All worked out on the space available flights from Saigon via Hong Kong and I arrived S.F. a couple hours before I left from Hong Kong, crossing the dateline. Did not sleep much. I had the middle seat in economy, on the aisle a very large American who slept the whole way and was hard to get around to stretch on my left a charming young Singaporian from the Microsoft S’pore office, enjoyed very much talking with her. Besides a broken laptop it turned out that my cellphone had lost it’s service here after I had a Vietnam prepaid SIM card installed in it. Fortunately a T-Mobile service point on Market street was able to get me going again but I have lost my address book that I had accumulated on it. So I am now double handicapped, on the laptop account.

I take the train this evening and will arrive Tuesday evening in Tacoma.

I am staying at the  Hotel Whitcomb a nice old turn of the century building on Market Street near the Civic Center, on the edge of the Tenderloin district. $ 69.00 plus tax. Skid Road of San Francisco.  All night the sirens of police and ambulance cars were blaring, but I missed most of the noise because I had not slept for 30 hours. Walking the neighborhood, you see the weirdest human beings, lonely, broken, wasting their God given gifts away; contributing little and taxing society resources and tolerance. A stark contrast to the 3 months in Asia where the disadvantaged at least try to make a contribution.

Hotel Whitcomb