travelweasel

I’m staying at the City Center Hostelling International in San Francisco. It’s located in the Tenderloin, which has the reputation of the area to stay out of. This is mostly because of the large homeless population, and I do not feel that the area is any more dangerous than the Red Light District, which is where the popular Green Tortoise is located.  Anyway the hostel is pretty great. Staff are very friendly and helpful and the rooms have just four beds, a bathroom and a closet! My only complaint here is that there is only one light in the room, so if one person is up everyone is. Free breakfast means bagels, toast, OJ, tea and coffee (all day), and fruit and cream cheese for an extra $.50 (which I think is sort of lame).Also the place is full of French high schoolers who are here to study English. They aren’t so bad, but are hard to communicate with. Today, on Thanksgiving, they were trying to bake two turkeys. At 5:00 pm they had just started to defrost it, and were arguing over whether they could do so in the microwave (the thing didn’t end up fitting in the microwave.) I think it’s still cooking now. 

We stayed in the Green Tortoise on Broadway. In the heart of the Red Light District, on the cusp on Chinatown and North Beach. The Red Light District consists mostly of big strip joints with leery bouncers who stand outside and try to get people to come in. I wasn’t scared to walk around because the area is full of people. But maybe I should have been. The windows of our rental car were smashed and a big red suitcase was taken - we were just lucky there was nothing of value in it.  The next night a man was shot in the back right outside the hostel. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/11/26/BA3A14C1V6.DTL&hw=broadway&sn=009&sc=228He died.I think I’m going to move to a different hostel.  

We drove south on Route 1 and found our way to Stinson Beach. We had planned on staying at the Point Reyes Hostel, but the manager was so rude that we turned our car around without ever having gotten out.The Stinson Beach Motel was the perfect solution, and the tanned, bermuda short wearing owner who could not have been friendlier. For $85 we had a small, clean room with an incredible mattress that was just minutes from the beach. In fact, we walked to the beach in the dark that night. The Milky Way shone and I made out four of the Seven Sisters. The beach is wide and flat, but there’s always a thrill to being on the beach at night, especially a beach you’ve never been to before. Friends in Portland recommended the Sand Dollar Restaurant. We went for dinner and there was a live guitar and piano player. The food was decent and moderately priced.  It’s a tiny beach town, but it’s also obvious you’re just an hour north of San Francisco.   

Everyone in Seattle owns, and usually carries around, three items: a rain coat, an umbrella, and a pair of rain boots. And you should see the variety they come in! Sold in every shop, on every street corner.I was impressed by the fashion sense of Seattle-ites. Well, impressed considering the conditions, and the conditions are Rain. It isn’t always pouring rain in Seattle - if it was, people probably just wouldn’t go outside. It’s more like walking around in a cloud. Sometimes it’s misty, and sometimes the mist coagulates to make little rain drops. So there isn’t a good excuse to stay inside, but it’s a good idea to be prepared for precipitation. And the good people of Seattle are. I personally hate these rubberized rain necessities. I think they’re ugly, and I don’t think that ugliness should be ignored or covered up by bright flowers or polka-dots. I think the ugliness of rain gear should be embraced by designs that make the items more ugly so that they can perhaps become so ugly that they’re actually interesting to look at. It’s like trying to hide a bad smell with air freshener - it just makes things worse. You might as well just smell the smell for what it is. Not sure if that made any sense, but my point is that the most fashionable people in Seattle wear rain gear that is deliberately ugly. 

There are currently only two hostels in Seattle, the Green Tortoise, located downtown, (www.greentortoise.net) and Hostel Seattle, in Ballard, (www.hostelseattle.com.)For the backpacker, this means two things: 1. Book in advance, especially on weekends.2. Expect to pay more for your bed ($25-35.)  According to a cabbie, there used to be a Hosteling International but they got kicked out of their building by corporate monsters and never bothered reopening. My mom and I decided to stay at Hostel Seattle in Ballard because it was cheaper than the Green Tortoise, and because I had had mixed experiences at the Green Tortoise in San Francisco.Ballard is a nice waterfront town filled with little shops and intersected by a bike/walking path that leads through Fremont and into the city. Not that you would want to walk into the city. It takes about 45 minutes to get to downtown from the hostel (a ten minute walk to the 17 Bus, a fifteen minute wait for the bus, then a twenty minute ride in.) So if you want to be in the city, go to the Green Tortoise.The hostel itself is clean, well-run and cozy. There’s a small, well-kept kitchen with a broken stove and small-fridge. My only complaint here is that there are no cupboards for guests to keep their food. We’re staying in the hostel’s only private room, which costs $60 a night. Two dorm beds would have run us $50, and there are about a dozen dorm beds in each of three large rooms.The manager is friendly, and if you ask him (or even if you don’t), he’ll give you a map and circle all the big tourist attractions. Personally, I’m not too interested in the tourist attractions, but it’s nice to know they’re there.