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