tiles, white pillars, some dragons and other animals, and some real Chinese script. Cross-street has bilingual street sign, saying "Bush" (in English version, anyway!).
Bottom picture is a different streetscape. Night. Mostly taken up with a 3-storey Chinese-y building with 2-storey tower, on the street corner. Has several tiled rooflet-awnings, decorated with fairy lights, and upturned corners. Building includes a ?restaurant with a red cloth awning "Cathay House", several instances of a wreath-type logo above which is "Trade Mark", and a vertical illuminated sign saying ???"WAX US6U". Tram in front of building, saying "San Franscisco Municipal Railway". A few pedestrians. Also notable is a very bright street-light in the foreground on the right. It bears a sign on which is painted "49 Mile Scenic Drive", and a ?duck.
Caption
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CHINATOWN SAN FRANCISCO
The mysteries of the Orient await you in Chinatown
Photos by Ken Glaser, Jr. \copyright 1988
Printed in Korea
Stamp
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USA 40, "World Cup USA 94". Drawing with
splodges of orange, yellow and grey-green in
background. A man in shorts, top, long socks
and heavy shoes who seems to have superglued his
outstretched right hand and raised left leg to a
soccer ball. Looks as if he is about to fall over.
[I think this is not the intended interpretation.]
Message
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Today I caught the train down the peninsula towards San Jose, and was picked up by Sea. We visited an assortment of shops and then went back to her place, where I was most pleased to find a whole pile of computers, all connected together and SLIPed to the net, one of which was running Linux and X. After I went through my mail (and managed to accidentally delete my mail file, ouch!) we went out to dinner with some of the other people I knew from the net. Then it was back to SF by train, with a 45 minute wait for the once every 20 minute bus back to my hotel. (But everything seemed safe enough, even at 12.15 in the morning.)
The peninsula is very different to the city itself---sprawling suburbs and scattered malls and shops---and would probably be impossible without a car. Rather different to Sydney, though, which is probably more like LA. I prefer SF proper to the suburbs.
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