San Francisco, CA (continued)

This hostel has a piano and a guitar available for public use in the dining room. The piano is missing two Es, a D and a B flat, but what strings remain are more or less in tune, and the guitar has all six strings and works fine. I've been away from my various instruments for so long and it's a blessed relief to be able to have a tinkle & a strum once in a while. Sadly my listening options remain very limited, as my MP3 player died a soggy death in a rainstorm in Chicago, and the prevailing choice of music in the hostel is dubstep darkcore trance garage or whatever they call it these days. Bah humbug. I try playing along to that stuff on the piano but it doesn't really work.

It's the annual Gay Pride march tomorrow. Not that such an event will make all that much difference to the general state of affairs in San Francisco. There's more mincing going on round here than in Mr Kipling's factory in the run-up to Christmas. Still, whatever puts people in a good mood is OK with me.

Since my last update I have done more general sightseeing and eating and drinking, as you might expect. Plus obviously there has been Euro 2008 to keep up with. I was rooting for the underdogs in both semi-finals, but to no avail. The final is at lunchtime on Sunday; obviously in California there will be a solid consensus in favour of Spain and I am inclined to go along with that rather than support ze Germans.

Today I hired a bike and cycled all the way round town. The weather was great when I got here but since then it's reverted to the evidently more familiar chilly Pacific wind & fog. If it had been sunny today then I would have stayed out longer and maybe explored what lies north of the Golden Gate Bridge. As it was, I settled for a breeze past Baker Beach, Lincoln Park, Ocean Beach and Golden Gate Park and then home all the way along Haight. I also stopped briefly to inspect 710 Ashbury St, aka the Grateful Dead House. Thanks to Neale for the tip-off there. (For what it's worth, a substantial number of the bright young things with whom I've been conversing in my hostel have never heard of Haight-Ashbury, or indeed of the Dead themselves. I must be getting old).

I've been freeloading with aplomb in recent days. While watching the Spain/Russia semi-final in an Irish bar downtown, I had two pints of Hoegaarden; the waitress got forgetful and gave me a check for just one. Even that was just five dollars, which compares very favourably with the 3 pound 75 (no pound signs on these computers!) which I normally pay in Chaplins for said beverage. Also I scored for a free bottle of whiskey in my dorm room at the hostel, left by a previous occupant; it's Johnny Walker Red Label, not a single malt, but tolerable enough when liberally mixed with ginger ale. And today's bike hire was reduced to $17 thanks to a promo discount from the hostel.

Another pub crawl tonight. Tomorrow I'm going back down to Haight-Ashbury to buy myself a suitably cool & bohemian T-shirt; no definite plans for Sunday; Monday I'm going to do the Alcatraz tour.

Haven't really been keeping up with Wimbledon. But perhaps the best thing about being in the USA is that I neither know, hear nor see anything at all to do with Big Tw*tting Brother.

710 Ashbury St, San Francisco - home of the Grateful Dead

(part of) the Golden Gate Bridge