Upside-down Pear Gingerbread

Courtesy Starting Out: The Essential Guide to Cooking On Our Own. I was going for a CBC exploded pizza logo effect.

In which we visit that bridge

Our first partial day with Nicole we finally rode the cable cars.

Here we are waiting for the cable cars. This is Nicole's waiting face. See, I don't need a Facebook account to post goofy pictures of people.


Going up

Nicole had scoped out a wicked restaurant to eat at and on the way we saw the picture below (a restaurant we did not eat at). The concept of the wicked restaurant is that you share each dish. We had an amazing halibut, scallop, and a tomato salad. We also had goat cheese which not everyone liked and, in my opinion, an overdone yellowtail. But wow, it was great and definitely the food highlight of the trip.

The next day, we wandered through Haight Ashbury, where I bought an awesome fall coat, and then went to Golden Gate Park and saw these animals.

Then we headed toward the bridge and took a billion photos.

I'm not sure what prompted Daorcey's confused face.

You'd think with the three of us and two cameras in our possession, we'd have many photos with the three of us in them. Here is the only one.

Finally on the bridge, we have the following.

It is a loooong way down.


And up.

Which beach did you go to? Ocean Beach

No, really that's the name of the beach.

After dumping our stuff in our really small hotel room, we rode the bus for an hour to reach the beach. San Francisco was suffering through an uncharacteristic heat wave so it was a sweaty bus ride.

I guess that explains our scowls.

Lots of people on the beach, surfers, and dogs.

I think he belonged to the lifeguards. But he would plop himself down near the water and only move if he was about to get wet.



Hey, another picture of us.



Some Cthulhu-esque seaweed thing.

Sashimi sampler. The snapper is usually chewy at most places, but here it was soft.

It seems the homeless in SF are crazier than their counterparts in Calgary. Is it the warm weather? Or the fact that people consistently give money to panhandlers? Anyways, in Japantown we ran into a guy who wanted us to buy him a chicken dinner. He was an older guy, with a cane but it looked like he had a home.

At first I apologized for not having any change to which he replied he wasn't asking for change but for a chicken dinner. Then he tried this tact:

Man: I was drafted into the Vietnam war but don't hold that against me. I could have gone to Canada but I did my duty to this country and her citizens. I protected this country.

Me: But we're not from here.

At this point, we've probably run through his two rhetorical points that usually work on people. I'm not sure why we didn't walk away. Too rude? I offered him a bottle of water which he refused. Then we just started moving very slowly away from him.

Thankfully, in Canada you don't see many homeless veterans. It could be fewer vets or hopefully, we just have better social programs to help those who fought.

Chinatown in SF

One of our quests for San Francisco was to have dim sum. A friend recommended some restaurants but we naively assumed they would be in Chinatown. Luckily, some helpful ladies at the Chinese Cultural Centre pointed us to a good restaurant, City View.

So here we are at the Chinatown gates. And for those of you keeping track at home, we did find the location of a safe house in GTA: San Andreas. Nicole did not scoff as much as I thought she would every time we pointed out a GTA safe house.



Found a coolie hat.

And now to the food. It was really good dim sum. Better than Calgary sadly and more expensive. We couldn't have had more than 15 dishes and it was $60 USD. But soooo tasty.

Shanghai dumplings, rice rolls (although not as good as Calgary's as the hoisin and peanut sauce was missing, and bean curd thingys. The bean curd thingys were the only duds of the group.



Anyone who's gone to dim sum with me knows my love of cream buns. The topping was crunchy and sweet. And the inside, so delicious.




In the foreground was an interesting dumpling. I think it had bamboo and mushrooms?

And then we found a store with my name.