El Lay

From Los Angeles I take a late evening flight to San Francisco, catching bart to the East Bay. A family joins with six rowdy 5-6 years olds who squeel and scream, climbing over the seats and trampling on each other. Dad has a gold grill on his front teeth and mom every now and then yells at the youngsters to 'shut the hell up." Eventually I move to another seat.

A nice thing, in Berkeley, are the train horns which waft up from the flats into the Berkeley hills. Fog horns boom at the entrance of the Golden Gate Bridge, doing so since 1937, guiding 100s of thousands of ships through the Golden Gate straight and forewarning San Franciscans when fog rolling in to envelope the city. They operate, on average, 2 hours a day (in the summer fog months, it is over 5 hours a day).  In 1994 the fog horns were to be silenced for better technology but the howling protests ensure the fog horns longevity.