Tourists Vs Residents

Wednesday, Aug. 30, 2006 - 12:00 a.m.

It happened again yesterday. A friend of mine called me and asked about cheap motels here. (He may have been trawling for crash space, but if that was the case, I think he would just have asked. These days, for reasons obvious and otherwise, I'm too dense to make the offer!)

For whatever this is worth, I don't frequent the 'Hourly Rates / Try Our Waterbeds' motels in San Francisco; I live in the city in an actual apartment. And I barely know where any of the decent restaurants are, because I cook at *home*.

Not sure what the thought process is here. "I know. I'll find somebody who lives in the area to tell me about what the tourists do."

Um... nope. Usually that doesn't work. Sorry.

Here's what the tourists do: They walk around in shorts and goosebumps and they look up and carry maps and travel in herds and take pictures.

But the residents? We shop at the local grocery stores and deal with other people in our neighborhoods and go to our jobs and bring home groceries and do our laundry and complain to our landlords to no avail -- most of those things are not what tourists do while they're here.

Most of us who live here in San Francisco can tell visitors how to get to the Golden Gate Bridge and to the Transamerica Pyramid.

But honestly, that's only because they're big and on major thoroughfares. Pretty hard to miss.

A considerable percentage of us couldn't tell you how to get to Coit Tower if our lives depended on it. And we wouldn't even think of taking a picture of a leather daddy getting on a bus wearing nothing but chaps and a vest. Too commonplace.

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John Karr didn't kill JonBenet Ramsey.

Why the dink is this luzer STILL ON TELEVISION????

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Okay. Have a good Wednesday.

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