Baghdad By The Bay: San Francisco

Well, I already spoke about the SF Zoo. On Sunday we decided to take the plunge and use our membership at the Aquarium, or California Academy of Sciences. There’s more than the aquarium, but that’s the biggest attraction, so we just like to call it “the Aquarium“. When you’re a member you get to go during the special “members hours” that is 8:30-9:00 on Tuesdays and 10:00am-11:00am on Sundays. Since getting up and out the door on Sundays for the 10 am opening is easier we decided on that.

What we discovered about going to the Aquarium on 4th of July was that everyone had somewhere else to be. It was great. There were only two other families in the Aquarium for about the first half hour and we had the place to ourselves. We actually got to see things without having to push or be pushed by other people there.

When we headed up to see what was not “the Aquarium” we got to walk through their new extreme mammals exhibit which was small, but fun. I used to spend a lot of my time as a kid there so I thought I had seen everything, but they found a few things to display that even had me saying, “what the heck is that?”

As we toured around the rest of the “not the Aquarium” we noticed some new exhibits were in place or maybe they had been there, but we couldn’t see them for the throngs of people pushing by us. They were kind of interesting, but nothing in the blow you away sort of style. In some ways I miss the old Academy of Sciences because it was separated into labyrinthine hallways they forced you to focus on the exhibits. Now it’s all open and airy which is the design style of the day, but it also makes it harder to focus in my humble opinion. It’s still got a lot going on, it just doesn’t seem as much as before.

Now finding that our daughter (she’s 3, but the size of a 6 year old) still had some energy left in her that she needed to disperse we went over to Early Explorers Cove which means essentially that it’s an indoor play area. It’s a cool indoor play area with a boat mock up and a little treehouse like area that kids and climb all over and inside of. There’s puzzles to do  and puppets and toys to play with, just remember to remove your shoes when you go in. Since everybody was somewhere else we practically had the place to ourselves which was good because our daughter doesn’t do well in big crowds.

Once she was worn down we decided to splurge and visit the Academy Cafe. It’s a bit pricey, but the food is of the total eco-friendly locavore style. We got a brownie for my wife, a cookie for our daughter, chocolate bread pudding for myself, a coffee and a Virgil’s Blackberry Cream Soda. Total came to  close to $13. A bit steep, but the food was really good.

As things were winding down we decided to leave and it was a little after 11 am. Now what were we going to do for the rest of the day? Luckily on the drive home my wife received a phone call from a friend who was coming to the city and wanted to get together at a playground later in the day. GREAT! We now had our whole day planned out with very little effort.

So today we went to the SF Zoo again today and we actually bought a membership so we’ll have another place to take our daughter on a whim. Above is a little video I shot and by little I do mean little. I used a cheap pocket camera then put it all together in iMovie and added the voiceover and music in Digital Performer for all you geeks out there. Well it was warm and crowded, but being so huge we were still able to get around fairly easily. The problem with the zoo covers many areas:

1. Too many exhibits that have are being reworked and haven’t been open in years. The Tropical rain forest has been closed for at least a year, the area with the sea lions has been gone for almost 10 years if not longer and there are areas like the pachyderm house which has been closed for years and that side across from the lion house is empty. The lion house has been closed for a few years, but at least they still have a few lions and tigers.

2. Because of 1. there’s too much walking time between seeing animals and that’s not because they have So much space for the animals, it’s that there’s just so much overused space that has a couple of ducks swimming around. There are several areas of the Primate exhibit that are covered over with cardboard that it looks like tenement housing for monkeys.

3. There is no elephant train anymore. The zoo is a big place and the elephant train used to take visitors around the zoo for a full tour. Now that it’s gone even a fit person (unless they’re a marathon runner from Kenya) will break out in a sweat and get tired quick.

4. FOOD. OK, I like the idea that they’re selling organic food that’s local raised, but $8.99 for an Angus cheeseburger with fries that was cooked how long ago and is now sitting in the warming booth does not a good burger make. After standing in line for 10 minutes our daughter tired of smelling food and not having any to eat started to have a fit. This led us to decide that we had had enough and left after a half hour.

5. Repave the walk ways. When you come in the place is easy to get around it’s all nice and new, but after about 100 yards you hit asphalt that hasn’t been paved in over 10 years. If you’re a parent with a stroller or in a wheelchair it becomes an extra work out to trudge along.

Now my wife thinks it’s all about them not having enough money, but with a $95/year family membership and all the regular money coming in from non-members plus food, plus donors, plus the kitschy stuff they sell at over priced prices I think they could do a little upkeep on the place.

We’ll still continue to go, but I’m hoping this post will get their attention and wake them the hell up.

I just found out recently that the San Francisco Public Library has a cool offering for parents. It’s a free pass to any one of a huge number of places to go in San Francisco like The Aquarium of the Bay, California Academy of Sciences, Cartoon Art Museum, California Historical Society, Exploratorium, The Walt Disney Museum and much, much more.

Now some of these places would cost you over $50 to take your family, but with your library card you just clic on the logo to the right and it’ll take you to the sfkids.org website where you can ask for the pass. You then go to the local branch and pick it up and you’re set. When you’re done you just return the pass card to any library.

We all know that times are tough and when you have kids it costs big bucks to entertain them. These free passes are a little known fact that I just came across when my wife and I visited the main library and now you can access everything to get you to these places online and remember…it’s free!

I did something today I normally don’t do. I got talked into visiting my public library by my wife. This is the main branch that’s downtown. I’ve never been much for public libraries after I graduated from college. They always seemed to be like they were dank and archaic and the “new books” area always had books from 10 years ago.

OK, I got a big surprise, shock is more like it. This place is huge. Six stories with a lower level that has a cafe. Everywhere you look there are tables with power outlets and ethernet cables so you can hook up to their internet. They even have computers there if you don’t have one that not only give you web access, but some of them have Microsoft Office on them as well and there are printers that they actually let you print out to for free! Let’s also not forget all the meeting rooms you can reserve for free!

I’ve always been an online type of guy. Life with google makes it easy to find information, but today I realized that you can get more information from a book than a google search. I know what most of you are think, yeah, ok, DUH. It just hit home with me today after of course noticing that the librarians now aren’t the old grandmotherly type women with scours on their face and those glasses with the little chains on them going around their neck. The librarians are hip now!

The architecture of the building is incredible and you can get off at Civic Center BART/Muni station and all you have to do is cross the street to get in. They also have many rooms with displays and exhibits making it a sort of free museum as well. The Main library also has the largest collection of historical records for San Francisco. I was able to find all the specifics of my home and information on the builder and saw all the permits. I have to say I was pretty impressed by it all and it’s more than just books. They have a large audio visual collection and the machines for you to watch DVD’s, VHS or listen to CD’s. If you haven’t been, you definitely have to check it out since it has more than you local branches have to offer, plus when you get your free library card you can also access their online collection of eBooks and podcasts as well. If you’re not a resident you can get a visitor’s temporary card from them as well.

I’ve been going to the California Academy of Sciences since I was a little kid. I’m talking before I could walk and I loved the old place. There was tons of things to do and see and oh how I remember the awful cheeseburgers and fries served in the downstairs cafeteria by a company called Duchess.

For a kid like me who was into science this was an awesome space because there was everything you could learn about, the Hall of Birds, the Hall of Minerals, Wild California, The Hall of Man, The fish roundabout, Life through Time, The Farside Gallery, the Elkus Gallery and of course the Planetarium and Aquarium. They also had a little know “Junior Academy” downstairs that offered Saturday courses to kids in the sciences from 5-18. The little kid classes didn’t work out so well, but that lead to the adding of the Discovery Center upstairs.

They also had regularly rotating exhibits that were usually pretty big. They had one on Shakespeare, Earthquakes, geez I a can’t remember them all. They because of the 1989 earthquake there were a few problems and they just decided to rebuild the whole thing again and make it all snazzy and eco-friendly. Don’t get me wrong, I love the fact that they decided to twist a few heads with the bio roof and solar panels, but it’s not the same anymore. It’s all about the Aquarium.

When you walk in you get to see the Piazza which one of the places to purchase an overpriced, but healthy organic snack. You head through there and can see the tops of a Philipine coral reef on one side and the Northern California coast on the other. The old grungy hall of reptiles has gone, but they saved the swamp area at least with a couple of gators and snapping turtles. Walk down a few stairs and you get the sparse swamp area. You can look into gator tank from below and there’s a few snakes and a lizard or two there. Of course they have to have a swamp/aquarium shop there as well. Then travel down a few more stairs and the Aquarium hits you. Big huge tanks with lots of fish. Not the 10′x10′ tanks you used to see in the old aquarium. Of course to balance this they have many more 10 gallon tanks in the walls, but over all you’re going to see a lot of stuff you’ve never seen before. My daughter loves the aquarium and even though she’s only three she has her favorite tanks she likes to hang out at and stare down the fish, That’s a whole ‘nother story I’ll get into later. So pretty much, the aquarium is very, very cool. So what else is there?

Well they’ve added something new and that’s the rainforest exhibit. To balance out the global shape of the planetarium the rainforest is a globe of glass that you have to enter through special doors so none of the stuff that’s inside gets out. Inside they have birds flying around, yet while I hear them I have yet to see them other than a macaw that tethered at the bottom of ramp just before you start traveling through the jungles. Each level has a different theme to it and  in the small flattened areas to stop at they have…more fish tanks! plus some reptiles as well and it fits in nicely, but still, it’s all about the fish. When you get to the top which is the warmest place you’ll find lots of butterflies swarming around. They’re all pretty small so nothing freaky there. Now you can go back down and out so you go down an elevator after you’ve gone through a check to make sure there are no butterflies on you and that takes you all the way down to the aquarium. If you decide to go I suggest you start with the rainforest and head down to the aquarium because there are some things you’ll miss in the aquarium that aren’t too obvious when you first enter into it.

OK, what’s left? Well there’s the planetarium which I’d love to tell you about because I worked at the old one for four years, but I haven’t had the time to see it yet as I’m always there with my daughter and I’m not sure she’s ready to sit still for 45 minutes to an hour in the dark. I’ve seen videos of it and it’s real state of the art, so I’m looking forward to going once my daughter starts pre-school. They did manage to keep South African Hall, but made a few changes. Nothing too major, except for the addition of a tank of cichlids from lake Malawi and Tanganika in Eastern Africa that was originally the Charles Bange Memorial tank that was put in place by donations by the San Francisco Aquarium Society [note I was the president of the SFAS for 4 years and on the board of directors for 10 years]. Now it has someone else’s name on it so apparently the Academy has forgotten that many years ago the aquarium was kept afloat by donations from the SFAS and now the SFAS isn’t allowed to meet at the Academy anymore. The Herbst auditorium has been replaced with the Herbst Forum on the second floor and there’s also the Naturalist Center which is sort of a small library with displays of dead things or parts of dead things from the mammalogy and ornithology departments, but that’s it for the 2nd floor.

Other than that there’s a few small exhibits that don’t make up for what they didn’t keep in there. I noticed something when I was there today though. While they made it a little bit wider which is really mostly with outdoor garden areas, it’s much thinner. The swamp is at the back of the academy and that’s it. The aquarium used to run around it with other exhibits behind that. They gave up a lot that people can learn from. I’m not sure where the scientists do there work as in the old place there used to be two levels up with offices and labs and all the ichthyology and aquarium labs were down in the basement where the aquarium is now.

Now here is where the rants will begin. The real rants. When my wife and I got married in 1996 we got a family membership to the academy. It cost us…$25. With it we each got a card that would allow us to bring in a guest as well as 10 guest passes we could give out to our friends. It cost $7 to get in back then. We also got invited to a members only night where we could walk around the academy and get behind the scenes tours and feed for free.

Now, that same membership will cost you…$500! You can get the Family Plus membership, but you’ll have to pay $75 each for the behind the scenes tour. Ticket prices to get in are now $24.99 for adults, $19.99 for 12-17 and $14.99 for 4-11.

If you have kids, get a family membership. It’s $159 and you’ll get that back 10 fold in a short period of time. There is one thing to remember though, if you’re going to go you should take advantage of the members only hours of 8:30-9:30 on Tuesdays or 10-11 on Sundays. Especially if you have small kids. We went there about 12:30pm today and the place was packed. We couldn’t even let our daughter out of the stroller because we’d have lost her in seconds.

If you want to go on the cheap the last Thursday of the month is Nightlife where it will only cost you $12 to get in, but you have to be 21+ because they have bars set up all over the place. I haven’t been to one of these, but being a member I would still have to pay $10 in addition to the drinks.

I have to admit that I like the cafe that they have as they serve a wide variety of all organic meats and veggies with enough variety to suit everyone, but that all comes at a price. We tried it once and we got a breakfast quiche, muffin, coffee and an izzy’s soda for just under $15. The quiche was small, the muffin wasn’t very large, but the coffee and soda were good. Today, I noticed as we walked through the piazza that while there were people in line to buy food, most of the people there [some of which had to sit on the floor as there were no more tables] had brought their own food. The line to purchase tickets was at least 4 deep and 100 ft long. So I imagine that the wait would be close to an hour.

If you’re a member you get to put on your best smug face and walk through the members entrance where they not only ask for your card, but you ID as well to verify you aren’t loaning your card to friends. You also get a lot of other little discounts and benefits that you can find here. The funniest thing is that maybe we should have gotten an individual membership for $99 because it says you can bring a guest in with your card. It doesn’t say that with a family membership. So if you’re a couple and don’t expect to take any out of town relatives there that’s the best way to go about it. Overall, I’d have to say that the California Academy of Sciences has changed from a museum of science to a political show off piece. Gavin Newsom is even quote as saying it’s his favorite place in San Francisco. You don’t get to talk to the scientists who are doing the work behind the scenes, but you can watch them through glass sometimes in the lab that’s open to the public for viewing, but no entrance.

People are talking about the loss of a big tourist attraction from San Francisco, the Pier 39 sea lions which called Pier 39 home since 1989. Everyone is writing stories about why they left, but they don’t know why. Allow me to edify you as to why the sea lions left Pier 39. They used to live on the obviously named at the time, “Seal Rock” out by the old Sutro Baths ruins. Then because they ate up most of the herring out there they left to find more and find a nice feeding ground with lovely places to rest at Pier 39.

This year, there was a large influx of sea lions in the late fall which caused the amount of plentiful herring found near Pier 39 to disappear. When the food goes, so go the sea lions. They basically ate the place dry and needed to move on to find more food. Find the herring and you’ll find the sea lions.

It’s a bit sad that they’re gone from Pier 39, but there’s lots of other stuff there to attract people. Maybe they’ll move back to Seal Rock so that people will have another place to visit in the city, and while you’re out there You should visit the Seal Rock Inn for breakfast or lunch. Great food at great prices and their Greek food is to die for, not to mention their rooms if you’re looking for a place to stay are awesome. There I got a foodie reference in.

As a little kid I loved pets. We had a dog when I was a baby, but while he was very protective of me he also saw me as competition so we could be left in the same room together. Once our dog was gone my parents decided to get me more kid friendly pets. A hamster wasn’t good enough for me so my parents got me a golden-mantled ground squirrel. Not the most kid friendly pet, but it was fun to have and show off to my friends. They’re classified as wild animals now so they aren’t legal anymore, but “sniffles” was as cute as a button.

One birthday I got an aquarium and discovered I was hooked. Back in the late 60′s there wasn’t that much in the way of aquariums and the fish you had to choose from were always few and far between. Back then we didn’t know that you weren’t supposed to put goldfish in with angelfish [goldfish like colder water and angelfish were tropical water dwellers]. My first aquarium was one of those awful 10 gallons with the metal frame and we always ran into problems with it like when my mother put a decorative sea shell in a freshwater tank [bad because the mostly South American fish like soft water and the calcium in the shell leaches out and makes it hard]. So eventually we gave up and the aquarium was stored away.

A few years go by and I decide I wanted to try an aquarium again and I got a brand new set up with an outside hang on the back filter instead of the garbage undergravel filter I had before. Then something magical happened. I decided to buy fancy guppies. These were really colorful fish that one day did something I had never scene before—I saw baby guppies! and then the dollar signs started to go off in my head. I got a smaller 5 gallon tank and would scoop the babies out to grown them up safely away from their parents who would make a meal out of them. Pretty soon I was turning them in at the local fish store for credit and my hobby was paying for itself. This lasted for several years and I wanted more, so I moved up to a 20 gallon tank. I think by now I had about 5 tanks running and I had a hatcher for brine shrimp eggs to feed and bulk up the babies with live food. For those of you who don’t know what brine shrimp are think of the Sea Monkeys you might of had as a kid. So here I am in my late teens with 5 fish tanks, I should have just stamped geek on my forehead, but I was still able to attract pretty girls who liked to look at the fish in my darkened bedroom ["Eric! why are the lights off in the your bedroom!" "We're just watching the fish mom!"] That line worked everytime.

Then one day I was in the now closed Nippon fish store and I saw a little flyer talking about the San Francisco Aquarium Society. Cool! There are other fish geeks like me who like to get together once a month and well, be bigger geeks. So I went to my first meeting at the California Academy of Sciences. There were maybe 25 people there and I have no idea what the talk was about, but it was about some fish I had never heard of. At the end after lecture they served refreshments and had a raffle. These guys actually got manufacturers and local stores to donate goods for promotion. I spent $5 on the 25¢ tickets and came home with a bundle.

Then came the big part—The raffle. OMG, I was seeing fish I had never even heard of before and it was the people in the club who were breeding them. Gee, you can breed more than guppies? I was hooked and joined that night. I received their first newsletter, Panorama and it was well, not that great. Good information, but it could have looked a lot better. So me needing an excuse to better learn page layout and graphic design redid that newsletter and brought a copy to the next meeting. I showed it to one of the members of the Board of Directors who’s jaw dropped. He asked if he could have this and I said sure thing and I offered to do the layout for the newsletter. At my third meeting I was asked to be the publisher of Panorama. I asked who the next guest was going to be and after I found out I went home and laid out some quarter sheet flyers and called my new friend on the board and told him, “Hey Jeff, I have something to show you.” Again, his jaw dropped. He took the copy and within a few days I started to notice them showing up in stores around the Bay Area.

I was suddenly becoming the buzz of the SFAS. I gave them a vision and a professional look. After being a member for one year a spot opened up on the BoD and I was asked if I would be interested. Hell yeah I was interested. I now had a chance to bring about change and learn more about the hobby. After being on the BoD for a year I was then asked to become the Program Chairman. I think this was mostly because I immersed myself in the hobby and was on the forefront of this new thing social network called Compuserve and it’s forum FishNET that I had the resources. Now I was bringing in guest speakers from all over the country even some from Germany where they were on the forefront. The SFAS started to grow with my new found marketing skills and had outgrown the little conference room and had to move into the auditorium. By year 3 or 4 on the BoD, I was nominated for President. I got elected and things really took off. We grew from just under 50 members when I joined to over 500 members and now I was even giving talks about my experience with new Dutch Plant Tanks. The limit for President was two years and I had to step down after that. After the new President served for a year some of the board members were asking me to come back again. So I did and served as President for another two years. During this time something strange started to happen. I was asked to be on a few PBS shows and I was interviewed by newspapers because keeping fish tanks had taken off like wildfire through the work of promoting the club that the BoD and the members had done. People would stop me on the streets and say, “hey you’re that fish guy”. At the time I had hair almost down to my waist, I was hanging out in the new Metal scene and I was totally dressed as a rocker at the meetings. I was trying to get a new band started, but was having trouble. I wanted to be a rockstar and in a sense I was, amongst the fish geeks. That may not seem like much, but at the time I had managed to turn the words “fish geek” into something that was cool, not dorky. Literally where ever I would go people were recognizing me. I was down at the  Monterey Bay Aquarium and people were walking up to me. I was visiting the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago and in talking to one of the people who was a biologist there I ended up getting a behind the scenes tour. My name had made it as far as the London Aquarium where I was also given a behind the scenes tour and taken to lunch.

Then as my two years were coming to a close and I had to step down a horrible thought entered my head. I made this club so noticeable because of my rockstar image would it hold up when I stepped down? I decided the find the best person for the job and get behind them and help them along. It seemed to work with me advising the new President for the two years he ran the club and we were invited to a few galas at the Steinhardht Aquarium by the Director of the Aquarium. When it was time for then President John to step down I thought about it. The SFAS has been in existence since 1932 and I only helped it out for 8 years of that time. They’ll be fine if I walk away. My life had changed a lot and I didn’t really have time for the club so I left. Not much of a problem since I was given a life membership and made an ex officio member of the BoD. I lost touch for awhile and then found out the truth—I was right. The club had shrunk down to the point that they don’t even have the required 13 board members. They no longer meet at the California Academy of Sciences and I’m starting to get calls from some of the old board members who also left and now are thinking of getting the old gang back together.

This was a great club and it still has the potential to be a great club. There are still members who have made contributions to the hobby by breeding new strains of fish, such as Dick Au and his German Blue Rams and Blue Angelfish. If you want to learn more about keeping fish properly and also be able to find some fish that you’ll never see in stores, then I suggest you check them out at www.sfaquarium.org, and maybe, just maybe we can get some of the old gang together to bring it back to what it used to be.