Coons, Chinamen, Japs & Italians

Last night I came home to find a fuzzy visitor pottering about the steps of the apartment. I got rather excited and decided to follow it...for about 15 minutes. Unlike the mangy urban foxes of London the raccoons of San Francisco are rather a handsome well fed bunch. This particular critter looked like a small bear with a massive bushy stripy tail, it sort of half scampered half waddled and was about the size of a small dog. Surprisingly he wasn't in the least bit afraid of me and actually seemed pretty curious. I confess that on my part (being the poorer side of five or six Manhattans) I panicked at one point and thought he/she was going to spray me with foul smelling arse scent. To my eternal shame I of course later realised that it's skunks that do that and not raccoons. I may therefore have been the first person in history to run away from a cuddly raccoon.



Earlier in the day I had gone on a long meandering walking tour through San Francisco's Asian enclaves. I eat dim-sum with a smiley yet toothless 78 year old woman in her front room, gobbled hot fortune cookies off the conveyor belt, played and quickly lost a game of chess with who I can only surmise must have been a Chinese chess grand master, and I briefly considered buying an ornate but singularly useless Japanese tea pot. It was a delightful afternoon and the views across downtown and out towards the Bay Bridge were breathtaking....unfortunate considering I had little breath to be taken having just climbed San Francisco's hills. I also got up close and personal with Coit Tower a large monument to San Francisco's Fire Department. The tower itself was designed to resemble the fire hose nozzles used by the city's firefighters but from certain angles I thought it rather resembled Gaudi's famous chimney garden of Espai...obviously no bad thing.



Later in the day I spotted Little Italy's stunning Sentinel building now more famous as being the home of Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope films. It's where Apocalpse Now, Rumble Fish, and GodFathers I and II were mixed and edited amongst others. Afterwards I went and enjoyed an exceedingly good espresso at Cafe Trieste where the great man himself penned much of the GodFather screenplays, as well being a known haunt of Kerouac and Dylan Thomas'. I felt I was in good company.