Friday, July 2, 2010 – 12:47am – Hilton Room 2-1614 – San Francisco, California
OK, so it really shouldn’t be Going BACK to Cali since this is my first time here, but I just couldn’t resist using that for the title of this entry. I’m lying in the bed in our room at the San Francisco Hilton. I should be sleeping. I’m sooo tired. I fell asleep for a couple of hours after we got back from walking around Union Square, Chinatown and North Beach. It’s been a VERY long day – which started at 5:30am at the Red Roof Inn in Seattle.
We got all of about 3 hours of sleep at most and got up and took the shuttle to the airport. The Seattle airport is pretty confusing. It’s a big jumble of kiosks and check-in areas and it’s really not clearly delineated where to go. We got checked in, grabbed something to eat and caught our flight at 8:10am. By 10:15am, we were in San Francisco. The flight was really smooth. I took a Gravol and tried to sleep, but I was sitting in the middle seat with Laina on my right by the window and a guy on my left, so it wasn’t the most spacious spot to try to rest. We got to the San Francisco airport and got our luggage and headed to the BART station to catch the train into the city. It took us about half an hour to get from the airport to the Powell Street station.
We got our City Passes from the Visitor Information Center and then checked into the hotel. I was so glad to get rid of the suitcases! We took a nap for an hour and a half or so and then got ready to go out for a while. We walked over to Union Square to catch one of the hop-on hop-off double-decker tour buses and took it around one loop and then over to Chinatown. Our tour guide was a cute girl and she was quite funny and enthusiastic. We stopped in a bunch of little shops in Chinatown to look for replacement mini-backpacks and I finally got one for $13 at one of them. We ended up eating at a Chinese restaurant at the corner of Broadway and Columbus and it was pretty good. I was so hungry that I wolfed down two helpings in no time flat. We walked up to a coffee shop in North Beach which is the very first espresso bar in North America. There was a cute, young girl there selling handmade jewelry at one of the tables and she gave us a flower before we left.
We walked back down towards Chinatown a little bit and took pictures of the Trans-America building and some of the titty bar signs, City Lights Bookstore and Vesuvio. We went by this cute little fortune cookie factory and took pictures of the lady sitting at the machine making fortune cookies. The machinery they had was really neat. It was like a bunch of little flat iron things and the machine would squirt batter onto them and the top would close and it would go around and cook and then the lids would come up, the lady would take them off and bend them around a metal rod and put the fortunes inside. We got to make our own fortunes and they put them in cookies for us. Neato! Laina really likes fortune cookies, so she bought a bag of “adult” fortune cookies. Curious to see what they say. haha
We walked back to the hotel from Chinatown and stopped for Laina to get some mini liquor bottles for her collection and I got a couple of keychains to send to Will and maybe Deidre. We came back to the hotel and slept for a couple of hours. I woke up with my stomach hurting and have been trying to get my photos uploaded to Picasa.
Need to get some sleep. We’re going to see Alcatraz tomorrow! COOL!