Don’t forget the City of Paris! My mom shopped for her business suits there in the 40s. I’ve a few pieces of memorabilia from the store I got in her memory.
Oh, and no matter how big San Jose gets, it just doesn’t feel like a city.
My grandmother would take me Christmas shopping in the City and we’d always go first to see the tree in the atrium of the City of Paris. It was absolutely magical. The stores in Union Square all had animated Christmas scenes in the windows – also magical to a child. Then we’d go eat lunch at the Woolworth’s counter.
No, San Jose won’t ever be a city like that.
There is a series of television advertisements running presently (in Aus, but I’m sure in other parts of the world) for Trivago, the online booking site. And they star a bloke called Jurgen Klopp, a former soccer player and football executive.
Now I thought at first it was just me who cringed every time his smile appeared on the screen, but apparently his teeth are celebrities unto themselves across the interwebs.
BEHOLD, and better put your sunglasses on folks.
Me too. He’s much loved in Liverpool (UK) for his success as a team manager, but the teeth are almost pantomime level.
That was our ritual too, except that when Big Aunt Lucy was in town for the holidays, she’d treat us to Blum’s after making the rounds of Union Square. This was in the days before BART, so we’d drive in and park down in the bowels of the Union Square parking garage - an ordeal that I would not dream of undertaking these days!
I made that sound last week when I was ill!
Hey! I thought I was in charge of really shitty jokes!
Oh yeah! I thought it was your day off.
The Kloppster has an invariably sunny disposition and Odin gave him choppers with which to illustrate it.
I did that once. Once. I’d never do it again.
For which Jan Jose is forever grateful.However, SF isnt anything like that today. The homeless and drug issues in SF are out of control. Even in Union Square you can often detect the stench of urine.
Downtown SJ had a Woolworths also, But few high rise buildings and the shopping area is in two giant Malls.
Yes, San Francisco is a dying sleazy tourist trap and San Jose is a soulless tech metropolis of consumerism. I lived in North Beach in the late 1970’s when it was still a very cool and hopping place. Glad I got to be there then.
A couple restaurant-themed rants:
Restaurants that serve hamburgers with slices of roma tomatoes. They are not big enough to cover the patty, so they use three of them, which overlap and create a big lump under the top bun. So i throw two of them away, but now I have a sad little tomato in the middle of the patty that I get no pleasure from until I’ve eaten half the burger! I get that roma tomatoes are cheaper than larger tomatoes, but, come on! Same with the sliced onion; I want a uniform, thin slice of onion that covers the patty, not that useless cone from the end of the onion! Save that for soup! Hamburgers are all about the layers, and anything that disturbs that order is an affront to nature!
Also restaurants that put fresh onions on a garden salad. Now, I like a nice red onion on my salad; but not when they are sliced into giant onion rings that I have to cut up myself! I resent chefs whose knife skills require me to finish their job at the table before I can eat my salad. Or do they imagine I’m going to fork a 4" onion ring and gnaw on it like a zoo animal? Salads should be bite sized, ready to eat. Finish the job, ya mo-ron!
I also hate when a leaf in the salad is huge and I have to fold it up and use the fork like a staple to hold it together.
That is because many people take the onions off, like I do.
I can handle the big onion, but sheeeeesss, tear up the lettuce for cryin out loud. It’s not a steak that I should cut up. Do. Your. Job.
When I am trying to pay a bill, and I get the screen where I have to click on all of the bicycles, or traffic lights, or ice cream cones, you get the idea. This is to verify I am a human. I’m not trying to take money, I think it’s ridiculous and infuriating.
Having just gotten back from vacation, what infuriates me are people get up and try to line up to board a flight the second the first group starts boarding, even though they’re in group 5 or whatever, ignoring the gate agent’s instructions to stay seated until their group is called. They just get in the way of the people who actually are boarding.
Those people are referred to as “gate lice”. Some airlines have begun cracking down on it.
https://www.thestreet.com/travel/airlines-are-spending-a-fortune-to-fight-gate-lice
I recently connected for an international flight in the hellhole that is Toronto Pearson. The gate area did not have space for all passengers to sit, it was behind a food court, so you’d be several minutes and crowds away from the gate, where you wouldn’t be able to hear the boarding instructions, and two adjacent planes were boarding at once; bound for different countries, but the different instructions overlapping could be confusing as some announcements ran together (“AC124 boarding Zone 2 passengers for London…AC345 boarding Zone 3 for Vienna”).
We stood near the gate because there was literally nowhere else to be, and the boarding lines just snaked through the groups who were waiting our turn.
It’s also partially caused by the airlines who simultaneously want to charge you for checked bags, resulting in people taking larger carry ons, then having no space in the bins for it all, so you can check your carry on for “free”. People want to be first in their zone to hopefully store their bag and not deal with that bullshit.