The sights of San Francisco

Although I flew into SF from TO on Sunday, we headed back to Sacramento almost immediately. However, thanks to the ignorance of the INS officer at SFO, I was back in SF on Tuesday. While waiting for my number to come up at the INS office in SF, I was able to take in a few of the tourist traps downtown.

My uncle took me to this very beatnik bookstore, where all the radical thinkers from the 60s used to chill. They even had a poetry reading room at the top! The book selection was a little eclectic but a refreshing change from the tripe usually found at Chapters et al. We actually managed to spend almost an hour just walking through the place because we couldn't avoid picking up the books that caught our eye as we walked past them.

When it came time for lunch we retrieved my aunt & little cousin from her office & ate at a Japanese joint. The most interesting thing I noticed there was that they use real crab flesh in their California rolls. I was quite impressed by the ease with which my aunt was able to quaff wasabi, since I've never developed a tolerence for the stuff.

After lunch, my uncle & I walked down to the pier, where the sea port is located. We scared a seagull & convinced a random dude to take a pic of us with my digicam before going into what promised to be the actual sea port building. Sadly, the building was nothing more than a mall so we didn't stick around long. There was some interesting industrial sculpture outside it though, so I climbed atop a large concrete sphere to watch the people go by for a bit.

After I had my I-94 in hand, we had a couple of beers at this quirky little microbrewery since it was happy hour & they offered drinks for a buck each. The beer was good, although not as good as Hoegartens or that stuff at Brewtopia in Montreal. The bar did have some really fascinating ceiliing fans though; They were actually mounted on a long rod that stretched acrosss the ceiling and spun the blades like parallel catherine wheels!

The last thing we did before heading home was to grab a pre-supper snack at this Indian restaurant. While we were there, one of the other patrons expostulated that it was the 2^nd best Indian joint he'd ever been in. The other one is in Santa Clara, where I'll be living, but I cannot remember the name of the place any more :-( Besides, I'm not convinced it could compare to Gerard street in TO...