Bienvenido a California, Part 5

We took a number of little day trips all over the Monterey area; and we saw the usual touristy places, like Carmel, Seventeen Mile Drive, etc. We went over to Salinas a few times, but that was mainly to shop in the Mall there. But finally we took a real trip. One long weekend, 5 of us loaded ourselves into a car, and went up to San Francisco! (All of the images and the YouTube video come from the Internet, they are not mine).

We put the details into Cathy's able hands, and picked a bunch of fun things to do while there. The 5 that went were me, Cathy, Robin, Rob, and some Hungarian linguist whose name escapes me. In other words, 2 miscreants...Rob and myself hehe...and 3 serious people. Rob and the Hungarian linguist were the only 2 who had been to SF before, not counting layovers in the airport. So it was pretty much a constant tug of war between those 2 and Cathy. Cathy wanted to see all of the tourist spots, while the two guys wanted to show us all of the cool little spots that only locals would know about. Robin and I were just along for the ride, and started just wandering off when they would start arguing hehe. We had great fun that weekend though, in spite of everything. And we saw everything we wanted to! Well except for Alcatraz Island, but I get ahead of myself.

We drove up to SF after we got off duty on a Friday...I think this was Memorial Day or Labor Day weekend, I can't remember exactly...but it was a short day for us, and we ended up getting up to San Francisco before dark, even with all of the traffic. We stopped at the southern side of the Golden Gate Bridge, to get pictures. And just in time too. Fog was rolling in while we were milling around there, and by the time we left, the entire bridge was obscured by fog. It was so cool watching it disappear like that.

What the Castro actually looked like:


Then we drove around the city for a bit, and ended up driving through the Castro. Rob and Hungarian guy had been here before, and were watching the rest of us for our reactions. Robin and I were curious. The normally unflappable Cathy, however, was going berserk. She was reaching around and locking all of our doors, and rolling up car windows, and pointing at the gays on the street as if they were space aliens with green tentacles and all. I myself had no idea what to expect before I got there, but in retrospect, a normal street with a few guys holding hands while walking shouldn't have been that big of a surprise hehe...but that's all it was. Cathy on the other hand, apparently expected an orgy to break out at any moment, and was apparently expecting the car to be invaded :) We managed to get her calmed down, but unfortunately, couldn't get her out of the car to get a coffee or anything hehe.

What the Castro looked like to Cathy! :



We drove around other parts of the city some more, and noticed it was getting dark, and decided to go check into the hotel. Umm, oops. Reliable Cathy had not bothered to get a reservation for us! On a holiday weekend. Needless to say, every hotel in the city was booked solid. We ended up driving over to Oakland, across the Oakland Bridge, in heavy fog, and tried getting a hotel in Oakland. No luck...Oakland was booked too. At this point we were quite cross with Cathy hehe. So we started driving north, away from Oakland, and kept checking hotels and motels we noticed from the road. We finally found one dumpy little motel in El Cerrito or Richmond or somewhere, that had ONE room available. We grabbed it immediately. The room had 2 double beds, so Rob and I got one, the girls got one, and the Hungarian guy volunteered to sleep on the floor. Broken furniture from other rooms had been piled up along one wall of this room...no doubt why it was available...but at this point we were just happy to have a place to crash, and were planning on spending all waking time sight-seeing miles away anyway. And then I noticed that the beds had those little coin-boxes hooked up to them. I went and popped a quarter into one, and the bed started vibrating loudly. Yep, it was one of those kinds of motels lol. We all sat around laughing until the bed stopped vibrating. It was a nice little massage though. When we left in the morning to do more sight-seeing, we noticed all of the hookers and cadillacs in the parking lot. Gah, what a place!

We drove over into SF again, this time from the north, across the Golden Gate Bridge. We ended up. Over the rest of the weekend, we went to see a variety of fun things, including Ghirardelli Square, the Haight-Ashbury, Fisherman's Wharf, etc. We drove down curvy Lombard Street. We parked our car for a while, just to ride the cable cars...we had heard that they were talking about doing away with them altogether, and wanted to ride one before they were gone forever (fortunately, the city kept the cable cars, so you can go there and ride them too!).



We spent several hours up in the Russian Hill neighborhood...being Russian students and all hehe. We went to see the famous Orthodox Church on Geary Street, only there was a service going on when we got there, and they wouldn't let us in until it was over. They were quite grumpy with us until they found out we spoke Russian, and then warmed up considerably, and gave us a little impromptu tour of the church. We weren't allowed to take pictures, however. We saw the many beautiful icons, and tried reading the text on some of them, only to find out that the text wasn't in Russian! It was in Old Church Slavonic instead. Then we ended up in a nice Russian restaurant, where we ate yummy food. I had borshch for the first time, the traditional beet soup...though the flavor of the beets was not overpowering at all, it was more like a generic vegetable soup, but with plenty of sour cream. And then these delicious stuffed grape leaves, which I think were more Ukrainian than Russian, but still yummy. We of course liberally sampled each other's plates, so we would each get a broad sampling of the different dishes.



The last day there we spent in Muir Woods, once again north of the Golden Gate Bridge, and not that far away actually. The video here doesn't really capture the beauty of the place. And why the videographer spent so much time in the gift shop, I have no idea hehe. It was so cool to stand next to trees that were over one thousand years old. It was too late for Alcatraz Island, once we were done with Muir Woods...all of that questing for a hotel had thrown off our schedule, so we had to do without seeing it.

Before going back down to Monterey, we stopped off in China Town, looking for something to eat before the long drive. It was already pretty late, and the restaurants were mostly closed. But there were still people all over the place, and many little shops open selling suspicious looking food. It certainly didn't look much like the "Chinese food" I had grown up eating in Baltimore (Chungking lol), but it certainly looked authentic. We ended up getting bao, a steamed dough stuffed with any old thing...pork in my case...and omg it was so good.


We ended up getting back very, very late...I might have gotten 2 hours sleep before having to get up for classes the next day hehe...but what a fun trip!