With Chris' upcoming deployment, he was able to take some leave so that we could spend some time together as a family. We decided to go to San Francisco since we hadn't been there before, and by the time Chris comes back we'll have a new little member of the family...at which point vacations will not seem so manageable, at least at first. San Francisco is only about 3 hours from here, so it wasn't a long trip. When we got there, we checked into our hotel and then set off on foot to check out some of the sights including Chinatown.
This is Dragon Gate, at the entrance of Chinatown. I had envisioned something much more impressive when I read about 'Dragon Gate', but there's really not much to it!
Stopping for a pic at Dragon Gate
Clara and Jonathan at Dragon Gate
A view inside one of the stores in Chinatown. You could barely walk through the stores, there was so much in them.
One of the buildings in Chinatown
a church
We read a lot about how 'you must stop by the Fortune Cookie Factory, where you can watch them make fortune cookies by hand at maximum speeds'. So we figured it should be easy to find once we made it to Chinatown. Seriously, anything you read about Chinatown, mentions this place. The problem is that it's not so easy to find after all, and since you're in Chinatown, there was a bit of a language barrier. We asked about 6 different people how to get there, most of those people were other merchants in Chinatown, and we got the same answer each time in broken English..."Up that way, turn left." So we'd go 'up that way and turn left' and after walking several blocks we'd stop and ask another person. Only to be given the same answer, but often pointing us back in the direction we had just come from. It was frustrating and funny all at the same time. I'm sure Chris would've given up had it not been for me, I was determined to find this 'must see place'. We found the little hole-in-the-wall place eventually, down a little alley, by following our noses. The fortune cookies were yummy. Chris took a pic of the 2 ladies sitting there making fortune cookies, but it turned out way blurry. After walking away from the place we had just spent about 30 minutes trying to find, I realized I had not actually watched the ladies make a single fortune cookie. The place was so small, 2 people could scarcely walk through side by side, so I had spent the whole time we were in there, minding the kids, keeping them out of the way so Chris could get a pic...and some fortune cookies! Oh well, maybe next time :)
I was trying to get a pic to show how steep the hills were in San Fran. The pic doesn't do the hills justice. The next morning we decided to take a taxi to the pier where we were to depart for our trip to Alcatraz. I about had a heart attack with the way the driver was driving. The kids were simply strapped into the backseat, no car seats, I was sure we were all going to die on the 10 minute trip to the pier.
We found a collection of bronze statues on the way back to the hotel from Chinatown and stopped to pose with them.
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