CitySeekr GPS City Guide - San Francisco for TomTom (PC only) [Download]

Turn your TomTom GPS into uber-intelligent City Guide!

Travel like a local with all the local knowledge of where to eat, stay, shop & entertain!

CitySeeker GPS City Guide - San Francisco turns your TomTom GPS into a detailed guide with all the important facts to help you find the best and the right places to eat, stay, shop and have fun!

Know where the best places are just like the Locals
CitySeekr GPS City Guide - San Francisco by WCities instantly transforms your TomTom VIA or GO2000 series* into a detailed and comprehensive city guide that lets you go out and get, shop and find fun and cool places to go just like a local!

How do you know what is a good place to eat or shop? Where are the best night clubs and sports bars? What's the best venue for an evening of jazz or a frenzied night of dancing? Now, with CitySeekr GPS City Guide - San Francisco you'll find everything you need to know about the best hotels, great restaurants, places for great entertainment or a day of adventure in and around San Francisco.

You can start you San Francisco day with CitySeekr and head to "Chinatown Kite Shop" and pick out a kite from the hundreds packed into this tiny shop, then head to "Dolores Park", amazing views and a bit of kite flying. Then it's out to "Camera Obscura", a San Francisco landmark built to resemble a vintage camera on the western most point of San Francisco. Follow that with a stop at the "Walt Disney Family Museum" where you'll get a look into the history of the Walt Disney family and life. Finally end with a wonderful meal at "John's Grill", a historic restaurant opened in 1908 and where Sam Spade ordered Pork Chops in Dashiell Hammett's 'The Maltese Falcon'.

Detailed and Comprehensive Coverage and Reviews
CitySeekr GPS City Guide - San Francisco has comprehensive coverage of Restaurants, Hotels, Shopping, Outdoor Activities, Museums, Sports venues, hot spots for Night Life and Entertainment.

Each listing in the CitySeekr GPS City Guide has a detailed review and important information about the location like average costs, operating hours, transportation information, services available and so much more. All the crucial details to help you make smart decisions and play your trip for maximum fun and enjoyment!

Simply download and install CitySeekr GPS City Guide - San Francisco to your TomTom GPS device and you're set for a day, weekend or week of fun and memories.

About WCities
WCities strives to provide the highest quality of comprehensive, multi-lingual, up-to-date guides, information and local events for cities and travel destinations around the globe. WCities is dedicated to being the most valuable source of information for business and leisure travelers as well as for local residents.

Features

·         Detailed information about all the important places in the cities you visit right on your GPS device.

·         Travel like a local when on business or leisure trips

·         Every listing has all the crucial details you need to make important travel decisions

·          Over 3400 detailed listings for Restaurants, Hotels, entertainment venues, Night spots, places to shop, things to do, sports venues and more.

Product Type: Download (est. download time is 8-10 min. with a high speed broadband, time will vary by connection speed)

TomTom VIA, GO2000 series - Windows PC Required

Price: $9.99

Click here to buy from Amazon

Capitalism laid bare in San Francisco

Here's the easiest way to get a San Francisco area twenty-something to launch into a bitter rant: cock your head sympathetically in their direction and say, "How about them rent prices?"

If I have one grudge with this place following our move, it is that for all San Francisco positions itself as the liberal bastion of the West, open-minded and accepting and done up with flowers in its hair, this is as nakedly capitalistic a city as I have ever encountered.

LP and I are blessed right now to live rent-free in the basement level of her aunt's house. But as we've started to tentatively look around for our own place we have come to one clear conclusion about this city...

We can't afford to live here. 

At $72,000 a year, San Francisco has the second highest median income in the country behind Washington D.C. It matches this with the highest median house price in the nation, at $552,000, by almost $200,000.

This is the highest disparity in America between median income and cost of housing. A median income earner can't afford to live here.

This has a somewhat geographic cause. Like New York and San Diego, two other cities with similarly high deficits, San Francisco is a very developed coastal area with limited space for development. But it's also in the midst of the social media boom. Companies like Twitter have moved into the middle of town and are dragging in high-income earners in droves. Facebook, Google and Yahoo, all in themselves massive, are offering free transport from San Francisco south to Silicon Valley each day. The production of new homes and the rate at which new rental vacancies have hit the market has not kept up with population growth.

Our research for an apartment (currently in the preliminary stages) began San Francisco city focused. We knew we were in for a rent increase from Boston. But our expected price bracket slowly started creeping up and up. We'd see the odd semi-affordable but very scratchy-looking place out in the Sunset, by the beach, but nothing to warm our hearts.

We had a brief moment of hope when a new suburb "Lower Nob Hill" started showing up in searches. Nob Hill itself is fancy. But Lower Nob Hill turned out to be part of the Tenderloin (San Francisco's glorious ghetto) that realtors had decided to dress up into something that it wasn't.

From what we hear, house hunting has become a blood sport: open homes packed with people turning up with envelopes of cash, two months of rent up front and two months of rent for a security deposit required on the spot.   

There are some disturbing byproducts of this warp in the market. Of the 800,000 people that live within San Francisco's 11 by 11 kilometre boundary, only 13.4 per cent of those are under 18. Families have been leaving this city for some time now and the result is that San Francisco proportionally has fewer children than any other city in America by some way.

San Francisco City Council has set guidelines that developers have to price 60 per cent of newly built units below market rate. But increasingly, I have read, these developers have opted to pay a fine instead of following this rule. And for all the low-income housing incentives on offer in the city like this one, it's doing little to keep the middle class itself from leaving.

Because if you were to be paying, say, $1900 a month in rent, you need to be earning at least $68,000 to ensure you're not shelling out more of a third of your income each month toward a place to live. But then someone earning $68,000 a year doesn't qualify for housing assistance, you follow?

The news of late has been soaked with depressing factoids about the housing market.

Someone working at minimum wage would have to work a 220-hour week to be able to live in San Francisco. The average middle-school teacher would need a second job just to get by.

At the start of 2013, the average apartment rental in San Francisco has risen to around $2700 a month with most two-bedroom apartments retailing for north of $3000. 

Once LP and I had looked around we realised that to make do in San Francisco we'd have to reconcile ourselves to living in an apartment twice as expensive as we were in Boston (in itself not a cheap place to live) but with probably less than half the space.

And we're both just not prepared to do that.

The result of this for us is that we'll end up living in Oakland or Berkeley. Which isn't a big deal. I'll still enjoy being within a subway ride of San Francisco. It's a great city.

But it was an alarming, and new, feeling to find myself in a place where I couldn't actually afford to be. And I can't help but wonder about what the future holds for San Francisco. With the tech crowd flooding into town and businesses scrambling to relocate near it, the city is dividing neatly into renting and owning classes, with a stark divide and little chance of mobility between the two.

Which to me seems like a final corruption of everything I'd sort of marked San Francisco up to be in my head.

But there's a chance, I guess, that I'm just being naïve. No?

Become a fan of Voyages in America on Facebook: you'll get blog posts to your news feed, some great photography, and some good chatter. You can also follow the conversation on Twitter, or send an email and share your thoughts.

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One Delicious Reason to Visit San Francisco Now

‘Tis the season…for Dungeness crab in San Francisco!

Many of my friends in the city have told me it isn’t Christmas without crab. When you’re talking local, sustainable seafood, this delicacy tops the list this time of year (Seafood Watch has given the crabs a rating of “Best Choice“).

Crab fishermen taking off for the day. (Photograph by Steve McFarland, Flickr)

The well-trafficked Fisherman’s Wharf area holds an annual crab fest in December and January and February are prime time for all-you-can-eat crab charity dinners and fundraisers.

But the beloved and much-anticipated season almost didn’t happen at all. When fish brokers threatened to cut the price of crab, it set off an eleven-day strike, with boats in the ports of San Francisco, Bodega Bay, and Half Moon Bay refusing to budge. When the opposing parties finally reached a compromise last week, the boats sailed.

Though it was a close call, crab season is back on track and poised to make many people smile this winter.

Here are the best places to take part in the Dungeness crab tradition in San Francisco:

When I polled my friends in Northern California about the best crab spots in the city, Swan Oyster Depot came up time and again (along with a caveat about the long wait). This year marks their 100th year in business, and they’re not going anywhere soon. It’s tiny (they have only 12 bar stools), but the lip-smacking array of fresh-as-can-be oysters, crab, shrimp and chowders on offer makes Swan soooo worth waiting in line.

Nettie’s Crab Shack in the Marina boasts that “local crabs are better than ever,” and is serving a warm Dungeness crab roll and a Cobb Louis salad with Dungeness crab, avocado, beets, and egg. They also serve nostalgic desserts like butterscotch pudding and warm apple and pear crisp.

A heap of Dungeness crabs. (Photograph courtesy San Francisco Travel Association)

At One Market restaurant in the Embarcadero District, Chef Mark Dommen always features Dungeness meat in crab cakes and in a salad, currently one with green papaya, pomelo segments, peanuts, and micro cilantro. To ensure optimal taste and freshness, they purchase live crabs every day and cook and clean them at the restaurant.

Anchor and Hope, another favorite, claims to be an East-Coast-meets-West-Coast fish house. Housed in a turn-of-the-century warehouse — with a little grit on the brick exterior and with a modern studio feel on the inside — its setting is just plain cool.

I don’t ever need convincing to go to San Francisco. But this time of year, I admit I’d just go for the crab.

But while I’m at it, here are a few other festive things on tap around town:

Part of the sugar castle display at the Westin St. Francis.(Photograph by Niall Kennedy, Flickr)

When you think of cities with that quintessential holiday feel, San Francisco doesn’t necessarily come to mind. But the city really does deck itself out.

“You can experience all the joys of the season without the cold weather,” says Bill Sutton, chief concierge at the InterContinental San Francisco. ” We have ice-skating rinks, holiday trees, a Dickens fair, and San Francisco’s own traditional holiday meal of cold cracked Dungeness crab, sourdough bread, and a nice California Chardonnay.”

San Francisco also hosts a few of my theater favorites, like “The Velveteen Rabbit” and “A Christmas Carol,” but you can’t leave the city without paying a visit to the Westin St. Francis to see its annual sugar castle, topping out at 12 feet tall, and decorated with top names we know from 2012, like politicians, celebrities, and athletes.

Annie Fitzsimmons is Intelligent Travel’s Urban Insider, giving you the dish on the best things to see and do in cities all over the world. Follow her travels on Twitter @anniefitz.

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