Fun in San Fran

A dear friend from home came to stay with me this past weekend. I always love to have visitors because, despite my living less than an hours drive from San Francisco, I rarely take advantage of the wonders it has to offer unless I have visitors who want to be tourists. Though most of our weekend was spent "conferencing" I decided to skip my CFD class on Monday and spend the day with her seeing the sights of San Fran. It was so much fun! We got "lost" a few times, but that is quite meaningless because we weren't really trying to get anywhere... we just wanted to see the city; so even when we were not anywhere touristy, we still felt like we were getting a more realistic taste of city-life. We did manage to happen upon a scenic route that took us to the top of a hill with a fantastic view of the whole city, and this was just the beginning... we saw the Golden Gate Bridge several times (according to our guidebook, it is the most photographed bridge in the world. I'm not sure how they can get statistics for something like that, but I kind of believe it. Together, we probably took over 20 pictures of that bridge, from almost every angle imaginable), wandered through the Golden Gate Park, touched the ocean (which I've actually never done in No-Cal before), drove down Lumbard Street, posed on a trolley (my first time on one),
had dim sum in Chinatown, hot chocolate at Ghiradelli Square... we even drove through very small Japantown. Yes folks, we did it all. We even timed it perfectly so that we got to experience real-live California traffic on our way home. Luckily, with the two of us, we got to dominate the carpool lane :) All that, and we made it back with plenty of time to get in a couple hours of homework.