Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco is undoubtedly a tourist trap. I would swear 80% of the visitors to San Francisco see little more than the kitchy stores, tacky amusement traps, and overpriced restaurants on the northeast end of the city. There are always hordes there, trying to figure out what Angel Island is (because it's not Alcatraz Island, the only one they've heard of) and they actually want to see (and god forbid, feed) the sea lions, which, IMHO, are a cross between ocean rats and street bums. I mean, I don't mind tourists (since I'm often one myself) but is it really neccessary for each and every one of them to go to exactly the same places?
But like any tourist trap, there is stuff worth checking out there, and you wouldn't have what you have there if it weren't a centralized collection of attractions. Alcatraz Island is actually a state park, so all you have to pay to see it is the $12 ferry fare. I'd gotten tickets to two tourist traps at a huge discount at a local school auction, and we'd also been planning to see them all summer. We finally got there last Sunday, early enough to get street parking in North Beach, where it's free.
Our first ticketed destination was the Wax Museum at Fisherman's Wharf. It was hilariously bad. Here's a wax figure of Elvis, who looks just like the wax figure of Angelina Jolie, but with a different wig. Peter was a bit incensed: we've seen realistic sculpture with clay, wood, stone, and marble, but why do wax statues always look so hokey? Is it the medium, or the tradition? It tried to be vaguely educational, with activatable audio on the historical figures we were seeing, but all Peter could take away from it was that the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis statue looked more like Lady Penelope from Thunderbirds than any picture he'd ever seen of the first lady. The Chamber of Horrors, though, had an electric chair, we could sit in to get a mild shock followed by another scare (you'll have to check it out yourself, for when you are in the mood for ultra-tacky amusement.)
I also had tickets to the Aquarium of the Bay. It was actually pretty good, with information and tanks on various kinds of fishes, a moving sidewalk that took you inside two tanks where the fish would swim around and above you and some touch tanks. Here's Peter and Kelly inside one of the big aquariums:
:
But we had membership at the Monterey Bay Aquarium a few years ago, and it paled in comparison: yet it still had that overcrowded-by-tired-out-of-towners feel that makes me feel so claustrophobic in both places.
The best part of Fisherman's Wharf is indubitably, the street entertainers. They're so good, in fact, that there is even a stage set up for them on Pier 39. You can watch jugglers and magicians and dancers perform on that stage, all day for free. They actually have to audition to get a spot on that stage, and they only get paid by the audience, so they work hard for their money. We were hungry for our lunch, which I'd packed and left in the car, so we just saw the unofficial street performers along Jefferson Street.
These guys danced like funky robots, complete with creaks and squeeks, and never dropped character.
The "robot" on the right has a plastic cup. If you put money into it, he would spin and whir and eventually drop the money from the cup into the bigger can below. A gold-colored analogue and the Tin Man were on the next corner.
A little further down, a giant skeleton was dancing as well, but he took a break to pose with people and eat their heads, as he did with this guy:
Then he tried to eat mine, but I was laughing too hard:
Afterwards, just around the corner, I was busily talking to Neil when a bush jumped up and growled at me. That was a street performer, too, and I jumped and screamed, much to the amusement of those who had gathered to see just such a thing. We stopped off at the Spy Store, but they had nothing to compare to the stealth bush. And so, having had our fill of Pier 39 for the day, we went home.