I have a new hobby: public transportation. It begs the question of how someone who spends two hours a day on BART can still enjoy riding buses and trains, but the fact is that Jacob and I spent yesterday afternoon wandering around San Francisco with a bus map and a pocket full of quarters and it was great.
We BARTed to Embarcadero and wandered down Market until we found the map kiosk, took a bus out to North Beach (on any bus headed to or through Chinatown I will always be out-elbowed, I've realized), ate a ridiculously tasty dinner thing, hiked up to Telegraph Hill and back down, took a bus out to the Presidio and wandered around trying to figure out what the Presidio actually is, got on another bus and found ourselves heading all around through the Inner Sunset and Laguna Honda and somewhere way down Mission, took another bus back up Mission, got off and wandered until we found a coffee shop, and re-caffeinated ourselves just in time to get back on BART and come home for bed.
Total cost: $5.95 for BART round-trip, and $1.25 for MUNI transfers that lasted us all the way through the afternoon (evening). It beats the pants off of taking buses in the East Bay, where transfers are more expensive and don't last as long, and the buses don't come as often or surround as much stuff in the areas that they serve. I'm not convinced that you can have more fun for $7.20, although when you add in $5 for hot chocolate and cookies and $20 for pasta dinners it's possible that other activities may suggest themselves.
It seems, irrelevantly, that people's reading habits are suddenly the subject of much interest at I Fought The Law and I'm somehow taking part in the discussion. To make my position clear, and just for fun, please allow me to give you my current partial reading list.
In progress or just completed:
The Linguist and the Emperor, Daniel Meyerson
The Ancient Engineers, L. Sprague De Camp
Red Earth & Pouring Rain, Vikram Chandra
The Boxer Rebellion, Diana Preston
Harry Potter & The Half-Blood Prince, J.K. Rowling
Guards! Guards!, Terry Pratchett
Split Infinity, Piers Anthony
In the last few months:
Nickel & Dimed: On (Not) Getting By In America, Barbara Ehrenreich
Me Talk Pretty One Day, David Sedaris
A Series of Unforunate Events: The Hostile Hospital, Lemony Snicket
Bee Season, Myla Goldberg
The Last Continent, Terry Pratchett
Samskrta-Subodhini: A Sanskrit Primer, Madhav Deshpande (not finished yet, actually)
Love Me, Garrison Keillor
Life of Pi, Yann Martel
Cakes And Ale, W. Somerset Maugham
Holidays On Ice, David Sedaris
Sick Puppy, Carl Hiaasen
Zodiac, Neil Stephenson
Um... if you loaned me any books this year and don't see them on this list, remind me which ones they were. I can't even remember what I have sitting on my bedside table right now, let alone what I've finished or not yet started. That's because, you see, I believe that there's no such thing as Appropriate Things To Read. There's everything interesting, and then there's everything else which I might find interesting later or I might not, and all of it should be read if and when the mood strikes me. So I've got about 13,750,289 books I've got to read and I hope you'll pardon me if I'm a little preoccupied.
Posted by dianna at August 22, 2005 11:43 AM