SF Trip - Saturday

We slept-in Saturday morning, got up slowly and had a leisurely breakfast in the hotel. It was very relaxing to just take our time in the morning. Then we went out for some shopping. We made stops in the Apple Store, the Virgin Mega-Store, Cody's Books and Nordstroms. The Apple Store was bigger than the one in Valley Fair, but not much different. It had some more items, but I did not find anything that I wanted, that I could not get the Valley Fair store.

I did end up buying an iTrip. It is a unit that plugs into your iPod and allows you to play music from your iPod over your car speakers. I had been told that the earlier versions did not work very well. Recently I have been told by some friends that the new iTrips work much better. I have not had a chance to test it, so we will see how well it works for me.

The Virgin Mega-Store had 3 floors of CD's and DVD's and it was fun to poke around there. I did not think Cody's was any better than Bookshop Santa Cruz. However, I always enjoy bookstores. Nordstrom's was mainly to allow my wife to shop for shoes. I worked on a puzzle book while she tried on shoes. She was happy that she was able to find a pair that she really liked. By this time, it was mid-afternoon and we returned to the room to rest some more!

We have some friends (Jeff and Gwynne) who live in the city. We invited them to have dinner with us on Saturday night. They suggested a restaurant named Farallon's. It turned out that they had tickets to see the Giants in the afternoon and would meet us after the game for dinner. It was a great recommendation. The decor is designed to make you feel like you are underwater. It was very nicely done and the food was excellent. It was a bit strange that although the menu was almost entirely seafood, the waiter recommends two steak dishes to us. All of us ignored his recommendations and had some seafood. Everyone enjoyed his or her meal. It was also nice to catch up with friends that we rarely see. We need to make more of an effort to see Jeff and Gwynne more frequently. The restaurant has an interesting web site that will give you a flavor of the decor. If you get a chance to look at the web site, we ate in the pool room, but got a chance to walk through and see the other rooms.

After dinner, we wandered through Chinatown. They took us to their favorite stores and showed us their favorite items. We were wandering through one large store and ended up in the back of the store. We looked out and saw a bunch of people in a park out back. We decided to take a look and found that there was a Saturday night faire going on. It was really interesting. Out front of the store, it was all tourists (we identified English, French, Italian, German, some Scandinavian language, and Japanese being spoken). Out back, it was all Chinese. We were about the only Caucasians there.

There were several live performances going on in different areas of the park. One was a band of 6 or 7 performers playing traditional Chinese instruments. The crowd was mostly elderly people, but they seemed to be really enjoying the music. At another corner of the park was a young guy playing kind of a Chinese guitar. In this corner were a lot of teenagers and young adults. Between songs they would ask him to sign copies of his cd's. In another corner was a middle-aged couple. They seemed to have a combined music and comedy act. They were really popular, a lot of people were gathered around to see them. Of course each of the acts was in Chinese, so we did not understand any of the words. It was fun to listen to the music and watch the reactions of the audience.

As we wandered around the faire, we came across an interesting booth in the middle of the park. There were no markings on the booth, just two guys with a box. One of the guys would start to bring something out of the box and 7 or 8 women would start shouting at them waving money in their faces. After a few moments, the second guy would take some money and the first guy would pull out some fabric and give it to one of the women. Then it would start all over again. Our best guess is that the women were bidding on the fabric. The women were really energetic in their bidding. And the winner acted like she had won the lottery. The fabric did not look like anything special to us, but either it had some special significance or it was really inexpensive. Another mystery that I doubt I will ever know the answer to!

It was getting late, so we decided to call it a night. As we wandered back to the hotel, Jeff and Gwynne pointed out some of their favorite spots in the city. Some places that we would like to explore at a later date.