San Francisco-One Afternoon
 

I will have about 5 hours in San Francisco (by myself--yahoo!!!--can you tell I have 2 children under 6??) My flight gets in at 1, so I figure I can get to SF by 2?

I LOVE cheese, so my first stop will be the Cowgirl Creamery at the Ferry Market Place. There is another cheese shop within a reasonable distance--but once I have been to the Cowgirl Creamery Store/Ferry Marketplace Stores, am I really going to see something different?

I like Fishermans Warf, but have been there many times. If I figured 2-4 or 5 at the Ferry Market Place (too much???), what else could I do until 7 or 8?

What about a decent restaurant nearby where I could eat by myself? I may also just get a good Italian deli sandwhich and eat a late lunch.

Any and all ideas appreciated!

Well, you probably won't want to spend more than 2 hours at the Ferry Bldg (although it is wonderful!) unless you plan to eat lunch there. You can eat at the Slanted Door!!! Boulette's Larder is interesting, although a limited menu. Hog Island Oyster Co. Many interesting shops.

You are near other restaurants including One Market and Boulevard. If the weather is good you can take a long walk along the bay until you find something else you want to do...and catch a cab back to SFO.

If the weather isn't great you are not far from MOMA, an easy place to spend an hour or three.

Depends on what your interests are. I'm sure many people can easily spend a couple of hours shopping in/around Union Sq.

SF MOMA is a great suggestion; and you can hang out at the Yerba Buena Gardnes next door.

If you feel adventurous, you can take bus #5 or #21 to Golden Gate Park. You can easily spend hours there.

Alternatively, you can consider taking the Golden Gate Ferry to Sausalito (ferry leaves from Ferry Building). The ferry ride takes 30 minutes and you can spend an hour or 2 wandering in Sausalito. Ferry schedule here:
http://goldengateferry.org/schedules/Sausalito.php

Slanted Door is great but you should make reservations just to be sure. Another option is Fog City Diner, a nice walk from there.

SFMOMA has a very solid Frida Kahlo exhibit until the 28th of September. I am not that big on Frida Kahlo but it's a very good exhibit. The photographs from her life are worth the price of admission.

I would also suggest getting Chinese food in Chinatown or Mexican food in the Mission. Yuet Lee in Chinatown is very good, and I like Taqueria Pancho Villa in the Mission.

There is also the Haight which provides a diametrically opposite flavor of SF than Fisherman's Wharf and the Ferry Bldg.

You've gotten some great suggestions here.

If you are going to the Ferry Building, then you should eat there because it has so many possible places to eat.

All the other suggestions on where to go are good, so you have a great choice.

The only recommendation i would differ from is that of Yuet Lee in Chinatown. I'm not quite sure why it's so popular - maybe it's become some famous chefs (who know very little about chinese cuisine) have recommended it. The food is passable at best.

Ferry building would be a far better choice for food.

Just my 2 cents.

Have a great trip and welcome to San Francisco and the Bay Area! :)

Thanks for some cool ideas. The MOMA Kahlo exhbit sounds interesting. I am not a modern art fan, but our city had a small Kahlo exhibit--with info on her life--and I found it fascinating.

I think I will just eat at the Ferry Building. For some reason, the idea of getting on ferry to Sausalito and then coming back just seems a bit much to me. Or am I being overcautious? If it's a nice day, it could be fun to traipse around there looking at shops.

I am totally forgetting here, the aquarium is in Monterey, right? Not near SF. That could be fun.

What about a great bookstore near the wharf or the civic center?

The Steinhart Aquariun in the new Academy of Sciences in GG Park is scheduled to open Sept 27. Here is a news article

With only a month to go, the $484 million California Academy of Sciences building hardly appears ready for anything - living, stuffed or pickled - and certainly not for the thousands of visitors expected on opening day.

"But the stage is set, and right now, today, we plan to have everything up and running in just four weeks - everything," insisted Christopher Andrews, director of the academy's public programs, whose main job right now is keeping tabs on the bewildering complexity that marks every final installation between now and the opening.

With just 31 days to go, Andrews and the academy's entire crew of scientists and other assorted employees have their work cut out for them.

Tanagers, honeycreepers, finches and their ilk flew freely for the first time Tuesday amid the towering trees of the new rain forest inside the academy in Golden Gate Park.

But in Costa Rica, hundreds of infant butterflies due at the academy are still in their cocoons, being readied for a plane flight to the same rain forest. They'll fly amid the forest's 70-foot-high trees soon after entomologists from the U.S. Department of Agriculture give the academy final approval next week for them to migrate here.

In other parts of the academy's immense green-roofed building, workers in the African Hall - reconstructed almost exactly as it was 80 years ago - are still installing specialized new lights to make the eyes of zebras, antelopes and the old stuffed gorilla sparkle as if they were alive.

The animal exhibits of life and evolution in Madagascar and the Galapagos Islands are still largely in crates.

Astronomically sophisticated computer operators are still testing software for the planetarium's unique new star projectors, which will reveal the changing heavens as never before. And everywhere, on all four floors of the new academy, crates are still being unpacked, mobile cranes are scurrying, carpenters are hammering, floors are being scrubbed and scrubbed again.

Waiting for move
Back at 875 Howard St. in downtown San Francisco - where the academy and its temporarily truncated exhibits kept the show running in miniature during four years of exile - hundreds of living fish, birds, insects, reptiles and amphibians are awaiting the crosstown transfer to the commodious naturalistic habitats they'll move into any day now.

Soon to be transferred to the new academy building, too, are legions of bats, flying geckos, chameleons, ants by the thousands and many more animals and plants.

Some are already there and happy. Sharks and rays are frolicking above the sandy bottom of their tank, and the penguins are completely at home and pairing up - boy with girl - in their rock-rimmed pool. The newly arrived alligators are safely installed in their swamp, where they slither around far more actively than the two that habitually lay torpid in a far-less-attractive habitat at the old academy's aquarium so many years ago.

The newly built Philippine coral reef - at 25 feet, the deepest artificial reef of any museum in the world - is alive with fish, and the amazingly diverse corals, reared from infancy at the academy's farm on Howard Street, are growing more colorful day by day.

Nearby, the rocky reef in the aquarium typical of the Farallones is filled with the same varied species of fish that live around any underwater crag off coastal Northern California.

Hundreds of fish
And some 1,700 fish are contentedly swimming in the varied waters of the academy's Steinhart Aquarium. "We'll have at least 2,500 by opening day," Andrews said, "and more than 4,000 within a year."

Meanwhile, interactive screens that kids will surely take to - reared as they are these days on video games - are everywhere. In the exhibit on Madagascar's weird and wonderful life, for example, Andrews himself maneuvered a handheld net on the screen to capture 78 different species of swift-flying insects - a striking lesson in biodiversity.

"It's all about celebrating life because that's the academy's mission and passion - to show through every exhibit and program how science and evolution are fundamental to understanding the amazing biological diversity of our world and what we can do to save it," he said.

California Academy of Sciences
Opening: Sept. 27

Where: Golden Gate Park

Admission: Free to the public on opening day

Stu Dudley