san francisco 2

More San Francisco...

Probably the third day of our trip we finally cracked and did THE most touristy thing anyone can do in SF...we waited 45 minutes in line just to ride a 10-minute cable car back to our hotel. To our credit, it was only out of total desperation: on the 4th of July no other public transportation was running to the hotel, and the hill we would have scaled to get there wasn't really a street so much as a vertical wall. Which would have lead us straight through Chinatown, no less. So cable car it was. Luckily some aged hippie was playing guitar for us and there were plenty of people to watch, like the two girls above (the only people on the train not wearing ugly sneakers and jeans!)

Aquarium of the Bay: I hadn't been to an aquarium in aaaages and I forgot how much I used to love them! In this one you go through an underwater glass tunnel in the San Francisco bay and look around at all the funny little things that live under the docks...but my favorite exhibit of course was the JELLYFISH:

Late night dinner down the street from our hotel, at Café Mason...this place is a little eccentric and even though all the staff is Polish the menu is a mix of Italian, French and Japanese with most things spelled wrong. But every other restaurant near our hotel either cost $50 a meal or smelled like cat piss, and so we loved Café Mason:

The next morning we woke up early and went to the Museum of Modern Art: absolutely amazing! Embarassingly we spent almost as much time in the gift shop as in the exhibits...

a welcome gift when we moved to another hotel :)

Later we found a VERY cool store in Ghirardelli Square called Elizabeth W., they make all kinds of perfumes and lotions and things for your home, and it's only in SF, we loved it!

One of the best meals out EVER: Plant Café, the Embarcadero. I always have to try out all the vegetarian restaurants no matter where I am, so one night we hopped on the street car to Pier 3 and found a table outside, right on the water. We both ordered veggie burgers and some snow-pea side dish and then split this raw vegan raspberry cheesecake and a french press for dessert- ahh! It's definitely a challenge making good vegetarian food that isn't boring and this place just GETS it. If only they had a branch in rural Rhode Island...

I loved this panel in the hotel lounge:

My cousins met us in SF and on their first day we went shopping in Cow Hollow, very cool area. We ate lunch at a gorgeous little French bakery called La Boulange:

And then we took the BUS (which was an experience in itself) to Haight-Ashbury, home of the SUMMER OF LOVE, even though it's a tourist trap now it's cool to think Janis Joplin used to live down the street...

end of trip photos coming later, hope you all had a wonderful weekend!

l-o-v-e

-a