VACATION IN SF

I feel like Pooh and I were on vacation for a month. The week we were in SF went by in a blur. We did so much, went to so many places, and met so many awesome people! I’d love to sit and type about our vacation but I’d end up having to write a novel. Most of it was a drunken rampage in Castro so I’ll spare you the details.

So here’s our vacation in SF…in a quick recap :) Que the flashback transition!

Pooh and I stayed at Hotel Kabuki located in Japan Town, not too far from Union Square and Castro. It was adorable! It was very Traditional Japanese meets Contemporary-ish. It was cute clean and cozy!

I loved the double shower in the bathroom. There was a very nice Japanese style tub for 2! The complimentary bath salts were very refreshing…and it’s nice that they refilled them each day.

On our first night in SF we had dinner at Shabusen. It was delicious! Did you get my Tweets? We were debating whether or not to share, order the small, or order the large but we ended up each getting the small. It was a LOT OF FOOD for a small!

After dinner Pooh and I decided to go out on the town by ourselves. None of our friends were in town yet and apparently no one went out on Wednesdays so we figured we’d make it a fun night for just the two of us. We went to Castro and literally hopped around town. We were at Q Bar, then The Cafe, then Trigger, then back to Cafe, then back to Q Bar, then Badlands…then well I don’t know from there. We had a lot of fun though. :) Pooh and I danced the night away!

The next day Pooh and I spent the whole day shopping! I don’t have any pictures because I was way too distracted and spent most of my battery life Tweeting via Foursquare. We went around Japan Town and shopped at this awesome place called New People. We had a lot of fun playing things that are so random but awesome. It’s a definite NEED-TO-VISIT when you go to SF. There’s pictures of it a little later in my post.

For dinner, I wanted to go somewhere special and nice since we were on vacation. We were very lucky to find Bushi-Tei (NOT THE BISTRO); it took us forever to decide on a place to go. It’s a French Japanese fusion restaurant with a lovely intimate interior and a very friendly wait staff. (PS, one of our servers was a hottie patottie with a very sexy French accent! rrRRrrR). The food was absolutely delicious!

Pooh got the Sonoma Duck Breast with baby mizuna, marscapone mustard, and dried chutney.

I had the Day Boat Sea Scallops with saffron Yukon potato chowder and pop over.

For dessert we had a Black Sesame Blancmange…frikking amazing. I love that it was sweet but not too sweet and wasn’t heavy. It was light and soft; perfect after a delicious meal. The fruits juxtaposed with diced jalapeno peppers were a nice kick of sweet and spiciness, soothed by the creamy Black Sesame pudding. Yum!

To our surprise there was another little desert of macaroons and truffles on the house!

After dinner Pooh and I went to our hotel to get ready so we can go out with our friends that just flew up from SD. How convenient that our buddies Jo and Aubrey were going up to SF for vacation the same week we were! We all went to Castro and had a blast!

The next day Pooh and I took Jo and Aubrey to New People…

I picked up some coffee and a matcha brownie while we were there. Look! Foam Art!

We were supposed to go to Alcatraz but didn’t know that the tickets normally sold out same day and that tickets needed to be ordered ahead of time. We still wanted to do tourist stuff so we went around San Francisco in search of…touristy things to do?

First on my list were to take a picture at The Painted Ladies! (I also wanted to take a picture at The Charmed house but we got lazy)

I shouldn’t have taken a pic with my front facing camera…but I wanted to crop out the creepy guy trying to record himself in front of the houses.

There was an odd yet fascinating shoe garden nearby!

We were headed to Fisherman’s Wharf to hang out when we saw a beautiful structure in the distance. We all “ooooh’d” and “ahhhh’d”…and screamed “pull over!!!”. I’ve never been to the Exploritorium and was amazed! It was so pretty…kind of a “you had to be there” moment I guess.

We had our fun taking pics, playing with ducks, and following swans…then headed to Fisherman’s Wharf for some…Spicy Tommy Tots and Beer at the Pub at Ghirardelli Square! Pretty awesome. We also went to the pier to get some donuts and of course, CLAM CHOWDER BOWLS! BTW, it was freezing in SF! I got myself some gloves :)

Another night of partying in Castro followed.

Day…4 of Vacation in San Francisco (Saturday), we were finally able to go to Alcatraz! I very much enjoyed the tour. I thought it was gonna be scary but it emphasized mostly on the “inescapable Alcatraz” aspect rather than the “creepy haunted” Alcatraz. I thought the audio tour was fun and really good. I loved a part towards the end *spoiler alert…sorry* when one of the inmates said that when he was released, cars were moving and everything was going fast…people were moving and going places but he was standing still…he had nowhere to go. It was quite sad.

So Saturday night was the night a couple of our friends from town wanted to go out and about. A friend from So.Cal also flew up to hang out in SF for the weekend. We painted the town red…along with every other color in the rainbow. :) I honestly do not remember what night the following pictures are from and where they were taken. I do know that we were having a blast and thoroughly enjoyed our time in SF. We met so many cool people and were able to meet peole we knew through Twitter/Facebook that we’ve never met before! Next time you’re in the same city as us…be sure to say hi! We don’t bite! There are tons more photos but I look really wasted in most of them…er these too. Pooh also has a lot of photos from his Nikon but he’s been too lazy to extract them and convert them from RAW files to JPegs for me. I’ll try to post them soon!

We were supposed to check out of our hotel on Sunday and go home that day, but we figured…let’s keep the fun going while we were in SF. We were off till Tuesday so we decided to stay another night. We had brunch at Baraccuda and had our usual SUNDAY FUNDAY in SF! Sunday funday lasted all day and night. We went to Trigger and everyone kept handing us drink after drink and shot after shot! Pooh was quite a mess by the end of the night but we both had fun…we were on VACATION!!! :) We all got to our friend’s house safely and rested before we had to drive back to SD. Early Monday morning we gathered ourselves and journeyed back to SD. But wait…there’s more! We ended up making a pit stop in Orange County to say hi to some friends. It was a much needed rest stop after having driven so many hours. We had dinner with our friends and THEN went home to SD. We didn’t get home until after 9 but it was a fun trip.