Not to jump to conclusions, but so far San Francisco, which has some truly wonderful sites and things including its Asian Art Museum, is overwhelming, overcrowded, dirty, and polluted. The twisted evergreens like giant bonzai - if that's not an oxymoron like 'jumbo shrimp' - are wonderful. Come to think of it, so are the prawns, which actually are jumbo shrimp. But this is no longer the American city most like Kiev,  most like the gentler European cities.

Not much news there. Nothing that can't be fixed, of course, if only a few million people per year decline to travel to SF. The bakers might have time to bake, the city to clean its public toilets, the apparel retailers to rethink their exclusive adherence to the narrow spectrum band represented by Urban Outfitters. Fashion-wise, the city is fascinating, surely the most democratic city in America. Everyone runs the same fashion gamut, from R. to Crum, crossed with student, urbanite, Pacific Rim: PacifiCrum. Grimy emphasis on selvage, distressed edges, knock-offs and genuinely expensive clothes that manage to look exactly like the knock-offs, and all of it like something that fell into a gutter and then pretends highhandedly to be deconstructing. I've been reading too much David Lodge. One bright spot is that the homeless tend to look, in purely esthetic terms, at least as good as almost everyone else.