Friday, July 29, 2011

San Francisco Recap

I visited San Francisco for the first time in April/May and had been lucky enough to be received by E., who is an amazing host. Some highlights and photos from the trip:

Castro District and cable cars
E. and I bought some chic sunglasses in a shop there. Instead of mirrors, the walls of the store had monitors showing you what’s captured on video camera. Crazy… We stopped by the Castro Theatre and I recommended Blues Brothers which was scheduled to play later in the year. Next time I want to grab drinks/food in the neighborhood since I saw a lot of bars and restaurants. We road one of the many cable cars (famous in SF) to downtown and capitol area.
Giants Stadium Tour (AT&T Park)
After a good experience with the baseball stadium in Boston (blog entry), I decided to look into the SF Giants baseball stadium tour (link). E. and I loved our tour guide, who was an operations manager for the team. We got to walk inside the locker rooms as well as a press box and many luxury boxes with great views of the field and the bay. They couldn’t have picked a more beautiful location for this stadium. Next time I go to SF, I would like to watch a game (funny enough, a couple of days after I came back to NY, I actually saw the Giants play in Citifield…and they managed to beat my team, the Mets). Next up…other baseball stadiums (probably NY, Chicago, and Philly since they’re potentially upcoming travelling destinations)

Mission Food and Art
When asking around people for recommendations for food in SF, many former SF people who have since moved to NY all told me I needed to have Mexican food in SF because NY doesn’t quite do it right. E. wasn’t as familiar with Mexican food in the area so she enlisted the help of her friends and Yelp. We ended up going to Taqueria Cancun (Yelp reviews) which had a very festive décor and the food was quite yummy. Since I didn’t write down what I had, I can only guess from the menu that I had beef or pork.
After dinner we walked around the neighborhood on Valencia and found a number of cafes, bookstores, and art galleries that featured SF themed art. I got a postcard for SFHQ.net which reminds me to look into those prints of SF (http://www.sfhq.net/sfusion.html) to buy…
Golden Gate Bridge
E. and I biked across the bridge, stopping at various places for photos and sightseeing. It was as breathtaking as they advertised. When we got to the other side, we found good ice cream and cute shops. Then we took a ferry back and took the subway to Berkeley.

Berkeley
Since it was evening when we got here, we didn’t do too much sightseeing. E. took me to Chez Panisse Café (link) for dinner. I took a copy of the menu with me but of course had forgotten what we had (I think fennel salad and duck).
Ghirardelli Square
Not only did the Ghirardelli store have tons of chocolates and gifts, the square itself (link) had many cute stores. I’d like to mention one that I particularly liked which was Lola of North Beach (link). Their SF souvenirs were probably the best I’ve seen all around.

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