The best thing about San Diego, and it is excellent, is Balboa Park. As well as the park space itself, it is littered with museums, all in great ornate stone buildings, and all the ones we went to were curated with some care (i.e. even if I wasn't mad about the art in them, the special exhibitions seemed nicely chosen). There's also an attractive church, a roundhouse theatre, a Crystal Palace-esque botanical garden... You could spend a couple of days seeing it all, and then another day for the zoo.
San Diego Zoo is pretty good. It has a great organic feel to it, in the sense that it's in a park on a hillside so it's on more than one level, and it feels like one big habitat rather than just a path with a load of cages arranged round it. The downside is that there's no logical route around it, so if you want to see everything you'll have to walk past some bits three times. But they have a really good range of animals and birds, including some giant pandas (always my favourite, and rarely seen). They take endangered species very seriously here with a lot of proactive breeding programmes. We decided to rank this as our third favourite zoo, behind Singapore and Australia Zoo.
We also undid any progress the English may have made undoing cultural stereotypes at the Photographic Museum here. The guy at the entrance desk told Lilly that she had a 'pretty fresh watch' in a friendly and complimentary tone. Lilly didn't actually reply, 'Goodness gracious, my good man, what on earth can you mean by that curious turn of phrase?', but she did manage to be sufficiently confused that the guy felt obliged to translate.* By the time we got to the gift shop by the exit it was clear that every member of staff had heard the story.
* Being a nice guy, he didn't point out that 'The Fresh Prince of Bel Air' debuted in 1990, so this is a meaning that has been around in popular culture for at least 20 years.
Outside the park we had less luck with museums - we went to Contemporary Art, which had an unmanned front desk and two waste-of-space pieces of 'art' and we declared it the worst museum ever. Then we found that it was just an annex, and went up the road to the main museum. On the grounds that we had to pay for that, we re-allocated our 'worst museum' award (main exhibit: some towers of stacked pallets). In fairness, the same ticket later got us into the third branch in La Jolla which had a whole range of stuff that was only 90% rubbish - not a bad ratio for contemporary art.
The heart of SD is the old 'Gaslamp' district which has been relatively recently gentrified. It's not much to look at but it is heaving on a Saturday night. We very much enjoyed cooking our own dinners at the Fifth Avenue Strip Club (as in New York strip steak), and trying a few craft beers at places like the Strauss brewhouse.
A few more neighbourhoods for completeness: we had a great Vietnamese and browsed for books in Hillcrest; we drove through Coronado Island with its naval base and expensive housing and long stretch of beach; we popped by beachside La Jolla; and we had dinner in the Old Town, which reflects SD's close links to Mexico (the border is just a few miles away, and it's possibly the only city in the US to have bilingual signage as standard) with Mexican-style courtyards, bands and food - very much for tourists but quite fun if you're not heading to Mexico itself (not the safest place in the world right now).
To summarise: San Diego is a fairly fresh place, nice stop for a few days, not worth a long trip on its own.
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