November 21, 2010

Soooo.. San Francisco. I was lucky with weather in LA. It was fairly warm and always sunny. Didn't get so lucky with SF. I guess when the weather was great in LA it was also great in SF… and when I left LA it was raining…. and also raining in SF. Flight was delayed 1.5hrs so that meant another 1.5hrs at the airport. I sat next to two people on the plane that were quite friendly. Just met and the lady was telling this guy her freakin life story. He seemed pretty into it and was certainly paying attention. When we were getting off he whispered something to me about how happy he is for that to FINALLY be over haha. Awesome. What a polite guy though to let her ramble like that for almost 2hrs. I slept most of the ride but even in my sleep I could hear here going and going. By the time I finally got to the SUPER NICE hostel it was a little after 4. Just kind of hung out at the hostel for the night and made some calls. Next day, breakfast was free. Not only free, but bagels with cream cheese. They didn't really have bagels in Australia, so free bagels here was the highlight of my morning! The hostel-planned walking tour at 9 was cancelled so I went to a chinatown walking tour I found online at 10. FREE! That was about 2hrs. Pretty nice. The guide was very friendly and knew a lot. She showed us old buildings, old whore houses, a fortune cookie factory (so fun!) and an herb shop. I had lunch at some dumpling shop that was meant to have the best dumplings. Pretty good, not the best.. From there I walked out to the Ferry Plaza and all along the coast to Fort Mason. My plan was to go all the way up to Fort Point, but my shoes are NOT walking shoes and it started getting a little cooler so I gave up after I got to a good photo spot. The weather was pretty cloudy and definitely windy. It only started raining as I was getting back. I chatted on the phone for most of the walk to Mom, Katie and Ryan. It took about 2-2.5hrs to get to Fort Mason and 1.5 to get back. My poor feet hurt. I got back around 5 and it started pouring with thunder and lightning so I just sort of hung out the rest of the night. Sunday morning I had to check out, but my bus wasn't until 530pm so I took the site seeing bus around the city. It wasn't expensive, but they didn't really show me anything I didn't see yesterday and the info they gave me wasn't that exciting, basically just pointing things out. It was alright… definitely took up some time. I got off at one of the last stops and wandered around… took a look at city hall. There I remembered that The Wedding Planner (old school fav movie ever) took place in San Fran and they went to City Hall to get married. It didn't LOOK like the city hall in the movie, so I didn't take any pictures or anything but now I want to watch it to point out different buildings and stuff. Had some time to kill before another walking tour so I rode a cable car down California Street and back. Not too exciting, but I guess it's one of those things you have to do when you're in town. Still had some time to kill so I wandered to a dog park near the starting point of the walk. The sun started peaking out a bit more, thank goodness, so it warmed up quite a bit. The walk ended up being pretty shit. I figured they'd walk around pointing out a lot of really nice cool Victorian houses, preferably ones with some history or something but they didn't. It was basically some lady rambling on and on about things that happened during the victorian time period. She was more of a historian than an architecture buff so she pointed out some of the differences in the houses, but was more interested in rambling. I started blocking her out and getting irritated that we weren't continuing on. She basically showed us like 8 houses in an hour and a half. I wanted to see the Full House house and she didn't seem to be ending anytime soon. Plus I had a bus to catch, so I snuck off toward the end and walked down to the house. Gotta say… a little disappointed. I mean, it was definitely the house, I could certainly tell, but it was just like all of the other houses next to it and the street wasn't that exciting. I don't really know what I was expecting, but I stopped, took a quick picture, and kept going haha. There's also a scene in the opening credits of Full House where they are in a park with houses and the city behind them… turns out that's the "pink ladies" and is a fairly famous row of houses. The website said we'd be going to these houses, but we definitely didn't. I wanted to make it out to those too, but didn't have time to do Full House and pink ladies. Maybe next time.

Just got to Sacramento. The place is an old mansion, super cute. My room is huge with 8 beds but only one other girl in the room. Guy said the place was pretty quiet tonight. I'm okay with that. This city seems pretty cute and relaxed. Like San Fran, but smaller and less intense. I can hear some jazz music out my window.. not sure if it's someone playing on a street or some restaurant or something. Tomorrow I'll go out exploring.