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            Welcome to Been there. Your tips on the places you know - that you love,
            live in or have just visited - are what make this guide.
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                <title>The Tonga Room and Hurricane Bar</title>
                
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                <description><![CDATA[Even in San Francisco, the Tonga Room and Hurricane Bar has a reputation for being surprising and quirky. It's in the basement of the very swish Fairmont Hotel - in which the UN charter was signed and, more importantly, where you can find Scarlet O'Hara's staircase from Gone with the Wind. (Although if you run down it repeatedly while attempting a bad southern accent, the staff will look at you strangely.)<br><br>The Tonga Room isn't signposted in the hotel, but take the lift down to the basement and you will find a place of such incredible kitch-ness that you'll understand why the hotel may try to downplay its existence. It's a tiki bar, so it's decorated in a 1950s vision of the tropics: pots of leafy plants, palm trees, plastic Easter Island statues, and waiters in Hawaiian shirts. Cocktails are served in hollowed out coconuts and pineapples festooned with umbrellas. <br><br>The room is arranged around a rectangular pool. The band plays in a thatched hut in the middle of the pool. The reason it's thatched? Because precisely every half an hour, lightning flashes, thunder rumbles, and it rains into the pool.<br><br>Go for the (admittedly expensive) cocktails and the experience: the food isn't great, but even on a weekday evening the punters arrive dressed in full 1950s costume and dance late into the night. And it rains every thirty minutes.]]></description>
                
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                <title>The Audium</title>
                
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                <description><![CDATA[For a very Californian experience go to the Audium. A 60s style professor creates a soundscape in a room filled with 150 speakers.  You troop through a darkened corridor and then sit in a circle in complete darkness.  Then the professor plays and mixes strange sounds – supposed to be 3d and sound sculptures but there’s a lot of running water and what sounds like a band of monkeys playing Hammond organs. Bizarre.]]></description>
                
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