Get off around the Montgomery Street Bart. Your mission: find a way into the admittedly touristy, and yet still cool in it's way, Chinatown/North beach zone. The trouble is that you've got some rather dull downtown office buildings to your north. You can go the west, but that will take you through Union Square, a yuppie department store hell which is too horrible to contemplate. I presume all you cool, ironic hipsters will want to laugh at the tourists that like to walk through the gate into Chinatown, at the intersection of Bush and Grant. So head off to the West on Sutter, and make a right on to Grant street. You'll know when you get there.

Just before the gate, you might like to take a look at the lobby for the Triton Hotel, 432 Grant near Bush... some nice recycled scrap metal furniture and so on.

I suggest making a detour of a few blocks: when you get to California, make a right and head west to the intersection of Kearney and California. Study the building at 580 California, on the north-east corner. This is my favorite office building in the city. Climb the steps of 601 California (the south-west corner) to get a better view, particularly in the reflection off of that brown office building across the street. Highly recommended.

You can continue up Kearney through Chinatown, but everyone needs to walk the length of Grant street once. So how about going north on Kearney for just a block, then hanging a left to head back over to Grant?

I like the stores on Grant Street. Sure, there's lots of touristy junk here... and maybe it's all touristy junk really, but out in the bins on the street, at various times, you can find neat things like cheap bamboo flutes, wooden snakes, chirping cricket toys, "Bang bang snappers", and so on, and inside there are jade-like statuettes, ceramic this and thats, and perhaps best of all, inexpensive silk outfits, sometimes ethnoidal, sometimes not.

And here and there you may catch a glimpse of the "authentic" chinese-american culture, which to outsiders like myself will perhaps always remain essentially unknowable...

There are also, of course, an innumerable number of Chinese restaurants, which I will (for once) not try to enumerate. Here are a few suggestions, though:

• Sam Wo's, 813 Washington near Grant. A multilevel hole-in-the-wall dive. Noodlestuff. Open 11am - 3am.
• House of Nanking, 919 Kearney at Columbus. Hugely popular, probably a little overrated, though.
• Hunan Restaurant, 924 Sansome, near Broadway. Most likely better food than House of Nanking, and definitely a shorter wait. Open till 9:30 PM.
• Brandy Ho's, 450 Broadway at Kearney OR 217 Columbus Ave at Pacifica. There's nothing wrong with Brandy Ho's though it annoys me mildly how hard it is to find something on the menu that's not flavored with alcohol. They overdo the "Brandy" schtick a little bit. Open to midnight.

Anyway, pick a place at random, if you feel like it... there are a lot of good ones. If you're not feeling too adventurous, you might want to restrict yourself to places with restaurant reviews in the windows... (there are a lot of publications that do reviews, and if a place hasn't managed to score one good review over the years, maybe it's got problems).

But all right, once you've had your fill of Chinatown, work your way up Grant street to Broadway. You're right on the border of Chinatown and North beach (and not far from the downtown business district, for that matter... that structure looming at the end of Columbus is known as "The Transamerican Pyramid", though I believe Transamerica sold it awhile back). North beach is nominally an Italian neighborhood, but to people like us, (whatever it is we are exactly), it's probably most interesting for it's history as a beatnik hangout. (There's a historical Reference below.)

Here's a few of the more "beat" places you might want to look at:

• The City Lights bookstore, on Columbus near Broadway (next to an alley recently renamed "Jack Kerouac"). This is a nifty place which carries a lot of stuff, but is heavy on the poetry, in particular the poetry published by the "City Lights" publishing house. All of this is owned by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, whose claim to beat godhood rests on having published people like Ginsberg way before anyone else cared. Getting the alley named "Kerouac" was a bit much, though: Ferlinghetti was kind of late to pick up on Kerouac. Also note the humor in proclaiming on the cover of Ferlinghetti's own book of poetry (published by City Lights) that it's been in print for 25 years: this isn't such a great achievement when you own the press....
• On the other side of "Kerouac" incidentally, is a bar named Vesuvio, where you can step upstairs and get a table by a window, overlooking the strip. Jack Kerouac nodded off here. Maybe.
• Across Columbus from Vesuvio, hidden in a little dead-end alley (now named "Jack London" I think) is another old bar with a much darker, beater vibe: Specs.
• Cafe Trieste, on the corner of Grant and Vallejo (just a stoned throw from Columbus), a small cafe which appears to be a well-preserved slice of the beat era. Lately I've been addicted to going here to do a Canoli with a pot of Russian Tea. And for whatever reason, I always seem to have good luck writing here... must be the vibes, man.
• From the window of his hotel room on Broadway (I'm told it was the Marconi Hotel at 554 Broadway -- I haven't looked to see if it's still there), Ginsberg could see the "Sir Francis Drake Hotel" at 450 Powell Street. The story goes that Ginsberg's peyote-warped brain decided that this building was "Moloch", hence Howl, part II. Maybe he was right: it is on Union Square... unfortunately, the view of this building is blocked from that direction now by a newer hotel building (originally a Holiday Inn, talk about Moloch!). You can however, go ballroom dancing in the "Starlight Room", at Moloch's peak...

One other thing you may have noticed already is that North beach contains the semi-official Red Light district for San Francisco. There's a bunch of "exotic dance" places scattered around the area, which I'm afraid I know very little about... except that the hungry <i> on Broadway by Columbus has the best name, and the Lusty Lady on Kearney near Broadway has a quasi-feminist reputation... it's supposed to have female management, with a reputation for treating their workers well (it's one of the first of such places to unionize), which I would guess would translate into a better attitude, and a better performance... except that their classified ads are always calling for women who have no tattoos or piercings. What fun is that? On the other hand, the place is open 24 hours...

(Oh and note the rather bland sign, on the rather bland place called the Condor, at the corner of Broadway and Columbus. For ages and ages, this sign was a tacky cartoon of a topless woman, with two red light bulbs for nipples. Now the Condor isn't even a topless bar any more. Some day, some day, I really hope that people will stop destroying everything in the world that is not featureless and boring...)

Also, on Broadway, next to the hungry <i>, there's the Beat Museum, which is probably worth a look on a "free admission" night.

Take a look at the places on Columbus if you feel so inclined. Skip the Stinking Rose, it sounds better than it is. I like the canoli's at Mara's Italian Pastry at 503 Columbus.

Some distance down Columbus is a great, highly recommended chocolate place called "Truffles Inc": 754 Columbus Ave, (415) 421-4814 (Reference).

But on to the next problem: how do we get you up onto Telegraph hill? This is another standard tourist destination, but it's not a bad place: a hill with a view of the bay that stretches from the Golden Gate Bridge to the Bay Bridge. There's a bus that goes up there, that I've never used (the 39), but I guess you could pick it up going north on Stockton, somewhere above Union, say around Filbert). Some people drive it, but on a typical day there's a long wait for a parking space up there. I recommend just doing the climb on foot... much less hassle, more interesting views, and if the exercise gives you problems, it's perfectly valid to stop suddenly and say "Look at that squirrel!" and force your friends to wait for you for a minute.

This is the way that I almost always climb Telegraph hill: go up Kearny, all the way to the end, at the corner of Kearny and Filbert. Off on your right, there's a stair case that might look like it goes up to someone's house, but it's a public thoroughfare that goes up to the top of the hill (keep an eye out for staircases like this as you wander around San Francisco... pedestrians don't always have to follow the same routes cars do). There's a sign here that says something like "Stairs to Coit Tower".

Once up there, you might consider paying to ride the elevator up Coit Tower. This is the best way to get a view of the city itself from Telegraph (you can walk around behind the tower, but there are some trees in the way on that side). It's also a good place to contemplate the stupidity of tourists... look at how desperate they are to figure out a way to throw money off the top of the tower. If it wasn't for fools like this, they might not have had to put plastic barriers over the windows.

To get down off of Telegraph, I suggest looking around the east side of the hill (the Bay Bridge is on your right when you face east). There are paths that lead to some nifty staircases that go down the steep side of the hill (the most famous one being the Filbert Steps, that come out on Filbert Street, but there's at least one other one, that I think comes out on Greenwich).

When you're ready to get out of this neighborhood tucked away between the hill and the bat: I'd probably walk it... (there's a path that winds through a park out to the Embarcadero, i.e. the bay) but if you've been following the route I've laid out, you've done a lot of walking already today. Here's a good cop out: take the 42 bus south on Battery street (you can probably pick it up around Filbert and Battery). This runs until around midnight. The 42 goes over to Market (and in fact crosses it, following first street out into Maritime Hall territory).