Happy New Year 2009

House with Christmas decoration

The house is famous for it's decoration on Christmas and Halloween and I believe Easter. People walk or drive by to look at it and take pictures. When I came today a crowd of at least 20 to 30 people passed by, alone, in pairs, in groups and with or without children. Popular place and one of it's kind, at least here in the neighborhood.

German store front view

Again a picture of the German store in SF, the store is on Church Street in Noe Valley.

J-line trails Church Street

The J-line Muni (one of San Francisco's transportation systems) trails on Church and 22nd. The trails are separating from Church street, running parallel for a while, because the street is getting to steep for the Muni cars.

Cable Car on California ...

... stopping at Grant in Chinatown. The picture was taken three years ago, as you may see on the "de Young" ad, announcing the re-opening in october 2005.

Christmas decoration and palm tree

"Milk" at Castro Theater

Milk is the movie/biography about Harvey Milk, California's first openly gay man in public office. He was assassinated, November 1978 along with Mayor George Moscone by another Supervisor Dan White.
Castro Theater is the 100th SF Landmark. In the picture you see part of it's beautiful ornate interior and at the bottom an impressive organ that is played before a movie.

Ikea - Emeryville

Ikea, the worlds largest furniture manufacture with retail stores worldwide has also stores close to SF. One in Emeryville and one in Palo Alto. Whenever I tell visitors from Germany that "we" have a store here in SF, people are always surprised. So here's the proof, yes there is an Ikea.

Downtown zoo

I hope you can see the two cats in the picture. It's a shop window of Macy's a Department Store at Union Square. They decorated everything Christmas like, looking like a house or home and put little cats or a little dog in the windows. It did not only get my attention.

Fire alarm box

It is a device used to notify the fire department. Some see them as outdated since everyone uses a cell phone these days. However in case of a disaster, power might be out, phone services might be broken and then such alarm box is quite useful.
Interestingly enough such boxes don't seem to be in every city of the US. I just found a online list of cities with operating box alarm systems. The list is not that long and San Francisco is one of them.