Chinatown - Monday

We are now on a roll with these walking tours, so today we want to explore Chinatown in SF. We carefully leave early enough to find a parking sport (another 45 minutes) and get a cup of tea before the walk.
The tour starts in Portsmouth Sq, one of the oldest parts of SF. It is an amazing place, although it is right on the edge of Chinatown it is quite noisy and full of Chinese people. They are in little groups all over the place, very few sitting alone. They are playing cards, or checkers (did not see majong, though I guess it was played as well), often for money. Most games had little, or large, groups standing watching with various degrees on animation. Across the square what looked like a tai che class, with people standing very still in various poses. We later learned that this was a demonstration (though I have no idea what they were demonstrating about).
We met our guide, who pointed out that because the normal homes were still single rooms with shared facilities then people would meet friends and socialise at places like Portsmouth Sq. Also popular meeting places would be barber shops and beauty salons, so we would see a disproportionately large number of them on our walk (which indeed we did).
For the next two hours we were whizzed round the fascinating streets of SF's Chinatown. We visited Grant St, which is the tourist street of CT, lots of the back alleys, which are the province of the Tongs and mutual benefit societies. We ventured into a Buddhist/Taoist temple and saw the visually fabulous shrines and statues. We visited a Fortune Cookie factory and the barber shop that was frequented by (amongst others) Frank Sinatra. We emerged on to Stockton St, which is the supermarket of CT, Often a shop would be split into an arcade, with a narrow access to every stall, these very crowded shops each held a variety of produce, maybe filled with live fish, live frogs and live seafood in a variety of different tank sizes. You choose your fish and they will beat it to death in front of you. Also meat and vegetable stalls with an amazing variety of produce, all at below Walmart prices.
We were shown some of the architecture, which is all post 1906, as CT burned down in the fire that followed the earthquake. We also learned some of the history of Chinese people in North America, how they were often persecuted and discriminated against both in law and through society.
Our guide pointed out the Utopia Restaurant on Waverley St, so that's where we ate after the tour.
Although the guide tried to get an awful lot in to the two hours, there didn't seem to be the same narrative thread running through (like the Hitchcock Tour), so it was more difficult to remember all that was said. But we had great fun and visited places we would not have dreamed of going on our own.