Scrabble addict: More adventures in San Fran

That night, we take the last train from San Francisco to Palo Alto. As we set off, I settle back into my chair in a mildly drunken manner and try to fall asleep.

"Good evening folks. As you all know, this is the last train out of San Francisco ... so I don't want ANY CRAP!"

He screams the last words and I am jolted awake. He continues:

"So sit there QUIETLY. I don't want to hear ANY loud music. I don't want to hear ANY loud laughing. I don't want to HEAR your electronic devices. And, as far as I know, we have not installed foot stalls on this train yet so keep your FEET OFF THE SEATS. Oh, and you need a valid ticket. If you haven't got one. GET THE HELL OFF MY TRAIN."

Nice. At every station we stopped at, the driver offered the drunks a little anecdote.

"Next stop Bayshore. According to a 2007 survey, Bayshore has the highest suicide rate in California."

Still Jetlagged
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After waking up at the crack of dawn again but thinking it's dinner time, we take the train into the city again. We decide we are going to stay in the city for the night instead of going back to Palo Alto and busy ourselves finding a cheap hotel, which, in San Francisco, is not easy. Firstly, because it's almost impossible to find anything in Downtown for less than $60 a night that doesn't involve shared bathrooms and bunk beds containing irritatingly nice and friendly Danish students with irritatingly perfect English accents and even more irritatingly perfect skin and secondly, because going from hotel to hotel in search of a room in a city that's made from mountains is really, really tiring.

It seems that the term 'hotel' is used quite loosely in the US. A few times we see a place that looks suitably shabby enough for our measly budget, only to find that there is no reception, no bell and a locked door. Another time, a desperately sad looking Indian woman lets us into her hotel, eyeing us suspiciously. The place doesn't look too bad although it smells of disinfectant and it's the same disinfectant that they used to use at primary school when little Johnny guzzled too many sweeties and chucked up on the floor. To me, that disinfectant has only one purpose, and that purpose is to hide the smell of vomit. The hotel smells like one big sweet-eating-bile-ejecting fest to me and I feel like ejecting some bile myself. However, the rooms were to rent by the week only. Then I see this sign ...

... and we retreat hastily. In fact, this is a sign that I start to see everywhere in the city and I wonder whether there's really a risk or whether it's just another way to avoid lawsuits. I wonder about the people that work in buildings that are seemingly full of asbestos or lead piping and think many of them don't have a choice except to sit there and breathe in or ingest whatever it is lurking around. I wonder if they have to sign some sort of waiver when they start work..."I will not sue you when my baby is born with three heads..."

We turn a corner in the amusingly named Nob Hill area.

"That's it." I say pointing up the almost vertical incline. "We're staying there. End of story."

We hike up to Hotel Amsterdam, which is in fact a hostel but has some private rooms with bathrooms, and more importantly, has no signs telling me that if I enter the building I'll be growing tumors within five minutes. I've never much been into communal living and the hostel scene; I need to be able to sit on the toilet without the threat of Danish Lars and/or his friends Lars and Lars bursting in on me. We haggle with the disinterested girl on the reception for a while. Then Vee, rather ingeniously, says:

"Do we get a discount if we are actually from Amsterdam?"

We do, and the pigeons have landed in their nest. We dump our bags and go off in search of stuff to see, donuts to eat, weak coffee to whinge about and crap to buy.

In China Town I buy a cool wooden Chinese flute. Vee stocks up on T shirts. We duck into a random bar for a (Chinese) margarita. At Union Square we sneak into a posh hotel and ride up and down in the glass lifts like lunatics and get great views of the city.

At the tacky Fisherman's Wharf we watch sea lions bask in the sun and look out to Alcatraz in the distance.

On Market Street we stop for a sandwich. This sign on the wall makes us feel very welcome.

I'm tucking into something grease-soaked and liberally lashed with mayonnaise when I hear this horrible rasping sound, like something rattling around in an empty box, accompanied by a weird wheezing sound. An obese woman is sitting about ten meters away from me, scoffing a donut, and the sound is coming from her.

She can't breathe. By the size of her, I am surprised she can even walk. The lower part of her belly is resting on her knees. Even though I've seen several extremely overweight people since I arrived, it's still shocking to see people that big. In Holland, it's really rare, if not impossible, to see someone who is clinically obese. In the US, there is a dangerously fat person on every corner and it's easy to see why. Every street is lined with places serving food and pretty much nothing else. You're never more than two steps away from your next calorie.

Since we arrived, we'd both been continuously hungry even though we were stuffing down more food in a few hours than we'd normally eat in a day. Donuts! I was consuming donuts! I would never eat a donut in Holland but they taste so sugary and light here that I want to shove them down my gullet all the time and it's pretty much impossible to order a coffee without getting about a pint of it too. I began to ache from swallowing too much. And I began to wonder whether the reason why people are so fat is that the food has so little nutritional value that you have to keep eating more and more to get your body's needs and all you absorb is the fat and the sugar because actually that's all there is.

Anyway, I don't want to look at fat lady but I can't help it and I crane my neck to check out the flab. I feel sorry for her. I want to slap the donut out of her hand and shove some lettuce under her nose. When I turn back around and look at the greasy lump of bread in front of me I suddenly feel overwhelmingly sick. All I can hear is her rasping for breath. I don't feel like swallowing my grease with the accompaniment of obesity in the background. There is no way I can finish my sandwich. Every time I try to take a bite, an image of my stomach hanging over my knees just like fat lady's pops up.

On the hippie trail
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Up in Haight and Ashbury, the seat of the 'Hippie revolution', I buy shoes and we eat pizza with slices of potato and whole roasted cloves of garlic on it. We pose in front of Jerry Garcia's old house.

I walk into a tee shirt shop that stinks so badly of marijuana that I have to leave. Gangs of greasy 'non conformists' with dogs and bottles of beer beg for money or say they'll take a photo of us for a dollar. Like I'm going to give you my camera - there's a reason why there are pawn shops on every corner. There's a lot of young people living on the streets and I get the impression that for some of them, it's a choice. I see a very healthy and happy looking kid, about 20, with perfect skin and teeth. But he's filthy, and has no shoes.

We walk through a tiny corner of the Golden Gate park and it's absolutely packed with random alcoholics, hippies, squatters, people playing drums and guitars, and kids having football lessons. We accidently find ourselves in an area that is an "Adults with Children ONLY zone" where several signs proclaim that adults are only permitted in this area if they are with a child. I want to scrub out the 'a' and see what happens when the sign reads that adults are only permitted "when with child" and then think that perhaps I better lay off the sugar. I worry we will be accosted and arrested for being filthy perverts because everyone who walks through a children's playground and who is not with a child is categorically a peadophile but it's ok and we manage to sneak away.

The sun is shining and everything is so green and there are millions of palm trees and exotic plants just hanging around. I decide that I really like San Francisco.