Dollars and Euros

Which bills would YOU rather use?

I was at Long's drugs a few weeks ago to pick up some household cleaner and some christmas cards. I go up to the cash register and pay about $9.50 for the stuff (christmas cards are SO overpriced!). I gave the girl a $20 (I am pretty sure I did, at least) and she says "10 dollars, thank you". Being absent minded as usual, I was thinking of something else and didn't pay much attention to her. But then later as I was leaving the store I remember pulling out a $20. Hey! What happened to my change? Too late! No way to prove, that I had given the bigger bill. This is like the 3rd time this has happened to me in about 3 months. It's always when I'm buying something small, like at the post office or the drugstore.

Therefore, I would like to use this opportunity to beg - no PLEAD - for the U.S. treasury to get modern and print some REAL colorized bills! If I was looking at a blue $10 vs. a green $20, I'm sure I would be making less mistakes (and so would the cashier). In fact there is an initiative underway at the U.S. treasury to modernize the bills with some color. However, if you look at them, the new bills still aren't really much different than before. I would say, the Europeans do this better.

In any case, this is the last blog entry for the year. Being in the holiday spirit, I am ignoring my own promise, not to post anymore to this blog for lack of guestbook entries. From now on, I'll just post, when I feel like it. Which is pretty much how I've been doing it.

To all those of you (all 4 or 5 of you) who have read my blog this year, I would like to wish a happy new year 2007.

Kent

Marin Headlands / Muir Woods

I think the last post was kind of personal (because people that read this blog, or are family members, are in it). Well I got some good comments from it, so thanks. But don't expect me to start telling you my night time dreams anytime soon (then you'd really think I'm strange).

Instead, today I'm going to stick to the more or less generic topic "Touristy Things to See and Do Around San Francisco". The occasion this time was the visit of another far away friend - Michal - who lives in my former town of Freiburg, Germany. In addition to bringing his good cheer, Polish traditions, and humor to my apartment (and the business conference he attended, presumably), Michal also brought the (unneeded) excuse for me to take a day off and show someone around.

RANDOM THOUGHTS ARTICULATED WHILE DRIVING ACROSS THE OAKLAND - SAN FRANCISCO BAY BRIDGE
We started our day in San Francisco dealing with Bay Bridge (Oakland to San Francisco) traffic, which if you go back to my postings from February 2006, you will see an example of. I still get frustrated sometimes, sitting in the car watching everybody have to idle, when there are these "FASTTRACK" lanes, which are supposed to let people with radio-sensing devices mounted in their cars "whiz" by without stopping to make change at the bridge toll (the bridge toll is $3 from Oakland, $5 from Marin / via the San Francisco Bridge, by the way). These "FASTTRACK" lanes however, are not visible until you get within about 1000 feet of the toll plaza - far too close, in my opinion. There are also a few lane indicator signs farther back, but these are routinely ignored (there is no penalty for hogging the dedicated lane for fasttrack). However, as I (once again) discovered on Thursday, the REAL problem is the stoplights mounted a few hundred yards beyond the toll plaza. These are for the purpose, I assume, of preventing traffic jams on the Bay Bridge (the lanes narrow from about 8 before the bridge, to 4 on the bridge). So... what can you do? CalTrans would need to dedicate a FASTTRACK lane on the bridge, all the way from Oakland to San Francisco (in my opinion), for this option to really work. (but I bet, they could charge a whole lot more money, and get away with it)

BUFFALOES IN GOLDEN GATE PARK
Thank you for bearing with me through that first part. The first real "sight" Michal and I saw, in San Francisco, were the buffalo in Golden Gate Park. I had seen them only once before. A friend reminded me of them last week, and I took my friend to look at them (figuring, it would be something of a novelty). The thing is, the buffalo were hanging out way in the back of their pen (as you can see), and were basically doing nothing. This is apparently not a new phenomenon, either.


I came to the conclusion that buffalo-watching isn't all it's cracked up to be. By the same token, hunting buffalo with rifles back on the plains the 1800s must have been very, very easy.

GOLDEN GATE BRIDGE
The second major site we saw was Golden Gate bridge. I am first including a picture taken while biking across the bridge (the bike path is always the left side, with a view of the Pacific).


Some interesting factoids: this bridge - an "Art Deco Structure" - was constructed in the 1930s at the cost of $35 million (it was built under budget - now when was the last time you ever heard of THAT before?). It contains 80,000 miles of steel cabling. The principal architect, Joseph Strauss, died 1 year after its construction, from stress-related disease (I think the architect of the London Tower Bridge met a similar fate, if memory serves me right). There were 11 fatalities during its construction (I suppose in the modern era, that would have meant the bridge construction would have cost 10 times more).

Here is a picture from the other side - the "Marin Headlands". This is a place that is kind of hard to get to (in the car), because you can only access it via the southern-bound stretch of Hwy 101. Michal is doing his best Charlie Chaplin pose.



MUIR WOODS
The last place we visited this day was Muir Woods National Monument, in Marin County. It was a fitting end to a very nice day. The trees in this park are indeed some of the biggest I've ever seen. I guess there are trees in California you can drive a car through, but they're further north near Eureka! (just kidding, the exclamation mark after the town name is not real). But, truth be told, it would have been offensive to this eco-minded yuppie blog author, to see cars passing through this forest. Instead, I posed in the burnt out hollow of one of the remaining giants in Muir Woods, a tree that probably has a name, which I didn't bother to read (I was distracted by a group of spanish speaking female tourists behind us).


This tree I am standing under, by the way, is still alive and green!

EVERYTHING I THINK YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT REDWOOD TREES
Hey, this is my blog, right? So, I can use it to selectively tell you what I think is important, right? Factoid number one: a forest similar to this inspired George Lucas' forest scenes in Star Wars III, on Planet Endor. Factoid number two: only 4% of old-growth redwoods still exist - almost all under park protection. Factoid number three: the largest redwoods only grow on the north Pacific coast, where enough moisture is provided by continuous fog for these trees to grow much taller than their cousins further inland (there are redwood trees all over California, but only the coastal variety grow to such heights).

Were you satisfied by your visit? Please tell us how we're doing.