The biggest Chinatown in the world... I mean.. the biggest outside of... ah forget it!
That's what they say about Chinatown in San Francisco. Just a fairly brief update today. Waking up this morning (hooray, I'm finally up to date with this thing!), we looked out our respective windows and saw... rain. Lots of rain. Then we had breakfast.... unfortunately, that seemed to have little to no effect on the amount of water falling from the sky (alot). So we got out our jackets, saddled up and began walking down towards the streets that make up SF's Chinatown.
Walking down the main drag, we saw a bunch of cool stuff, but given that I kinda wanted to, you know, use the camera during the rest of this holiday, I didn't take many pictures, choosing instead to shield the device from its natural predator, the rain. Shops that sold literally thousands of cheap (and not so cheap, I saw an antique carved wooden buddah with a marked price of $14,500) trinkets, traditional medicine shops with hundreds of herbs and spices which I couldn't even read the names of, let alone pronounce (let alone know what the hell they were for) and some truly stunning back alleys (what can I say, I love old-style fire escapes).
But I did manage to unravel one mystery today, that age old question "how do they get the fortunes inside the fortune cookies?". The answer? This lady, who it seems is single handedly responsible for San Francisco's lucrative 'baked goods with prophetic messages inside' racket. I won't tell you all what my fortune was, not because it was bad or embarrasing (do you reckon they sometimes throw in a 'your wife is cheating on you' just to screw with people?), but because fortunes kinda begin to lose all meaning when read 5 in the course of one 12 hour period.
After cruising through Chinatown, we came to the iconic City Lights Books, birthplace of the beat generation. We tried to get into the trans-america tower (huge San Franciscan pyramid shaped skyscraper) but apparently they don't have an observation deck (selfish bastards, keeping the best views in the city all to themselves). Then it started raining really hard, so we went back to our hostel. The end.
Walking down the main drag, we saw a bunch of cool stuff, but given that I kinda wanted to, you know, use the camera during the rest of this holiday, I didn't take many pictures, choosing instead to shield the device from its natural predator, the rain. Shops that sold literally thousands of cheap (and not so cheap, I saw an antique carved wooden buddah with a marked price of $14,500) trinkets, traditional medicine shops with hundreds of herbs and spices which I couldn't even read the names of, let alone pronounce (let alone know what the hell they were for) and some truly stunning back alleys (what can I say, I love old-style fire escapes).
But I did manage to unravel one mystery today, that age old question "how do they get the fortunes inside the fortune cookies?". The answer? This lady, who it seems is single handedly responsible for San Francisco's lucrative 'baked goods with prophetic messages inside' racket. I won't tell you all what my fortune was, not because it was bad or embarrasing (do you reckon they sometimes throw in a 'your wife is cheating on you' just to screw with people?), but because fortunes kinda begin to lose all meaning when read 5 in the course of one 12 hour period.
After cruising through Chinatown, we came to the iconic City Lights Books, birthplace of the beat generation. We tried to get into the trans-america tower (huge San Franciscan pyramid shaped skyscraper) but apparently they don't have an observation deck (selfish bastards, keeping the best views in the city all to themselves). Then it started raining really hard, so we went back to our hostel. The end.
posted by Jono Russell at 6:59 pm
1 Comments:
haha whoa jono such a cool blog
damn i wish i was as lucky as u to travell around the states, must be awesome!
have you seen ne drive-bys yet? or ne african-american gangster fights??
whoa if you do, please PLEASE take some fotos n put them up!
ne ways, have fun on the rest of ur trip!
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