Four gold domes and a bride

Went to San Francisco today on a whim: such a beautiful day, have to get out and EMBRACE it, blah, blah. We drove via Marin County, over two bridges, into SF, and decided to eat lunch in whatever block we could find a a parking place on Geary, a crap shoot. By some miracle, we found a spot near two restaurants, the first too much of a hole-in-the-wall (feared food poisoning), the second a coffee/laptop place trying very hard to be Parisian via murals. Even the wastebin in the bathroom had been tarted-up to look French, an Eiffel tower painted on black plastic. (Now THERE'S a wastebasket.)

Sitting at a window table with our sandwiches, we could see four onion domes--one big, three small-- on a large church across the street. The domes were bright gold, with a texture something like orange peel. A man in a full-length black priest's get-up hurried past our window carrying a cheap white plastic bag. His hair was straggly, shoulder-length, and greasy. Not a good look. He crossed the street and disappeared into a side door of the church. What the hell?

We finished lunch and investigated--or I did; Jerry couldn't give a damn about any church in any form unless it has outdoor lights where he might find a moth. He tagged along. The church turned out to be a Russian Orthodox cathedral. Who knew? There were lots of instructions in Russian (Cyrillic?) posted on side doors. The impressive front doors were locked. One had a combination lock on it, which did not go at all with the domes.

Then we walked at Crissy Field, first toward the Golden Gate Bridge and Fort Mason. Across the bay, the Marin headlands were so visible--every contour, every blade of grass--it was DIGITAL. We turned around and walked as far as the newly-renovated Palace of Fine Arts, which is now very elegant, with beautifully landscaped grounds, including a large pond, all of it originally designed by Maybeck. On one of the meticulously kept paths, we came across a bride in bright-white satin embroidered down the front with rhinestone flowers, posing for photographs with her groom, who wore creamy white from head to toe. They were enraptured, with each other and with checking out the pictures already taken. My groom (c. 1977) could give even less of a damn about weddings, but I loved it, every detail.

The Palace, the pond, and the adjoining building (now the Exploratorium) were all part of the Pan-Pacific International Exposition, held in 1915 to celebrate the opening of the Panama Canal and also to pep up the city's PR after the 1906 earthquake. I remember my dad telling me that his father carried him around it as an infant; he was born in May of that year. The Exposition covered many acres of what is now the Marina. All the rest of the buildings are long-gone.