I think its a fantastic weekend city. Been there several times on the weekends. Its the kind of city where almost all the restaurants away from the tourist areas are good - because bad restaurants don’t last. Where the architecture is interesting. The museums are top notch. People watching is facinating. There are enough tourists that its easy to take a bus to Napa on a wine tour for a Saturday, or over to Muir Woods.
I wouldn’t want to live there, too many people, too expensive. Weather sucks (and I’m from Minnesota).
Guys, you’re all being transparently wooshed; silenus (a fellow of great taste, especially in beer and whiskey) is joking. It’s like making a comparison between Ethiopian restaurants in Manhattan Island, NYC, and Manhattan, KS.
Stranger
What do you consider “sucks?” It doesn’t rain much, it’s nice and cool in the summer, mild in winter… the weather is a specific high point for me.
Joe
SF’s tourist attractions are few in number and mostly kind of suck. If you are a “read the tour book and make a schedule” kind of traveler, it’s not going to be great.
But it is a great city if you are the kind of person who likes to stroll around and discover things and soak up the aptmosphere. Unfortunately the coolest neighborhoods are often the farthest from the tourist circuit.
And it really is a great food city- and not just the trendy places. I could take you to a Lebanese coffee roaster whose family had been doing their thing for ages. I could take you to a tiny Vietnamese sandwich shop that sells six sandwiches for five dollars and will make you cry with how good they are. I know a really sketchy Nigerian eatery that will serve you deep fried fish with greens and cowpeas just like you’d find in Nigeria. You can get something from ANY part of the world. Ever had good Nepali food? Want to see why Guatemalan food sucks? In the mood for some saffron-rose ice cream from the Bombay Ice-creamery? Yum!
There are also a lot of fun things in the East Bay, but once again it’s stuff that you probably wouldn’t ever know about if you weren’t from around there. On certain Sundays there is a Thai Buddhist temple in Berkeley where monks sell cheap, amazing Thai food to a very Northern California crowd of hippies and hipsters. In Albany there is on old industrial waste dump that where the garbage has been turned into amazing but ephemeral pieces of art. In Oakland there is a bonsai garden tucked away in a park with trees that were brought here hundreds of years ago on ships from Japan as gifts from the emperor. How cool is that?
Anyway, yeah, not a great place for most tourists, and it’s probably best if you know someone who lives around there.
There are a lot of homeless- they also like walkable, pretty cities with mild climates. They don’t bother the locals, it’s just part of living in the city. Earthquakes are obviously rare, and in modern times even when they are bad most of the damage is property damage. I don’t think statistically you are more at risk of being hurt in a natural disaster than you would be in any other city.
Too cool, too misty - SF doesn’t really have a “summer” or a “winter” - it has eternal Spring. Which is nice if you like Spring - alot.
What is it about earthquakes that sets people off? I’ve talked to people from the Mid-West and Gulf Coast–where one regularly suffer from tornados, thunderstorms, hurricanes, flash flooding, sinkholes, ice storms, and 4H shows on a seasonal basis–and yet, they’re terrified of a little tremor. In the 20th Century, San Francisco was subject to two major (M[sub]w[/sub]>7.0) earthquakes, and most of the deaths that occurred in 1906 were due to the resulting fires caused by unprotected wood structures and leaking fuel. You are far more likely to die in a plane crash on the way there than be injured or killed in a major earthquake.
So you did all the generic tourist-y things that you could do in any city with slight variations, and then gave up? Did you walk thorugh North Beach or Haight-Asbury, take the elevator up Coit Tower and take in the impressive view and the silly murial, drive up to the former SF-87C Hawk Hill Nike site to take in the Bay entrance, look at the architecture in Nob Hill and Russian Hill, have a meal or drink at any of the wide variety of excellent restaurants everywhere away from the tourist sights, check out the new and used bookstores that are hidden away in every back alley and off-street neighborhood, go to the de Young and people watch, et cetera ad nauseam?
For NoCal outdoors stuff I would hub somewhere around Redding; south I’d look for someplace near Monterrey or Big Sur. Driving into and out of the city is a big pain in the ass, and it really isn’t close enough to the upstate for an easy day trip. There is so much to do in this area you couldn’t really see it all if you had a month. Northern California alone is larger than most major European nations, and has almost every type of climate and terrain imaginable, including volcanos, mountains, deserts, ocean, big lakes, vineyards, et cetera.
If you can’t find anything fun to do in or around San Francisco, you really just need to get a large colorful towel and start waving for a passing spacecraft, 'cause you’re all done with Planet Earth. What you are really looking for is a thrillride through the ergosphere of a galactic mass black hole. 
Stranger
“The coldest winter I ever saw was the summer I spent in San Francisco.” – Attributed to (without verification) Mark Twain.
Personally, I think it is perfect weather; you get sun and a cool, sea breezy-mist at the same time. It’s not beach-lounging weather (mostly) to be sure, but then, when you go to the beach the birds crap on you anyway.
Stranger
I found the panhandlers unusually numerous and aggressive (most cities in the U.S. have cracked down sufficiently that you get the passive holding out a cup but not the follow-you-down-the-street harangue that I’ve encountered in S.F.). It’s obviously an issue of government/police taking a lackadaisical approach.
The other thing that I figured out is there seem to be lots and LOTS of hardcore heroin addicts (maybe not totally uncommon among that population, but this seemed notably more, by which I mean I’ve seen people openly shooting up on the street in the Tenderloin).
How the Tenderloin continues to exist and be a dump just blocks from Union Square is a big economic mystery to me given the insane N. Cal. real estate prices of recent years . . . .
I have to admit, I really did enjoy the Alcatraz tour.
You need to walk the Golden Gate Bridge to appreciate it. Additionally, seen from a moderate distance, it is in a beautiful setting, and is an example of elegant design. It’s sort of like civil engineering meets art. (Other local bridges, IMO, like the Oakland Bay, are indeed just bridges).
IIRC Union Square has never been considered a really great part of the city–much like Pershing Square in L.A.
My parents are from Minnesota, and I grew up in the Mid-South. My parents moved back to Minnesota when I was twelve. My father said “I can’t live someplace without seasons.” Minnesota is too cold in Winter and often too warm and humid in Summer, but I’m my father’s child.
Regarding the food, I think like a lot of places, you need to hook up with a native who can show you where the really good places are. Queuing up with your fellow tourists at all the tourist book places isn’t going to be nearly as much fun, or tasty.
Same goes for a lot of the night life. If it’s in a tourist guide, it’s so yesterday, and you’re going to be hanging out with your fellow tourists.
Another one not to be missed is Axum Cafe. It’s an awesome Ethiopian place on Lower Haight at, um, I think Pierce St.
I love SF restaurants.
It’s the inability to predict when they’ll happen. Anything bad that comes out of the sky generally allows for some level of tracking and prediction. An earthquake, however, happens without any warning.
Also, with thunderstorms, hurricanes, floods, etc., you can head for safety, whether it be a basement, some high ground, or just someplace indoors. In an earthquake there’s nowhere to run.
I live in San Jose and I generally avoid going to the City. I don’t like walking there, I don’t like driving there, and I especially don’t like parking there. I’m not a big fan of cities, so that heavily influences my opinions. I like slightly smaller ones like Portland, OR or San Jose’s downtown*.
When I do go to SF I usually have a good time, though. Mostly because of the company. Last weekend my wife and I went to Crissy Field for the first time with our dogs and it was great. Really, really great. The sky was completely clear and the wind was light.
After that we grabbed some food at Pier 39 and told at least 350 people what a Shiba Inu was. Note: If you own an unusual dog breed and bring it to a tourist destination, be prepared for the onslaught.
*: Despite being the 10th most populated city in the US, its downtown could fit inside my cubicle.
There are things that can be done to help survive an earthquake, but they’re done ahead of time and most of them involve building codes and shopping. SF is ground zero for quake safety design. Any time SF has earthquake damage, the civil engineering professors descend in a swarm. For the two years after the Loma-Preata quake, every structural or geotechnic engineering class at UC Davis started with a day of earthquake slides. I guess it was something to do on the first day.
After the professors come to conclusions, there’s another round of earthquate retrofitting.
I agree that SF is not car friendly. It’s very much not parking friendly. And don’t ever count on being able to turn left. When my son dragged me along on a walking tour of Chinatown (his college field trip), we parked in Dublin and took Bart into town. While we were there, I forced him to go to this museum. I had been wanting to check it out. It was small, but surrounded by other little museums.
If I were to plan a trip to SF. I’d hit the Exploratorium and then see how many little museums I could find.
Oh, nearly forgot. For another sort of geek fix, you could take BART over to Oakland and watch the knights of the Society for Creative Anachronism practice sword and shield work.
BART Fighter Practice
The Province [of the Mists] is proud to host the oldest fighter practice of the whole Known World. Food and shopping in the vicinity. Since it’s in a parking lot there’s ample parking.
Location: Big parking lot of the Rockridge BART station in Oakland, CA
Day and Time: Every Thursday 7-10pm
It’s an aquired taste. There are other fighter practices in SF (see here), but that one has the history going. I’ve never attended. If I did, I’d bring a chair.
Germany, the Czech Republic, fecking Vladivostok, and still the ‘rubbish food’ stereotype gets hurled at London? Boo hiss.
Oh, I was teasin’. Pretending to be a fickle hard-to-please tourist.
I’d already lived & traveled around Europe, so for breakfast I wasn’t expecting more than a bread roll, butter & jelly and if I were lucky, maybe some cold-cut meats. I never get my hopes up for coffee.
This was my first time to London, our plane landed early in the morning, we checked into our hotel and I was starving. We found a little diner place near the hotel and I ordered what they had, that looked reasonably filling. Eggs (scrambled?), what I think you call a banger, fries and beans.
Well, that was an odd breakfast. The eggs were a greasy flat yellow thing, but I’ll give you a pass on that one, because you can get some atrocious scrambled eggs in the States, too. The banger was 1 step up from a hotdog, but a couple steps down from other sausages I’ve had. The fries and beans? Not breakfast food for me. 
It’s all good though. Everything else we ate was just fine, and I don’t judge London because the first food I ate kinda sucked. 
*There is, for some reason, something especially grim about pubs near stations, a very particular kind of grubbiness, a special kind of pallor to the pork pies.
Worse than the pork pies, though, are the sandwiches.
There is a feeling which persists in England that making a sandwich interesting, attractive, or in any way pleasant to eat is something sinful that only foreigners do.
“Make 'em dry,” is the instruction buried somewhere in the collective national consciousness, “make 'em rubbery. If you have to keep the buggers fresh, do it by washing 'em once a week.”
It is by eating sandwiches in pubs on Saturday lunchtimes that the British seek to atone for whatever their national sins have been. They’re not altogether clear what those sins are, and don’t want to know either. Sins are not the sort of things one wants to know about. But whatever their sins are they are amply atoned for by the sandwiches they make themselves eat.
If there is anything worse than the sandwiches, it is the sausages which sit next to them. Joyless tubes, full of gristle, floating in a sea of something hot and sad, stuck with a plastic pin in the shape of a chef’s hat: a memorial, one feels, for some chef who hated the world, and died, forgotten and alone among his cats on a back stair in Stepney.
The sausages are for the ones who know what their sins are and wish to atone for something specific.*
[right]Douglas Adams, So Long And Thanks For All The Fish[/right]
Stranger
“And then you bit into them, and learned once again that Cut-me-own-Throat Dibbler could find a use for bits of an animal that the animal didn’t know it had got. Dibbler had worked out that with enough fried onions and mustard people would eat anything.”
— (Terry Pratchett, Moving Pictures)