Alice came to visit this weekend, making it tremendously better than my average weekend of pretending to clean the house and going to Costco for a hot dog. Between Shana last week and Adi next week, it has been an embarrassment of riches, which has also made it difficult to trade out of my first ever primary oncall, which is scheduled to start next Friday. ("Hey guys, I need to get out of my shift at the end of April, but, uh, I can't do any other weekend in April either, and I want to take vacation in May and June, so what do you say?")

On Friday we went to Thank You For Smoking, which was funny, and found some place to eat Italian food that I'm sure is just some chain, but was good. Saturday was the big day, we got up and left at 10 to go to San Francisco. First we went to the old mission at 16th and Dolores, which was exactly like the one in Pasadena where I shot (backup for) a wedding last summer. So it was interesting to have time to look around at whatever I wanted, instead of having to work. Until I started working at weddings, I hadn't seen a Catholic church since a certain person's confirmation when she was all of 15.

From there we went to Golden Gate Park and looked at the tea garden, which was nice, although it would have been much nicer if it wasn't so crowded with people with little kids. Why would you think little kids would want to go there? There's nothing but ponds and bridges and flowers and stuff like that. This was the home of the Buddha in the picture.

After this we wandered around for a while trying to get to Chinatown, since the only way I knew to do it would be to take the cable car, which was a line that was much too long. In the process of trying to find a bus substitute for the cable car, we walked about 3/4 of the way there before giving up and having a cab drive us the last two blocks. So that was kind of silly, but at least it didn't cost much. Actually Alice put up with my mass transit fascination all day without complaint, even though I know she would rather just drive places.

Having found a place to eat and source of Haw Flakes, (don't know what Haw Flakes are? The packaging will set you straight: Ingredients: Haw, Sugar, Water.) we now found a way across town to Fisherman's Wharf and Ghirardelli Square, where it was raining, unfortunately.

Going back, we missed the 10:00 train by, literally, one minute. There was nothing to do but wait for the midnight train, so we rode back up a couple of stops and went to the Gordon Biersch there. The less said about this part, the better. We did get back in time for the last train, and woke up in time to get off in Mountain View, which was also fortunate.

Today we went to Arby's and shabu shabu and...nothing else, because it turns out it's Easter, and everything is closed. Even Fry's, which was shocking and disappointing.

It was a good time. This is the kind of stuff I could be doing every weekend if I had Northern California friends. It could happen, right?

16 Apr 2006 23:47 PT - persistent link - trackback - 4 comments