San Francisco

Sat, Sept. 20 & Sun, Sept. 21

This was our second time in San Francisco since Miranda, as well as Patrick and I, have already visited the city before. We all hoped Lieven would enjoy his first time in this beautiful city. We spent one and a half days here and made the most of sightseeing. Took a boat trip around the bay and saw the famous Golden Gate Bridge and felt the ice cold winds blowing around it. We also had a drink at Hooters where the waitresses are cute young girls in short shorts and low cut tops.

On Sunday we took a guided tram/bus ride through the various, mostly outrageously expensive neighborhoods. This was pointed out to us by our friendly, Chinese-American guide, who practically at every corner told us how much an appartement or house would cost us to rent or to buy. We found this information to be somewhat interesting for 5 minutes but after 2.5 hours of it, got really tired of it. After our Grand Tour, we had lunch at a good seafood restaurant with a wonderful view of the bay; we also saw lots of see lions sunning themselves on the pier. We walked off our delicious lunch by going through Chinatown and Little Italy.

I’d like to add that as in every major city in the US, there are lots of homeless people who live out of shopping carts; this is even more noticeable in cities with mild, year around climates such as SF. This is in stark contrast to the glitzy, expensive areas that official sightseeing tours concentrate on.