Cohesive Pieces: a San Francisco Weekend

Our weekend trip wasn't exactly this weekend, or even last weekend, so as always I'm playing catch up.

Although I haven't yet unpacked my bag from the trip yet either so maybe really it's all on schedule. . . my typical taking forever to get anything done schedule. Tomorrow I'll work on getting unpacked.

Golden Gate and San Francisco from above

It was good to have a few days away. I hardly ever go anywhere these days unless it's for work and I don't even do that very often anymore.

All adult trips are especially rare. So, a few San Francisco images before it's winter and I've totally forgotten about the trip. . .

The giant rainbow flag flying over the Castro neighborhood. Right near there a naked man is enjoying the sun on a red bench. I'm not sure what's enjoyable about hanging out in your neighborhood naked, but I guess I've never tried it.

Going across the Golden Gate Bridge was one of the things on Dev's to-do list, and it was one of our first stops. It was actually really clear. Our timing was pretty good.

Those are surfers out there to the side of Dev! No real waves and no beach but I guess it works well enough.

We were going to go back and bike across it later in the weekend but we ran out of time. Or possibly ambition. Maybe both.

We did do a lot of wandering around the city on foot all weekend.

down by Fisherman's Warf

Street artists at night. I'm still amazed how these guys can make painting in a few seconds.

This bar just down the street from our hotel had a plane hanging from the ceiling. It also had more than 100 beers on tap, but Dev was annoyed they didn't have anything good. (Corona was not among the 100 available.)

View from our hotel window

Coffee one morning in North Beach. (I think Dev is standing in the middle of the road to take this photo!)

Some of the streets are insane. We brought running shoes so we could run while there and that too somehow didn't fit into the schedule, but I'm pretty sure I couldn't have run up even one of these hills. It made me tired just walking up and down them. (But we did walk up and down them all weekend so I don't feel so bad about not running.)

They have very high tech self cleaning toilets in San Francisco. Dev had to spend quite a while reading the directions and thinking about using it before actually trying it out. Brian wasn't brave enough this time.

There were also sorts of cool bakeries in North Beach (and we had to stop and try out things from a lot of them!) I loved that in many of them you could see all the baking going on in the back of the store if you looked just passed the counter.

We (we'll Aspen and me. . . not really the guys' sort of thing) also stopped at the Citylights bookstore. I've never been a big fan of any of the writers that made this place famous, but still kind of cool to visit the landmark.

We walked though Chinatown too.

Somehow we didn't even buy any Kung Fu shoes. Not sure how we let that bargain get away. . .

We had some really good food and drinks at a Mexican restaurant down in the Mission district. At some point I'm going to attempt to replicate the chicken-avocado quesadilla I had. I have very low expectations for my success, but it's making me hungry again just thinking about the good food there.

I loved the band outside all checking their lotto tickets before beginning their next set.

Of course we had to stroll around Haight Ashbury, too.

Where apparently it's always 4:20.

The people were really interesting in the Haight. Many were quite eccentric. There were an awful lot of homeless people and an awful lot of hippies as well. There were also an awful lot of people who seemed to be homeless or hippies but I couldn't quite tell which.

One of Dev's friends from his Marine days came and took us all to dinner one night. It was a very cool place, though I think I ate my year's allotment of meat in that one evening. They have an open salad bar with all sorts of sides and salads and fruits, but then they have waiters just wandering around with giant slabs of meat (14-15 different kinds) and they come and slice off pieces for you at your table.