CHINATOWN RESPITE

The first smoke of the day was in the briar I associate with giant friendly spiders in Chinatown, the last pipe of the day will be in the pipe for watching rats in Spofford Alley. Neither piece of smoking equipment was made there or is in any way Chinese. And the tobacco is a splendid English style flake produced by a venerable company in North Carolina.

But you see, I live about six blocks from Chinatown, and quite unlike in the downtown Financial District, there are likable people there, delicious baked snacks and hot beverages, and no one yells at you for smoking.

So it's an entirely different ballgame.


There are actually no giant friendly spiders, alas, and the rats which once flourished in Spofford Alley while the city was digging it up and beautifying the place for the edification of tourists, making it all photogenic and picturesque, have died or moved over to Market Street.

San Francisco really loves tourists.

Residents, not so much.


When you leave Grant Avenue (都板街 'dou paan gaai', Dupont Street) and head sideways or into the alleyways, you do not encounter many visitors from the rest of the country, and will hardly hear harsh European languages.
Or bump into large erratic herds of people moving slowly while blocking the sidewalk and stopping for selfies.

I very much like that mental sense of being in a San Francisco that is from somewhere else, not in this dimension, on a different world.
It gives me time and space to dream.



Pipe, tobacco, and quiet passages.
Perhaps a cup of milk tea.



It's a private place.





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