A friend took us on a quick overnight trip to San Francisco, where he used to live. The city's roller coaster topography was especially gripping as we zipped about in his Cooper Mini; my heart is still in my mouth from going over the precipice of Leavenworth! But what most gripped me was the Palace of Fine Arts, which I'd not visited before, perhaps because my view of the city is shaped in ways I hadn't realized by Alfred Hitchcock's film "Vertigo" (but we did also just go to Big Basin Redwoods). It's a weird place. 
Constructed in plaster and wood for the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exhibition, architect Bernard Maybeck "designed [it] to evoke the sadness and beauty of looking at a Roman ruin." He might have planned it before the great earthquake of 1906, but the strange statues 
of weeping women, their backs to us, their heads and arms hidden, will have had special resonance then. The place was rebuilt in steel and concrete in the 1960s, and now looking more like Roman ruins
than ever. But what made it increasingly uncanny was the nature around it. This included huge spiky-leaved plants with alien-looking seedpods (giant rhubarb?), red-eared slider turtles, and an overgrown island full of predatory birds (great blue and black-crowned herons) poised to pounce. Very creepy! 
