Shopping in Chinatown, San Francisco

The first picture is looking down Bush Street from Stockton. We stayed at the WorldMark which is very nicely located for a lot of fine dining, entertainment, shopping, and sightseeing. One had better do a little tuning up of the old muscles before visiting SF. We definitely had many chances to exercise little used muscles being that we live in the flatlands of the Snake River Plain in Idaho. I have found that it is a misconception that some people have that rural people are in good physical shape and city dwellers are potbellied slugs. Haha. Cities have fine public transportation, but the buses, trolley cars, or subways don't service every block. Sometimes it is just faster to walk instead of wait for the bus, and, of course, a lot cheaper to walk. So we do a lot of walking when we visit cities. In our rural setting we do a lot of driving and not much walking. When we visited NY with our family in 1989, we walked 84 blocks the first day. And that was after arriving after lunch. Our son was nine years old and daughter was 13. Geez, we walked the legs off those kids.

SF has its own special challenges with those hills. I have to laugh when I think of Idaho's famed Sawtooth Wilderness Area that gets over a million visitor days per year. The U.S.F.S. have reconstructed all the trails to have no greater than 7% grades. Really nice for walking, but if SF ever was taken over by the National Park Service, there would have to be some serious re-engineering of the streets and sidewalks. Don't think it is going to happen.

We rode the cable cars. Always a joy. And, yes, sometimes the passengers do have to get off and push the cable car for a few feet, I guess so that the cable can catch the car. Pretty cool to see a bunch of passengers jump off and start pushing the car in the middle of the street.

We were located one block from the Bush and Grant St. entrance to Chinatown. Our first visit netted a take home dinner from one of the bakeries and a big discovery. Well, a big discovery for J. After asking a few shopkeepers if there was a fabric store in Chinatown and being told "NO", J found one. What glee. Her reaction upon entering a fabric store reminds me of my buddy, Perry's reaction to entering a flyfishing store. A pure look of competence and anticipation. Makes me think of an alcoholic looking at that first drink of the evening. It was such a big find, that plans were made to return a few days later after thinking of what she could make with all that beautiful silk fabric and have time to really go through each bolt of fabric. And go through every bolt of fabric she did do. Yiyiyi, my aching back! Really. The salesgirl found me a stool to sit on while the two of them went through fabric. You can see the silk fondlers in the pictures. This was one smart saleslady knowing that keeping the husband contented was the secret to making a big sale. And a big sale she did make! I got to talking to her and found that she had lived in Boise, ID for a year, but it was too cold and she did not like it when her car made a 360 on the street one winter night. We Idahoans are always hoping for a real hard winter in hopes that it will drive the Californians back to California. They like Idaho until the winter sets in. Come on hard winter!!

A day later, J, caught a cab (I went to a bookstore and sat in Union Square reading the book, well, not really. I watched the homeless people. They are really interesting.) and went to the
Garment District of SF. There is an outlet there for some big merchandiser that I don't know the name of and they had bolts of fabric, too. J was seeing these numbers on the ends of the bolts and she thought it was the price. Like 35 etc. Well, it came to be that each bolt sold for the same price, something like $3.50 a bolt and the number at the end was the yardage. Well, that put the old fabricholic over the edge. She returned with three big black garbage bags full of fabric that must have totaled a hundred pounds. It took her several days to wash, dry and fold the fabric when we got home. Hey, a hundred pounds (a guess, but probably not much of an exeggeration) is a lot to handle when you are a retired lady.

She has plans for sewing outfits for the grandkids and, of course, sewing outfits to sell on the Etsy site under the name HattieJane's Creations. You can go to HattieJane.com to catch a link to her online store.

Just thinking of walking those SF streets and lugging around that fabric has tired me out all over again.

To all those Coyotes out there, Yiyiyi.

Papa Coyote loves you all