The Travelling Tobias: Independence Day

Today wasn't as crazy as I expected, there weren't idiots running around doing dumb shit, people were like the were on any other day. My day began with another morning stroll down the the bay to write in my journal, heading back to the hostel shortly after and then leaving once again, but this time to Golden Gate Park. I was going with a Danish couple who were interested in checking out some museums, the first one we went to was based on comic book art.. but was closed!! So we caught the metro to GGP.

The park was fairly blanketed in fog which was pretty typical by now, but really cool (literally) as being inside a cloud is sort of wet and cooling. The park is huge and I only covered a small area, there's a lot of plants and grass and flower beds.. and joggers! SO many joggers. We bought discounted tickets for this 9th floor observatory town with amazing views, once again.. the fog was an issue, so my view stopped after 200m or so. Bu still that was cool, I then left the couple and made my way back downtown, had some taco's for lunch in the main shopping district along Market Street.. and then making my wa back to the hostel for the Independence Day rooftop BBQ!

The BBQ was SOOOO good, everything supplied for us, food, salad, bread, sauces! I had 2 vegetarian hotdogs and some salad, drank some Stella and hung out in the sun chatting and watching a fellow guest beatbox on his microphone. The hostel roof has a wooden decking so was lovely to be on, and had some nice views towards China Town. After lunch we walked to Market Street to check out the shops, there's some huge department stores here, they even have a Westfield which was really cool. Not spread out much.. it just goes up many floors. Union Square was alright.. nothing that fancy.. but a nice area to hang out in I guess. We went back to the hostel for dinner, back up on the rooftop again, and I had a nice home-style cooked hamburger.

Later on we were hanging out in the common room with 2 English lads, getting our drink on a little and only left the hostel around 9:10PM... knowing full well that the fireworks began at 9:30. Drinking the whole way to the wharf, we managed to get there just in time for the last 10 minutes of fireworks. Downside was the clouds were back over the bay so half of the fireworks could hardly be seen, just large bursts of colour really. We're not sure why but after the fireworks almost everyone left the wharf area, the cit really needs to capitalize on the crowds and somehow keep them down there to party longer, ultimately.. to spend more money and have fun. We actually left as well so can't really bag out the locals haha, and we ended up in an Irish pub we went to on the pub crawl.

These English guys have no shame, whatsoever, lucky they couldn't see themselves from someone else's point of view because 2 drunk English guys break-dancing in the middle of a pub is only half as cool as it sounds, but made for good laughs + conversation starters. I left a little after midnight, Rob stayed there for a bit longer and told me some funny stories of things that happened later on, like some random guy out the front of the pub who could do back-flips. This is a fascinating city, San Francisco.