Ann Arbor!

Last week was my last in San Francisco; Friday morning we flew to Ann Arbor for our friends' wedding, and I just arrived in Charlotte for a week-long work conference. After that I'll meet up with Ben in San Diego for a few days of vacation before we finally return home to Philly!

We had thought we would spend some time exploring Ann Arbor this weekend, but a combination of rain and jet lag resulted in us only really leaving the hotel for the wedding itself. It was at the University of Michigan, which is home to the fanciest water fountains and coolest-named conference rooms I've ever encountered.

Marble and wood paneling!

WOLVERINE ROOM!

Also, because of this crazy sign in the hallway, I learned that the U of M was initially supposed to be a “Catholepistemiad,” which is an academy of universal knowledge. Vocabulary building!

The bride is even craftier than I am, as evidenced by - among many other impressive wedding crafts - this glorious cake topper:

The cake is giant lego pieces!

However, I did attempt to contribute my own nerdy craftiness in the form of the wedding sampler I made them:

10 points for whoever decodes the binary border first!

We would have liked to stay longer today to keep socializing, but the flight options out of Detroit are pretty limited so we had to head out bright and early. It seems the TSA knew I was coming, though, or at least knew where I was going - check out the liner in the security checkpoint trays:

Cool, but I can't say I'm thrilled to be associated with the TSA.

Two weeks and two cities until we're back home!

Breakfast and Stairs

For our final non-working day in San Francisco, we went to the Buena Vista Cafe for Irish coffee and corn beef hash. The Buena Vista's creation story is that they brought Irish coffee to America - I have no idea how true that is, but they certainly have it down to an art form, and it seemed that's what everyone in the whole place was drinking. They make them in large batches all at once, and as soon as one batch is ready it gets snapped up and served by the waitstaff in under a minute.

First they add the sugar cubes. Not pictured is that before this the glasses were filled with hot water to warm them up.

I missed him pouring the coffee, but here he is quickly stirring in the sugar - notice how the liquid is still sloshing in the glasses.

Adding the whiskey. He is crazy fast - I picked up the camera when he started, and by the time I snapped the picture he was already on the last glass.

Last but not least, adding the cream. To the left you can see new glasses full of hot water, about to start the process over again.

Ben enjoying the finished product.

After our hearty breakfast, we went to the 16th Avenue tiled steps for one last classic San Francisco sweaty and out-of-breath steep climb.

Look at all those stairs!

Ben almost at the top.

The view from the top probably would have been impressive, but in true SF-style it was too foggy to see beyond a few blocks. At least the (mosaic) sun was out on the stairs!

Shout out to my dad for recommend the Buena Vista and Quinn for recommending the tiled steps, and making our last weekend day here great.

Last Weekend

Ben's internship ends August 1, but next weekend we'll be at a wedding in Ann Arbor (woohoo!) so this is our last weekend in the city. Last night we met our friend in Oakland after work for a sunset hike through Redwood Regional Park, which was lovely.

It's hard to take a picture with a sunset in the background.

It's only about 20 minutes to reach the top, but it's basically straight uphill to get there - we were panting and sweaty by the time we reached the summit, but the view was worth it.

View from the top.

From there it's another hour, but it's gently downhill and through the redwoods. It was crazy how efficiently they blocked out the light - it was dimming by the time we got there, but in the redwoods it looked like night.

Not a great picture, but you get an idea of how dark it was in the trees.

After the hike we went to Oakland's Korea Town, where we gorged on kimchi and deliciously spicy meat of many varieties to compensate for all the walking we had just done.

This picture does not convey the fact that this was actively bubbling when it came out. Yum!

Today we hosted a going away barbecue in our shared backyard, so we could have one more chance to see all our Bay Area friends.

Friends!

People brought all kinds of delicious baked goods and California produce and beverages, and best of all there was a baby and a dog:

A baby! And a dog!

 It's hard to believe it's already time for us to go, since it still feels like we just got here. But we were very happy to have one last hurrah with everyone, and to smother our sorrow over departing with food.

The face I'm making about this pie conveys my feelings about this summer.

Tomorrow we'll mostly be cleaning and doing laundry and other moving-out errands, but hopefully we'll make a couple hours to do a few last San Francisco fun things on our last non-working day in the city.

Hiking!

Yesterday we went to the movies and ate sushirritos and drank all our fancy raffle wine, so today we had to do something less gluttonous to compensate. We started the day off at our friends' house with delicious homemade scones for breakfast, which doesn't sound healthy but then we spent the next seven hours hiking with them so it all works out.

First we went to Mount Davidson, which is the highest point in San Francisco. My favorite part about the walk up was these crazy hot pink flowers that were everywhere

A bunch of flowers, and Sam's back.

Closeup of the cool flowers.

Ben's favorite part were all the really tall trees that were covered in ivy almost all the way to their tops.

Ben admiring a tall ivy-covered tree.

We knew that Mount Davidson had a cross on the top, but from the pictures we thought it would only be person-sized.We were both surprised and impressed when we reached the top, and found out that the cross is actually HUGE:

Jeff at the base of the giant cross.

The top probably would have offered some really impressive views of the city, but the fog had other plans for us. We still got to have a lovely picnic, though, so all was good.

Foggy view

Picnic!

We caught a bus over to Golden Gate park, and went up the tower in the de Young museum. By that point a lot of fog had cleared and there were pretty good views of the city, but it was hard to take photos because of the backlighting.

We walked across the park, and along the way passed some buffalo.

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

Ben's "buffalo face"

On the other side of the park and North a bit were the Sutro Baths,or rather what used to be the Sutro Baths and are now just cool-looking ruins you can climb on.

From there we kept walking up the coastal trail, which afforded a really nice and only partially fog-obstructed view of the Golden Gate bridge.

 

We were trying to end at this place we had heard had a neat "rock maze," but when we finally found it we were a bit disappointed.

Sam looks on while Ben attempts the labyrinth.

Also, somewhere along the way we encountered Dorcas Street, and took a picture with the Dorkuses.

Our hike was largely planned using a book Sam and Jeff had on the secret stairways of San Francisco, which led us to lots of cool places, but also resulted in me having a dozen different versions of this picture on my camera:

Also, I'm not standing up for at least the next 24 hours.

Chinatown and Marin

We actually went to Chinatown briefly on the 4th of July, but it was a short visit so we went back again today. The highlight was definitely dim sum breakfast this morning, but we were too busy stuffing our faces to take pictures.

Us with the famous Chinatown gate. It was hard to get a picture because it is an active street.

San Francisco's Chinatown is the largest one outside of Asia, so although it felt similar to the ones we've been to in Boston, NY, and Philly, it just went on and on and on.

Lanterns everywhere!

The sun made this picture hard to take, but this is a Citibank.

Not a warning sign you would see in many other places.

Besides dim sum, the other neat thing we did was visit a fortune cookie factory. The warm discs of dough come off a pressing machine to the right, then the workers grab them, pick up a fortune from the pile, and fold them over a small rod into their characteristic shape. They had broken cookie scraps for you to snack on, and the whole street smelled like fortune cookies.

The pile of money is from people taking photos.

After dim sum, we walked down to the Embarcadero, stopping along the way to take some obligatory tourist pictures.

Ben, a fountain, palm trees, and the ferry building.

We caught the ferry over to Marin, where some of our friends live. The view from the ferry is really excellent, but the only picture we took is of me holding an old plate, because it is indestructible and has been around the world on many camping adventures in the family, so my mom mailed it to us and asked us to take a picture with it in front of a San Francisco landmark. And if you look closely, you'll see that the Golden Gate Bridge is indeed visible in the background.

It was really windy.

Actually I guess we took two pictures; this one is of the "roller coaster bridge."

Our Marin friends asked us if we wanted to go paddle boarding with them, and I thought that was the thing where you lie down on a board and kick around in the water, so I said yes. It turns out that it's a much scarier thing where you stand up on a board and paddle yourself around, but we did it anyway and I didn't even fall over (although I did spend half the time on my knees being too nervous to stand up). We didn't take the camera with us because it isn't waterproof, but we did take a picture of us all on the dock afterward.

I am happy because I'm relieved to be back on solid land.

We also had board game night on Friday, visited other friends in Fremont yesterday, and had dinner and ice cream with yet another set of friends tonight - this Bay Area social scene is wearing us out! We only have a few weeks left until we head back to Philly, where we'll take a week-long nap to make up for all this excessive summer fun.