day two: wednesday

In addition to the dopeness of having the room right off the courtyard, my room is also right next to the hotel kitchen. It's a regular kitchen like you would find in a house, with all the regular kitchen stuff like plates and glasses, ice, a dishwasher, and best of all, food. Food you can eat any time. Delicious food, like cheese danish and peanut butter and wasabi snack mix. On my second morning in SF, I discovered the awesomeness that is being able to roll out of bed and get coffee in my pjs. Instant gratification, and because my room is so close to the coffeemaker, I didn't even have to worry about anyone seeing me skulking around the kitchen with my ubiquitous morning cowlick. After four or five cups of coffee and four or five danishes, we went to a meeting at the office where our first training was.

We got on the subway to Oakland with bags and bags of cleaning product ingredients that I had shopped for on Tuesday night. It was quite a hike to the train station, and holding the stuff, which included two five-gallon jugs of vinegar, made the train ride itself into yet another workout. Between tooling around the city buying supplies and then taking them places, up and down these crazy hills, my muscles have been in a constant state of achy breakiness. But all the exercise makes is a lot easier to justify eating gelato twice a day.

After the meeting we went to Union Square - picture Downtown Crossing plus two thousand additional tourists plus cars. Pretty nuts. We ate at a New York-style deli, which wasn't nearly as New Yorky as anything I've experienced on the East Coast, but still pretty good. We got some latkes, and they were $10. This place is nauseatingly expensive. More on that later.

I left my boss and decided to walk back to the hotel. This took about two hours, what with my stopping at various antique stores and jewelers trying to find tarnished silver (to demonstrate our green silver polishing technique). When I asked, people generally looked at me like I had twelve heads, each one crazier than the last.

I stumbled upon a really cool farmer's market in front of the Civic Center. A lot of the produce was stuff I'd never seen before, mostly Chinese and Mexican vegetables and fruits. And yes, there was Durian fruit. I would have bought some, except it's heavy to carry, smells like ass, and tastes worse than it smells.

I was a little bit luckier finding liquid castile soap. When I finally got back to the hotel I decided it was time to stop fucking around and just go to a Trader Joe's or Whole Foods. The point of this part of our training is to utilize ingredients that people around here can easily find at local (and cheap) stores, so I was trying really hard to not wuss out and go to a yuppie chain store, but my feet were killing me. So I mapquested the closest Trader Joe's (two miles away) and set out for Haight-Ashbury (on foot, not really solving my achy feet problem).

Well I never quite got to Trader Joe's, because I got distracted by gelato and then found castile soap at one of SF's many many MANY vitamin/herb/other hippie crap stores. I did end up walking almost all the way there, and I got to see most of the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood in my wanderings. All of the stereotypical legends about the neighborhood seem to be true. The whole place smelled like nag champa and cloves, alternatingly (I know that isn't a word.)

I walked up many a steepass hill through the Lower Haight and up to Buena Vista park (good views, as the name would suggest) and then Duboce park, where there was a doggie play group thing going on. In a word, it was f-ing idyllic. The area where Duboce park is is pretty much what the intro to Full House looked like - long rows of tall, skinny Victorian-ish houses on a steep hill, with wholesome-looking young family types all over the place, their kids in expensive jogging strollers and baby gap clothes. It was a far cry from the neighborhood where I'm staying (which I'll get to later).

I got back to the hotel, made some phone calls to my loved ones, and collapsed in a heap on my bed. I was going to just call it a night, but it was only like 9pm, plus I needed a burrito, like, asap. So I headed deeper into the Castro district, where I'm staying. By all accounts it's the most vibrant gay neighborhood in the city, which is really saying a lot. I was tempted when passing by bars like The Men's Room and Moby Dick, but I kept going in search of a sweet taqueria.

On Castro street, which is like the main drag (yes) of the neighborhood, I found a place that met all my needs, i.e, eggs and avocados. The B&B is awesome but severely lacking in the egg department. I got huevos rancheros that would bring tears of joy to your eyes. Fresh eggs, cooked juuust over easy, right in front of me, with warm corn tortillas, Spanish rice, black beans, some kind of delicious fresh green salsa, and a WHOLE avocado sliced over the top. And for san francisco food, it was actually pretty cheap. I ate the bejesus out of that thing and passed out cold.