What do you get when you see a red bridge, the rock and the BART? San Francisco of course!

Friday night through Monday morning, Amy and I stayed at her old friends house Desmond and his wife Katherine at their house in Berkeley. It was great we had a bed, and a bathroom, and a shower and a fridge that was actually cold instead of our semi-cool cooler even when it has ice. The first night we were there we were greeted with happy people and a big pot of curry. After dinner three of us went to the local diner and had some milkshakes and sundaes… you can't beat that! On Saturday Desmond and Katherine had a day planned for us. We had a lazy morning with a huge breakfast and then headed into to town, where we happened to check out this weird pirate store. Yes! A whole store of pirate things. It boggled my mind for a good amount of time on how the store actually stays open when it sells items like pirate beard cutting, or signs on 10 ways you could use a message in a bottle, the first being ordering a pizza. I didn't realize there was a customer want for such items… and I found out there isn't. So to this day I still don’t know how the store remains open. After glass eyes and hooks. we went across the famous Golden Gate bridge and took some classic tourist pictures. No HK peace symbols in our photos though! The interesting thing is the Golden Gate Bridge is actually reddish orange and not gold at all, but is called the Golden Gate because it is the only entrance into the wealthy bay area.

Golden Gate Bridge

We then proceeded to do a 2.5 hour hike into the hills of the Golden Gate State Park. We got a great look at the city as it was a fog free day which are seldom found in San Fran. After an eventful afternoon, we proceeded into the city for an art show. The theme was rejection. The walls we covered in rejection letters from universities and various jobs. There were even rejection letters rejecting rejections (If that makes sense!) it was hilarious and depressing all at the same time. All that rejection made us hungry so we headed to a local Japanese restaurant for some sushi. Amoung the 12 that joined us was a movie star, and unlike the Ian Ziering (Steve from 90210) sighting this one was real and I even talked to them. The star was Ted Lavigne, who played the creppy guy at the end of Silence of the Lambs, and is a major character on the show Munk. You may be scratching your head thinking, "who" don't worry I don't know who he is either, but he's a movie star so who cares! Not me, it counts! So after some laughter and corny jokes all around, the parents of the girl who hosted the art show paid for dinner, it was great and certainly not expected!

On Sunday in true San Francisco style Amy and I went to Alcatraz also known as "The Rock". We took the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) also known as the subway to normal people into the city. This was the first real touristy thing Amy and I had done on our tour. We took a 15 min ferry trip to the island and started with a tour with Margaret called "Shipwrecks, sharks and skeletons" oooooo scary! The gist of the tour was that there were a lot of shipwrecks around the island because of fog and the shallow waters. There aren't really any sharks that swim into the Bay but were often talked about to scare the inmates from trying to swim to shore. and there could be some skeletons in the water depending on if you believe the 3 guys who tried to escape the island drowned or not. It was a very cool tour.

The 'Rock'

Then we herded like cattle to collect out earphones and proceed into the prison for an audio tour. This tour was amazing and has won awards for how good it is. You walk around the prison being told various stories and about the sections of the prison by voices of past inmates and prison guards. As you walk you hear people yelling and banging on the rails of the cells and the clanking of keys, it's really cool! The tour is supposed to take about 45 min, but we were there for about 3 hours because of how interesting it was. It was funny to take off your earphones and watch all the people move without talking from one section of the prison to the next. Once back on main land we walked through the famous Chinatown, which happens to be one of if not the biggest in North America. They had just celebrated Chinese New Year the night before ( even though it was last month) and remnants of the big parade covered the streets, The streets were closed off to traffic and instead filled with vendors selling all kinds of crap. I bought some postcards that looked as if they had been on the shelve for several years and for good reason but were only 25 cents a piece which is a bargain in post card talk. Amy took a picture of the store where I bought the postcards and was yelled at by the man who owned the store. It was weird because you couldn’t' even see where he was standing because of all the red and yellow plastic crap that covered the store from head to toe. I think he should have been pleased that he was a least getting customers, but he was a grump! I introduced Amy to bubble tea to which I happen to do for a lot of people, and she loved it, but whose kidding who doesn’t love slimy black balls in your drink, not this girl!

On out last morning in the city, we headed to the well known Berkeley Bowl grocery store which sells every kind of fruit and vegetable imaginable. About 10 kinds of oranges! And then got a quick tour of Telegraph Street, which was famous throughout the civil rights movement as a place of change and the Berkeley campus. Berkeley is a great place to visit, and even has a large supply of hippies still living there thinking it's the 60s!

Me and my new toque