Golden Gates and Roman Ruins

January 3rd 2017

Midnight — New Year's Eve

Our flatmates have spread out to various new year's parties — we are baking pancakes and push dogs around the flat.
But let's start from the beginning:

Gates of Gold

After it has already been the new year for a while back in Germany, we manage to leave our place before the sun has set. We take the bus towards the shore. Arriving at the final stop, we can already see the iconic Golden Gate Bridge in the evening sun. And it is pretty magnificent.
Through icy winds, we cross the bridge — the San Francisco skyline to one side, a beautiful sunset to the other. A few boats pass the bridge on the rough sea below us.
While looking at the bridge, we come to the conclusion that it's even prettier in real life than in the pictures. A rightful icon of San Francisco.
When we arrive on the other side, it's almost dark already and the lights begin to turn on in the city. A few more minutes in the freezing cold and it's dark enough for some pretty photos.
I use the wait to read up on the different types of stone used in the seafarer's memorial we are standing on right now — who would have guessed that the black rock is imported from Zimbabwe? Fascinating, fascinating.
We eventually get back to a bus stop on the other side shortly before freezing to death. Where to? Anywhere with Wi-Fi.
Somewhere around the city Jan finds a signal, we jump off the bus and search for dinner opportunities with the free internet from some fast-food joint. One lyft ride later, we find ourselves in Japantown. The small restaurant with integrated karaoke bar that we end up in hovers somewhere on the spectrum between Japanese and Korean and serves comparably cheap food.

We return to an empty apartment — our flatmates are probably out to celebrate already. In the constantly dripping shower we find Muna — the dog of our flatmate, who doesn't seem to be a huge fan of new year's.

I'm told I am responsible for Muna today because apparently I am 'more of a dog person' — and I don't mind at all.

We leave Muna to herself for now and get cooking — we're making 호떡 ('Hotteok', Korean pancakes with sweet filling), our favourite street-food snack from Seoul. At least that's the plan. The yeast dough that should rise to twice its original size has moved remarkably little in the last two hours — and the improvised replacement dough doesn't seem to be doing anything either.
We lose patience around half past ten and try anyway. To our surprise, we manage to make some pretty decent Hotteok after two slightly charred trial runs — we are super excited and almost forget about the new year with all the pancakes.

A few minutes before midnight we're out on the street and counting down the seconds to midnight, waiting for a very mediocre firework.
We don't see the downtown area from here, but in the suburbs there are only very sporadic rocket launches — maybe that's not as much of a thing here.

Back in the apartment we find Muna under the desk in our room, and she does not feel like leaving at all. After several tries to coax her into leaving, Jan just pushes her across the floor out of the room and closes the door — not all the way, apparently, Muna returns after a few minutes and is in for another ride across the floor.

I can't understand how our French flatmate would leave her dog at home on new year's eve. Good thing we are here at least.

The day after

We wake up around noon, finding paw prints of the past night in the bathroom, and make some more Hotteok for breakfast. We then take the bus to Land's End — the west-most part of the city.
A brief walk through the huge Golden Gate Park takes us past a Dutch windmill and to the beach, which we follow until we arrive at some cliffs. Here we find the Sutro Baths (some of you might know them from 'Little Brother'), the ruins of a old Roman-style bathhouse right on the coast.
There is not much left of them today, and it feels a bit like visiting ruins in Greece. Between pools of water filling the foundations and seaside caves, there is a lot to explore. Our V-Log from here is quite hard to understand (even more so if you don't speak German...) and doesn't contain all that much information either. But here it is anyway, for those of you who'd like to see: