Look up.... WAYYYY up!

Yes, if you're in San Francisco and you looked to the top of the highest building in the skyline yesterday around 430pm, you might have caught a glimpse of Michael and I staring right back at you. :) We took some good advice from Michael's father and spent a cocktail hour at the Carnelian Room in the Bank of America Building in the heart of the business district. All I have to say is "WOW". We couldn't have chosen a better day. The views all the way out to the Golden Gate Bridge and beyond were spectacular. In fact, we could even see the piers we had walked to the day before and managed to pick out the docks where the sea lions have made their home. Oh, and by the way, in his last post, Michael said there were about 100 but I would estimate it to be more like 300-400 sea lions soaking up the sun down there :) Like nothing I've ever seens.... And well, it was like nothing I'd ever hard or smelled before either. I stumbled upon the webcam (with surprisingly good quality) if you're interested... Here's the website. If you can't open the webcam from my link, you can get to it from clicking on the right hand side of the website. Anyhoo, our birds-eye-view was great. We could see people playing hockey on a rooftop, we spotted people chilling on high up balconies and spied on the streetcars as they moved through the city. It was pretty cool. We even saw a helicopter that was flying below us! The other wierd thing was that, despite the ridiculously steep hills here, we could hardly tell what was an uphill or downhill... so we certainly must have been up high. Oh, and we were also able to spot our apartment from our lookout point, which was only a few blocks away.

Earlier in the day, we spent a little bit of time wandering through Chinatown, which could be a destination in itself! According to its collective website, it is actually the largest Chinatown outside of China! Hmmm.... The Toronto Chinatown is pretty big but yes, I do think the one here is a little bigger. If anything, it's the best place to buy cheap, fresh veggies in the summer. We walked around to a couple of open air storefront markets where we bought five heads of garlic (packaged together - we're not trying to keep the vampires away), carrots, two bunches of green onions, chinese noodles, soy curd, oranges and about a pound of cherries - all for under 8 dollars. I coudn't believe it. We're going to have a great stirfry tomorrow with all that. :) We stopped in at a bakery and tried a couple of items we couldn't really identify. One was a potsticket (which was very yummy), then something the lady behind the counter simply called a 'shrimp' (although this could have just been reflecting her lack of English skills) and then something we had seen in another window called a 'Chinese doughnut'. Yeah, the shrimp thing was gross - all fishy tasting inside of what seemed like a potsticker. But not as tasty. The Chinese doughnut made me want to gag. Not so much because it tasted that bad but because, when I was expecting a doughy texture, I got more of a gellatin slash tasteless jujube texture. It seemed to have been rolled in sesame seeds, then fried. Oh, and there was some dark red, unidentifiable semi-sweet (maybe fig?) jelly in the centre. Wierd.... I'm sure a lot of people must like it (because we saw them in a number of shop windows) but certainly not to our taste. Oh well. I give us kudos for at least trying new things :) haha

Those were the big highlights from yesterday I think... Today, it seems we're going on a 'date' tonight but Michael has yet to tell me where to go. Must be some place nice though, because I'm getting a pedicure this morning and I get to dress up :) Will post more on that (and will add some pics to this post) tomorrow I suppose.

Mariah

Fisherman's Wharf

Hi All,

Compared to yesterday, Monday was very laid back. We decided to walk up through Chinatown to go to Fisherman's Wharf which is located at the north end of the city. Its only a 30 minute walk from where we are staying.

Fisherman's Wharf is a bit of a tourist trap but it has the famous Buena Vista bar which serves world famous Irish coffees, Ghiradelli's chocolate store, views of Alcatraz and the sea lions.

When we got there we toured around a bit, checked out the various shops and walked along the piers. I was looking forward to seeing the wild sea lions on Pier 39. When we got to Pier 39 we shocked to find 100+ sea lions just lounging around on some floating docks. They were nice and quiet until another sea lion moved or jumped onto the platform then they would bark at each other, then calm down and fall back asleep. This pattern kept going for the entire time that we were there. The entire scene reminded me Mariah and her two sisters.

After spending an hour with the sea lions we walked along the boardwalk and saw the funniest thing. We saw a homeless man hiding behind a few tree branches to make himself look like bush. When any girl were to walk by the "bush" he would drop the branches and scare the person. We saw quite a few people scream from this trick.

We also went to the famous Buena Vista bar for a $7 Irish coffee. Despite the high price it was well worth it. I even picked up a couple of tricks on how to make a great Irish coffee.

Finally we rode the cable car back to the hotel. It was a pretty good day.

Monday in San Francisco

San Francisco runs a 12k, well sort of

Hi All,

Sunday was our second day in San Francisco. On Thursday before we left we found out that there was going to be a 12k run in San Francisco that was supposed to be a big event and a San Fran tradition. The run is called Bay to Breakers because it starts at one side of the city and ends in the Golden Gate Park on the other side of the city. I knew this race was going to be different because there were a lot of warnings and disclosures on the website that said no nudity and alcohol was permitted in the race.

Mariah and I woke up early on Sunday morning to go find a nice spot on the route to watch the runners. It turns out that most of the city was there as well. Approximately 60K people were running in the event. I believe that number was based on registered runners although many people chose to join the run.

The first runners to start were the elite women and 10 minutes later the elite men started. In total there was maybe 15-20 people that were taking this race seriously. Then the rest came....

Almost everybody was dressed up from Elvis, ballerina's, vikings, star troopers, cows, Borat in a yellow thong and the list goes on. There were also quite a few nude men and far too few nude women.

One of the most impressive parts of the races was the number of "floats" that people made. Some people created a flintstone's car, DJ booth, toga party, racing pit crew etc. Some people even decided to tow their boat and raft in the race. Mariah and I would soon learn that these floats served a dual purpose. They also housed kegs for people to drink from. There was a lot of alcohol, many women drunk champagne straight out of the bottle, some floats offered "runners" the chance to funnel a beer. There were probably more kegs than serious runners.

We watched the race for about an hour and I must say it was the funnest races I've ever seen.

Check out the photo album by clicking on the image below.

San Francisco Bay to Breakers 2008 12K run

(a couple of guys jumped out from the crowd to sprint with the elite men runners)

(one of the many creative keg stands/floats)

Brock meets a cat

Hi All,

One of Mariah's friends, Sarah was having her apartment fumigated so she came over with her cat. Brock has never seen a cat before so Mariah and Sarah decided to film the interaction. When Sarah took the cat out of its cage it immediately went to hide behind the toilet. To surprise Brock they threw a tennis ball towards the cat. The result was hilarious. You can view the full 2 minute video here. The file is about 40mb so it might take a couple of minutes to download.

No animals were harmed filming this video. In fact I am not sure if Brock even knows what happened.

Enjoy.

Michael

San Francisco here we come

Hi All,

Mariah and I are officially in San Francisco. We left today from Dayton, Ohio at 12:40pm and connected in Dallas. By the time that we got to my father's apartment which is in the heart of downtown San Francisco it was 8pm PST (11am PST). Here are some photos that we took of the San Francisco airport and the views from the apartment.

Brock the sheep

Before

After

Poor Brock

Brock and Friends

Hi All,

Here are some relatively new pictures of Brock that we were finally able to download. In this set he is playing with his friends Bongo (white Lab-Beagle mix) and Napa (black Lab-Boxer mix). Brock looks more vicious than he actually is.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/76456464@N00/sets/72157605000637003/

We should have some new pictures of him soon. He recently got a haircut that was a little too short.

Michael

Official: We have a house :)

Hi Everybody,

I have great news to report. Mariah and I officially have a house. Two weekends ago Mariah and I had a home inspection on the original house that we had an accepted offer. We had a great home inspector who was incredibly thorough. After 5-hours, we had a less than impressive home inspection report. There was mold everywhere, the separate garage needed a new room, there was a nest of baby raccoons that I happened to find accidentally. Instead of walking away, we decided to at least ask the owners to repair the major problems. The sellers decided to only offer us $500 for all repairs. At that point we decided to walk away. That same night we found a house in a completely different area of town that we liked a lot. We went to the house and fell in love with it immediately. The only problem was that when we were walking through the house, three other people came to visit during the same time. We decided that we would have to move very quickly so we placed a very fair offer that very night. The next day at 12pm our realtor Connie advised us that our offer was accepted. We booked another home inspection with the same inspector and braced ourselves for the result. After the inspection was done we found that there were very few issues that needed to be resolved. We asked the sellers to fix all of the probems and they agreed.

The house is located in an area called Pleasant Ridge.

We are very excited about this house. We close at the beginning of June.

Michael