I don’t know if I mentioned it, but I was in San Francisco for a wedding. Cricket and I decided to stay in the Queen Anne Hotel. It is supposedly haunted. Here is the haunting information:
The Queen Anne Hotel is a hotel in San Francisco, on Sutter Street. The hotel is an historic 1890 Victorian mansion, in the namesake Queen Anne architectural style, and decorated in the painted lady style. It was originally a girl’s boarding school. It narrowly survived the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.The hotel is a popular site for ghost hunting. The headmistress of the former finishing school, Mary Lake, is said to haunt her former office in Room 410. The hotel’s paranormal history was explored in an episode of the television show Haunted Hotels.
We did not stay in room 410 so I didn’t experience the haunting. I have to recommend this hotel, the room was great, the bed was hella-comfortable, the breakfast had make-your-own waffles, there’s an enormous living room / salon with fireplaces and comfy chairs AND every morning if you sign up for it you can take a black car anywhere you want in the city for free. We didn’t go to the afternoon tea and sherry but I imagine that was lovely as well. I had a strong attraction to this piece of furniture.
And this heater.
And the floor inlay.
The only problem I had with the hotel was the decor. Victorian is a really tough design period, there’s a lot of clutter and bric-a-brac, it’s all dark wood, kind of ornate, it can go downhill real fast.
And in some places in this hotel it did. For example, why did you paint the lady’s heads in the dining room? Now I’m eating breakfast surrounded by dead eyes. It’s hard to eat your yogurt with that.
Nope, that’s a hard nope from me.
I don’t know what they were going for with the dead flowers. I’ll tell you what, it really complemented the dismembered lady heads everywhere.
Now, this is cool and then it is not. A bunch of stained glass windows survived the earthquake in 1906 and they are above your head as you climb the stairs. Lovely. However some jackass put fluorescent tube lights behind them so they have all the warmth and charm of a second-grade classroom. Why? Why do you do this to me? Anguish.
This isn’t really a complaint, more of a flumoxing really. This was our bathroom wall viewed from the toilet. What… what is going on here?
I understand some of the elements like the light switch and the plug things but the everything else, I have no idea what’s going on there. Many questions left unanswered.
We were right next to Japantown which consists of two very large buildings built in a Japanese-esque style and a tall tower.
We went early in the morning which I do not recommend because almost nothing in the two Japantown malls is open until around noon. It was a perfectly fine mall, lots of shops and food stalls. I have to admit I am jaded. There was a Japantown on the way to my previous office and therefore I was regularly exposed to a chunk of Japanese culture. I imagine this would blow someone’s mind if they were from a Japanese-starved area but I was okay with it, not mind blown. But I do recommend checking it out, there might be something there that isn’t in your area. Here’s a list of the stores.
http://sfjapantown.org/directory/
The one thing they had that gave me warm fuzzies was the beverage vending machine. I fell madly in love with the beverage vending machines in Japan so I got a little teary-eyed to see my old friend again.
That’s it for today. Next entry: Art and Alcatraz.