The rain came down all day long and into the night. Sometimes it just sprinkled, sometimes it rained hard, but it kept on raining. It was wet and cold all day. We didn’t care. We are on vacation and in San Francisco. As we walked up Columbus Avenue towards Chinatown for dinner, Carol looked at me and said, “This is incredible. Can you believe we didn’t come back here before this?”

When you are here, you can’t forget that San Francisco is a Pacific Rim city. New York City’s Chinatown looks like an immigrant enclave, but Chinatown in San Francisco is as much a part of the city as any other neighborhood. We walked along, dodging other people’s umbrellas, looking at the foodstuffs for sale along the sidewalks and in shop windows: fruits and vegetables piled up in bins, carcasses of cooked birds hanging in windows, a tub full of entrails and sweetmeats. Pastries were neatly arranged in the windows of bakeries. Fish swam in tanks waiting to be sold.

I have never ridden on a cable car, because I have always been unwilling to wait in line and cram myself on with all the tourists. As we walked back to our hotel tonight, a cable car swept past us, splashing through a puddle. The car was empty except for the conductor and the operator. It looked cold, bleak, dark, and unromantic. I was not tempted to ride it even if it were empty of tourists.