I went to San Francisco yesterday with Shaadi and his friends. I realized that car rental rate for a day are same as minimum taxi fare. Shaadi was driving in his usual video game style mode and the ride to SF was fun. We had lots of snacks and map lying in the car and the map were really very useful.

First place we went was a carnival in and had a tough time finding parking space. The carnaval was not all that great, just a big crowd with lots of music and noice and some stalls trying to sell clothes and handicrafts (probably made in udaipur) for exceptionally high rates.

We also got to see some beutiful buildings like City Hall and saw The Great Seal of state of California (its really not that great, but for a seal, yes it is huge).

After that we went to Lombard Street, it is also called the croockedest street. See more info here. It was really fun sitting in car at such an inclination, wheel spins were unavoidable. Its good that almost all cars in US use automatic gear shift otherwise driving the car would be nearly impossible (there are lots of people who come to see the street, hence traffic crawls). There are many street with similar inclination in mussourie but I didn't see any one this long (the approach to street) and surely none of them were this curvy. (A slogan on one of the J&K roads, "Honey, Not too fast on my curves")

We went to Fisherman's Wharf next, it is said to be SF's most popular destination with lots of seafood hotels, and street vendors. The street was really very colourful, I bought a jacket from one of the shops because it was very cold. We couldn't take a ferry ride to alcatraz because we were too late. The famous Golden Gate bridge that has been destroyed atleast 100 times in various hollywood movies was looking very small from the street and I was disappointed that it was really not as grand as I expected. I was soon to be proven wrong, after having a very bad but enjoyable :> lunch at Hooters we went straight to Fortpoint to see sunset and suddenly the bridge was gignatic. But Shaadi was not satisfied with the view and he wanted to see sunset from a nearby hill, we crossed the bridge (it is a metal beauty) and lost our way :)) Some more map reading got us to a good place but alas, we were again just minutes late, the surrounding scenery was really good and multiple people simultaneously compared it with rivendell (I got to watch the movies, I have seen parts of second LOTR).

Will write later..