Customer Reviews

Moleskine City Notebook San Francisco

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a very unusual product and I would strongly encourage anyone considering getting one to be completely aware of what it is before they purchase it. First, if you are looking for a single travel guide to prepare you for your trip to New York (or anywhere else there is a guide for), this is very close to worthless, if not entirely worthless. I would call one's attention to the title of the product. It is a "Notebook." That means that most of the pages are blank. This literally is a book for taking notes in.

So what do you get when you buy this? Every book in the series follows the same format. First there is a personal information page with address, phone, allergies, family doctor, passport number, then map information with public transportation maps. Then follows information on the various forms of transportation with phone numbers and websites, including cabs, buses, other forms of public transportation, and airports. There are some blank itinerary pages, measurement and speed conversion charts, size conversion charts (for shoppers), then a long series of neighborhood maps, including an index. And that's it. The final two-thirds of the notebook are blank. The next 20 or so pages are completely blank and unlined for whatever use you want to put them to. Next come several pages intended for writing down names of restaurants, bars, museums, historical sites, hotels, or whatever. The book also comes with unlabeled tabs with stickers to use as desired (for theaters, concert halls, or whatever you desire) as well as tracing paper for, as the label says, "Itineraries or Whatever." Finally, there is the usual pocket at the back that is found in all Moleskine products.

For some people this is going to be an absolutely useless product. But for many this will be remarkably useful. In fact, I can envision two uses for this notebook. First, those who are planning a trip to one of the places for which Moleskine has produced a book. Let's say one has consulted the Blue guide, the Eyewitness Guide (by DK), a Rough Guide, the Michelin guide, and the Let's Go guide. Maybe you've bought all of these, making for five guides. No way do you want to drag all of these on your trip or more than one on your flight. So what might you do? You might take the Moleskin Notebook, record into it all the places you want to see, restaurants you want to dine at, museums you want to stroll through, and anything else you want to do while in your destination of choice, and record it there. So the Moleskine City Notebook can serve as a distillation of all the various travel guides, web sites, and other resources you have consulted. And instead of hauling about a large Fodor's guide, you can carry about this small Notebook that can easily fit into a backpack, purse, should bag, or even pocket.

The only downside is that the Moleskine City Notebook is only as good as you make it. If you do a good job of planning your trip, it will be filled to the brim with useful and helpful information. If not, it will be as unhelpful as you have made it.

There is a second use to which the City Notebook can be put to use, though it is not one for which it was primarily designed. You could use it for the city in which you live, should you live in one of the cities for which one is made. I live, for instance, in Chicago. I have bought one of these so that I can over time use it to record every bit of helpful information that I might find useful or helpful. I can record what hours the Seminary Co-Op Bookstore (the real one, not the trade version on 57th Street) is open. The hours for the Chicago Public Library and the Newberry Library. Phone numbers of restaurants and addresses of bars. And so on and so forth. Granted, these books will only benefit those who live in one of those cities, but for the U.S. New York, Chicago, Boston, Washington D.C., Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles are pretty populated areas.

So this is a very well conceived product though it absolutely has to be stressed that it is a specialized one. Please note: THIS ISN'T FOR EVERYONE. If you don't want to use the Notebook to plan your trip it is going to be very close to worthless. I'll emphasize again: this is only as good a product as you make it. But if you use it to help you plan your trip, it could be the single item you would most loathe to be without after your notebook.

I bought this notebook because I liked the idea of not having to spread out a map and have it flap in the breeze and thought it would be nice to have my map and journal together as a single unit.

While the other components of the San Francisco City Notebook are as expected (Yes, the gray print is hard to read - what was the designer thinking?!), the maps are the worst I've seen for this city. Not only are they incomplete, the Muni routes aren't shown on the street maps which have only a few major stations and the cable car routes. This inconveniently requires one to flip from the Muni pages to the pages with the street maps. It isn't easy to go down the index and then locate the page with the right street map to find the nearest station which, in fact, while being the nearest station according to the map, may not be the nearest Muni stop in real life. Reading the fine print, I discovered that the street maps are copyrighted by Lonely Planet Publications in 2006 while the Muni Metro maps are copyrighted by the City and County of San Francisco in 2003. I don't take issue with the BART map; only with the street and Muni maps because the street maps should have the complete Muni routes on them to maximize convenience and usefulness like other maps for San Francisco that I've seen.

As a result, the City Notebook for San Francisco leaves me still needing a separate map when I was expecting to be able to carry only a single unit.

Great for planning travel and journaling the adventure. I travel to San Francisco several times a year and there are always new places I want to go but never seem to have the time to fit them all in- so I record them in my little Moleskin book and I'm ready for the next visit. The maps are great too and I like the little clear plastic overlays so I can mark those for route planning instead of marking up the actual map. When I pull out my little journal to consult it, it doesn't look like I'm reviewing a tourist book at all :-) This book is what you make of it and I really like that about it. Happy traveling.

I purchased this before moving to San Francisco. While I only ended up living there for six months, this came in handy. I always made sure I had it in my purse.

The BART, MUNI and city maps are super helpful. I'd give this five stars just based on these maps. It takes a while to get used to the small size of the city map, spread out over 10-12 spreads in the book. But because the book is so small, I was able to carry it with me everywhere, and not look like a silly tourist when I pulled it out to consult the maps.

I used the rest of the book to record names and addresses of various places/businesses/events in the city, contact information for new people I met, and directions. I'd definitely recommend this to anyone new to the city. I just moved to Portland, OR and was disappointed when I found out there wasn't a City Notebook for Portland. Guess I'll just have to walk around with big ol' clunky maps and bus/train schedules again. I'm hoping Moleskine will expand the City Notebooks to include some smaller US cites.

This is a pretty little moleskin notebook for your trip to SF, or to use as a personal guidebook if you live in SF....BUT....and this is a big but so I put it in caps...The maps are awful. It's such a great idea to have the muni maps and street maps right in front of the book (much like a lot of British pocket calendars do) but the maps are basically unusable -- first, you find yourself flipping back and forth to look at different maps for different things (transportation separate from street maps for example) -- but the Street Maps are printed in pastel and are not readable -- if you wear glasses, forget it, they become invisible in sunlight. And worse -- for a book designed for you to create your own guide, the maps cut off too far north so that even important landmarks like the Zoo are cut off!!! You need to buy another map to get much-visited tourist places on it. This is overall a pretty, but unusable, idea. I'd love to see them rethink it and redo it. I'm not sure what some of their other guides are like (I saw the Paris book, and that is equally unusable), but this SF version is poor.

As a huge Moleskine fan (I really can't get enough sketchbooks) I found the City Notebooks excitig. I was even more excited when I came across the one for San Francisco. Living in the Bay Area, San Francisco is nearby but I'm not there everyday. This book has become a great way to document my adventures and keep track of various places I go in the city and things I come across that I want to check out at a later date (like design firms I want to apply at or visit). Plus having the BART and MUNI maps (the actual ones) is very helpful for figuring out what lines I want to take without having to look for maps on the street. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who loves to document things. It's just the right size to tote around, paste pictures in, and keep track of things you do in a city.

As a new resident of San Francisco, I thought I'd get this Moleskine to help me document life in the city. Upon receiving the book, however, the dividers proved to be more an inconvenience than I had thought they'd be. I spent the better part of a week trying to figure out what I would use each section for, and I still haven't really figured it out. I only use two sections: restaurants and a custom tab for running times at the gym.

I suppose it might be handy for someone who travels more often, but at the same time, how often are you going to go back to the same bar or the same museum or the same hotel such that it becomes worth it to have entire sections dedicated to those establishments?

I enjoy the maps of the city, the MUNI maps, and the BART maps. More useful, however, would be a complete map of all the MUNI routes and perhaps BART times.

As it stands, I feel that my money would have been much better spent simply printing out my own maps and sticking them inside a standard, fully customizable Moleskine.

Moleskine City Notebook San Francisco I love this kind of Moleskine. I bought this for my wife who traveled last month to San Francisco. She used a lot and liked it too. I think the Moleskine can make them in 5x8 format, would be perfect!