San Francisco - 6th October

[From: David Mar <mar@physics.su.OZ.AU>]

Postcard VII - 6/4/94 San Francisco

Picture:
A sunset (sunrise??) scene. The bottom half is a foreground carpet of flowers: Poppies, ... er... more different types of poppies(?)... in red, pink, yellow, purple, and a bit of white. In the midground is a building which looks a bit like the US Capitol building, but smaller and apparently made of a white framework and walled with glass, like a big greenhouse. It's lit from the interior and surrounded by lush green lawn, a few palm trees, and some other trees I can't identify. The foreground flowers are lit by fill-in flash (or photographic lamps of some sort). Deep blue sky above, with words "San Francisco" superposed in a decorative white serif script.

Caption:

CONSERVATORY OF FLOWERS, SAN FRANCISCO
Beautiful spring flowers carpet the entrance to the Conservatory of Flowers in Golden Gate Park.
Photo by Ken Glaser, Jr. (C) 1988
Printed in Korea

Stamp: World Cup USA 94; a soccer player doing something incredibly athletic.

Text:

Golden Gate Park (picture) is very attractive - big enough that the density of visitors drops right off away from the main attractions. I did the tour - the Academy of Sciences (a natural history museum), the De Young art museum, the flower conservatory (a tropical hothouse) and the Japanese tea garden. I think I must have read too much ecology and anthropology though, as isolated tropical plants and art works are profoundly unsatisfying - I keep asking What was the context?

Then I caught a bus around the city (via the Golden Gate Bridge approach) with some great views (SF has some decent hills and some mountains as backdrop - something Sydney lacks). I walked back to my hotel via Chinatown, which is just a big collection of souvenir shops. (I had trouble finding somewhere to eat!!) I've just had my first Hershey's bar (chocolate), but it wasn't a patch on the wonderful (but really expensive) Swiss chocolates SEA introduced me to yesterday.

I'm not impressed with either the sales tax or mandatory tipping - why don't they just add it to the prices _before_ printing the menu? It's bad enough having to do currency conversions... Danny

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