17 December 2003

Today was the big drive from Las Vegas to San Francisco ... What I was awake for, it was really quite boring ... not as much to look at as the drive from Melbourne to Sydney, which is a guideline to the length of the drive. There were varying shades of brown, and rocky things, and weird spiky trees, and then in the afternoon we saw some cows... actually, we saw a fair shitload of them. We smelled them before we could see the vast cramped field of cows ... there were also various fruit and nut orchards, which reminded me of something in the movie Identity. We successfully navigated our way through the Yahoo Maps provided directions that we scribbled down (think www.whereis.com.au but for USA and other places), and arrived at the Hotel Bijou ... it was the first time that we'd had to be in the car and driving when it's been dark enough to need lights ... oh yeah, we went over the Bay Bridge, which had a toll on the way into the city, except we couldn't figure out how much the toll was until it was really close to pay time ... and then the lanes shrunk from 20 to ... 6 lanes. At least they had lights to sort of help people merge their lanes together... We checked in, and were put in room 403, named 'The Net' room. All the rooms at the Hotel Bijou have a movie title associated with them. All of the movies were set somewhere in San Francisco at some point...

After settling in, we walked down to San Francisco's Chinatown, and tried our luck in finding some decent Chinese food... we traipsed up, and down, and looked at the menus of various eating establishments, in our quest to find something that didn't only have your US-ian Gwei Lo Egg Foo Young and Sweet and Sour 'oh my <insert deity of choice here> I think it might be meat' dishes ... eventually we settled on a place, and even though we ended up having what you'd be calling the 'Gwei Lo' Dim Sum special ... A couple of spring rolls, a char siu bao, a siu mai, a war tip, a pork and prawn ball, and a sweet lotus bean paste ball thingy later, we decided that it wasn't half bad for Yum Cha fare, even though it was defintiely not the time of day for Yum Cha foodness (: That, and we've been missing our fix of Chinese food (although that'll be fixed once we get to meet the relatives in Vancouver Canada) ... so to have something that was pretty cheap, and decent for the price was a good thing (;

18 December 2003

On our first full day here, we wandered over to the cinema, and watched 'Lord of the Rings: Return of the King' ... along with a swarm of school kids in uniform, clapping at various parts of the movie... see Decay's short and relatively devoid of spoilers review in the appropriate section. It was good, enough said? So much so that we'll probably be seeing it again before we get back home *grin* ... At some stage, we bought postcards (in New York, actually, probably the first or second day we were there), and then proceeded to write a few of them. Then we had a lot of problems remembering to bring them along with us so we could post them, or finding a post office (since we had some posters that we either wanted to send home, or buy a parcel tube to store them in) so we could buy some more stamps (we only got three free and I don't think there was enough postage to send to Australia). So, anyone waiting for postcards ... we'll hand-deliver them when we get back, since we'll probably beat them home now ...

In the afternoon, we did some wandering about, and then we went back to our hotel room, and collapsed and fell asleep. For 16 hours. Of course, it was Thursday - some sort of tradition on this holiday for us to collapse in a heap on Thursday afternoons and sleep til the next time the sun rises ...

19 December 2003

Today, we visited Alcatraz. We did this by taking a cable car (complete with chirpy conductor dude and driver dude) to Fisherman's Wharf, and then taking a ferry across to Alcatraz Island. We walked up a steepish incline up to the top of the prison area, and worked our way through the holding areas for the prisoners. There was a cell set up with the props that "America's most Wanted" used when they did a feature on an escape from Alcatraz... *grin*, and we also saw the areas they used for solitary confinement, and the 6 cells without windows or light ... which wouldn't be much fun to be in for any extended amount of time ... All the wildlife and plants were protected there, so no kicking of seagulls or pigeons, no matter how much noise they made... For lunch, we went to Dante, and had some crab cakes and beer battered fish (cod) and chips for lunch type sustenance. Nice enough food, plus it got us out of the rain - always a good thing ...

Next, we headed over to the Aquarium of the Bay, and looked at lots of swimmy things... Nemo and Dory fishies were present, as were a whole pile of other kewl looking fishies... They had a couple of under water walkthrough tunnels, and some touchy-feely pools to see what baby bat ray sharks feel like. It was nowhere near as big as either the Melbourne or Sydney aquariums, but it was a nice way to get out of the rain ... Eventually, we headed back to the cable car turnaround station, and got really really wet waiting for the next cable car to turn around go up the hill... in case people don't know about the terrain of San Francisco, it's really really hilly. Actually, that probably doesn't do it justice. For the suburban Melbournites readin this, think the Gallagher-View Mount/Waverley Road hill, and have lots of those really close to each other, but steeper. It's some sort of fortunate freak of placement that San Francisco's climate isn't super cold and icy/rainy, because cars would have no hope going up or down those hills in that sort of weather. Anyway, the rain. The lady waiting in line in front of us was nice enough to offer the shelter of her large umbrella to share, so we didn't get too much more rain on us...

Dinner was at the ok, but highly over priced Indian restaurant, where we both had a combination plattery thing, which had tandoori chicken, chicken masala, shekhebabs (spelling someone?), a vegetable curry thing, rice, and naan, with a choice of mango or pistachio 'ice cream' (made with condensed milk?), and a glass of chai to finish. USD60.00 (including not much of a tip) was way too much to pay for better Indian we could get at home... ahh well, it was food (:

20 December 2003

Today started off normal enough - we went a bit domestic and traipsed to the nearest laundrette. It didn't have Christmas music playing in the background, but it was decorated with maps of the world, and various parts of ... some folding and packing later, we walked about town for a bit ... Decay decided he'd had enough and so I walked about a bit more, and came back to check email and stuff with the half-hour Decay left for me on the access card we purchased from the front desk of our hotel dudes.

Decay was happily settled in watching the remnants of the college basketball game on TV, well, until the power went out ... so we went downstairs to the lobby to figure out what was happening ... eventually, news filtered back to us that apparently a substation which provided electricity to about 100,000 people, had caught fire ... much darkness for us then, hey? The guesstimated time to fixing was about 6-8 hours, given about 4 hours into the outage, and at some stage I'd run back upstairs to grab a pack of cards to kill some time ... Decay and I sat in the groovy purple couches and attempted to play various forms of poker (didn't work because there was nothing to bet with), big-2 (didn't work because it's pretty unexciting with only two people and only half a deck between us), blackjack (didn't work for the same reason poker didn't), until Decay taught me how to play Rummy, Decay-family style... I had a streak of beginner's luck and won a few times (: I can see how Rummikub was based on the card game Rummy now, and it kept us entertained from some point after 5:40pm until nearly 1am ...

We got to know the hotel staff during this time, they did the right things given the circumstances, and even ran out to get torches and batteries for all the guests ... the battery-operated emergency lights didn't last anywhere near as long as what they were supposed to - some didn't even last out 30 minutes, but the PABX phone system managed to stay up for about 6 hours ... pretty good (: There were some pretty petty hotel guests, or, nearly hotel guests - Decay and I couldn't understand why they thought that the hotel could really do anything about the fact that there was a power outage in the area - it's only a small hotel (65 rooms), and it's not worth the noise for them to have backup generator power... It's not as if it was the hotel's fault that the power went out ... and the people who were complaining weren't even the ones paying for the room anyway... something about a gift horse, and a mouth, or something here. Hotel Bijou dudes, you rock (:

21 December 2003

We woke up at some stage the next morning, found it was 9 something, and that the power wasn't back yet... I wonder how all those wakeup calls went ... since the phone system was down, and there was no hot water (the thermostat was electrically powered, but the water was gas-heated) (: We sat down again, and played more Rummy. We'd thought about coming down at about 6:30am before the shift change to freak out all those guests/staff who saw us playing cards before they went up to their rooms, but we were asleep at the time (: Some coffee was procured from one of the sister hotels, and the daily delivery of cakes and pastries were served in the lobby area instead of the breakfast room, where at least there was sunlight pouring into the rooms ... We attempted not to kill ourselves lugging our suitcase and assorted baggage down three floors (level 1 is ground floor), and then sat down to play cards some more while waiting for our airport shuttle bus to take us to San Francisco Airport. oh yeah... Beeep! and ... Bzzzzzzzzzz....

The security alert had just been moved up a level to Orange, which may explain why when we checked in, and went through to the departure lounge, we were taken aside to have our carry-on bags searched, and our bodies metal-detected with one of those swipy wand thingies... That was a small barrel of fun - nah, actually it was pretty ok - the people doing the search were nice enough - one of the dudes really took a liking to the Crumpler bags Decay has for his camera and laptop (for this trip, Demotivator, but ususally Deliminator lives there) ... go legitimate Aussie companies! (Still don't understand Ugg brand boots...) They checked pretty thoroughly through the contents of our bags, to find (in the small backpack) my scarf, a couple of books (Neal Stephenson didn't set off any alarm bells!), some munchy food, a nearly dead bottle of coke, and probably some other non-terrorist-looking items ... the laptop bag held a couple of sets of mickey ears, and Demotivator, and the camera bag held ... a camera! W00t! Because we'd arrived super early (we'd planned on the checkout time of 12pm to take the shuttle at that time, but the hotel weren't bothering with check-out times anyways, because of the whole power outage disruption thing. We took this time to use up our free calling card (given to us in LA when the flight from Melbourne was delayed) to call my mum, at 9 in the morning Melbourne time on Monday. No big problem but it was nice to hear a familiar voice again (: We called Decay's work to see if someone could put us through to DK the Elder, and used up the US-ian shrapnel in my purse ... USD1.00 for 10 minutes for a call to Australia isn't too bad, really - it's more than what we got out of the free '30 minute' phone card ... 2 minutes to a mobile was all we got after various minutes were taken off for payphone, international, mobile calling ....

The plane trip over took just on 2 hours, I think? No delays, much snow, and views of snowy mountains and Crater Lake, and stuff... They told us Carousel 22 for the retrieval of our luggage (which we saw being loaded into our mini plane 737-400?), and after about half an hour, someone else who was on our flight told us they'd changed their minds and put it on Carousel 20 instead. 20, 22, what's the difference, eh? *grin* CA30.00 (including tip) taxi with cricket watching driver dude later, we checked into our hotel, and it's been the best room we've had so far, because it's a suite! Yay! Bedroom, mini-kitchenette with stove, cooking implements, oven, microwave, fridge, utensils, shower/bath with decent pressure, and a sofa ... and a tv in both the bedroom and the front room ... added bonus - the bed is comfy! We had dinner in the restaurant associated with the hotel, and then proceeded to cruise through the 80 gazillion channels on the TV ... there are well over 100 channels, including Food TV ... so we watched a lot of that, in order to find out when Iron Chef might be on ... and then fell asleep (;

22 December 2003

Today we did some walking about after a breakfast in the restaurant downstairs. Hash browns here are the equivalent of skillet browns in New York, which are what I'd call diced potato chip thingies. Meh, they taste nice (: We walked through the Pacific Centre Mall, and then wandered our way over to Vancouver's Chinatown ... which seems to leave San Francisco's Chinatown for dead in terms of ... Chinese-ness? There's a shop there that I want to return to because they have kewl Sanrio stuff ... Decay's worried that I'll be Hello Kitty-ing up any daughters we might have, but it's ok - it's too expensive to do that in Australia *grin* ... that, and they have some mechanical pencils of a decent weight ... I'm always on the lookout for a mechanical pencil that are heavier than the usual plastic variety... they have a cute one with Pukka and Garo (?), who are the dudes featured on a cushion that friends of mine created for us (:

Decay discovered last night that the mini-mart next to the hotel has a small collection Pocky for purchase... so we've sampled choco-banana flavoured Pocky, which violates the rule of banana sweets... because it tastes like real banana, and not lolly banana ... nevermind, it tastes ok, and the Japanese snack food creating dudes are weird... he also bought some wasabi-coated green peas... Yum! Another example of the weird Japanese snack food creating dudes doing good things (:

Dinnery stuff was on Robson Street, in a place called Milestones. Unfortunately we couldn't manage to continue on our theme of Pink <insert food item here> named restaurants, but hey, it was warm, the menu sounded decent enough, and we were possibly a little bit hungry (well, maybe Decay was, but I wasn't really super hungry since I'd been grazing on wasabi green peas most of the afternoon (: )

For starters we had some dry rib bits, complete with yummy 'spicy' dipping sauce ... our waiter dude, who reminded me a bit of the guy who used to run Rock Kung (Kenny G Land for those who remember, Stirfry?), for his hovering about the table and wanting to get us to order stuff and things ... these dry ribs were tasty, good finger food ...

Decay ordered an 8oz (225g approximately?) rib eye steak, served with roasted garlic mashed potatoes and green things (sugar snap peas and other stuff), and a horseradish and pepper cream sauce thingy... I had a corn and potato chowder, which had cheddar cheese, sour cream and tortilla chips on top. That was all fine except that the crispy tortilla chips were Haw Flake Red, and it was really weird eating something that looked like a haw flake but tasted nothing like it ... the chowder was tasty though, but a tiny bit saltier than I would've liked... And I had my first alcoholic drink of the trip - a blackberrytini ... which was pretty, and apparently it had to be shaken in its cocktail shaker in front of me (and the table of german dudes) by their resident tall, well-built waitress. Yes? Decay had a beer of some description - he said it was nice though ... and a shot (and a bit) of stolichnaya vodka on ice, with some lime juice thrown in (from the decoration on the glass ... he also took the one on the martini glass and chucked that in too (:

Justification for this dinner was that we couldn't let the not brilliant Indian meal we had be the most expensive meal, although the dinner at Milestones wasn't as expensive as the Indian anyways...

My parents and bro (the Stirfry Ninja) arrive this afternoon after their long plane trip from Australia... they left about 2pm our time (9 or 10am-ish Melbourne time) yesterday, because we rang them to find out what they wanted us to do in terms of meeting them at the airport, or at the hotel, or whatever... we managed to catch them at the airport before they were due to leave, and sounding all happy and stuff (:

Oh yeah, while we're at it, Happy Christmas/Hannukah/whatever celebrationy thingy you feel like rejoicing about, Merry New Year (for those we won't see until after then), and um... we're going to get Chinese fooded up in the next few days ... How are the fish going, Trauma? (: And what about that XBox ... Hmmm? *grin*