California trip, part one!
I should do some vacation-trip reporting now, perhaps. Okay, so I had this post that I started while waiting around in the airport on the way to Cali, but it's kinda in a state of messy unfinishedness, so I'm going to start over and copy-paste the relevant bits (or just go from scratch).
Start! Our flight out was earlyish in the morning, and I was up pretty late and then had an impossible time falling asleep, so I basically got like zero sleep before we left. Anyway, the first flight (out of three to get to CA) went fine. We landed in Milwaukee, and my brothers/dad looked at the upcoming flights listing and decided our next flight wasn't coming for an hour and a half, so we got breakfast. Or they got breakfast, since the food place basically had bread and things served on bread (muffins, bagels, sandwiches, breakfast burritoes). We sat for a little while, critiqued the lettering of some signs, I wondered about the time and looked at our itinerary (our airport only gave us boarding passes for our first flight, which was probably part of our problem) and saw OH NO OUR FLIGHT WAS TO DEPART FIVE MINUTES AGO. We were looking at the wrong listing, one for St. Louis instead of Kansas City. For whatever reason. So we missed that flight. So we had to scramble to find someone who could help us book a new flight, and there were six of us, so finding empty spots wouldn't be an easy task, and after much fussing and waiting, we ended up taking a total of four flights to CA (instead of three) and getting there around 7:45pm (instead of 11am or something). And the airports were soooooooooooooo lame. I'm pretty sure I hate Milwaukee now. Kansas City (where we had like a 4 hour layover) was also boring, though I discovered (10 minutes before boarding) that at least they had free wifi. And they had a cool ceiling that looked like the underground level of some sand-castle-fortress-thing. The flight from Denver was great, though-we basically ran directly from one gate to the next one and were ready to board (until they called us back because apparently the lady in Milwaukee gave us seats that weren't actually available? so they had to work that out, but whatever, they managed to get us on the flight somehow) and made it to SF at loooong last! And at takeoff I got to see Denver's view of the Rockies, which was pretty neat.
So that night we managed to get to our hotel and then find a place that was open for dinner at 10pm, and I had an actually-really-delicious salad at a Lori's Diner (which turns out to have locations like all over the place-we saw at least 3) with yummy avocado and nice, flavourful tomatoes and stuff.
Aaaaand... Wednesday! That's when we did, like, everything. We walked ALLLLLLLLL over SF, around some cool houses and some shops I wasn't interested in and reallyreallyreallycool gardens growing on the hillside with windy little paths going through them and a friendly grey cat, to Coit Tower, and up and down (and up and down and up and down) Lombard Street, including the really-curvy-part, to Fisherman's Wharf (I'm not sure why we went there, we only stayed like 5 minutes before deciding it was expensive and there was nothing we wanted to see, and turning around to find somewhere to eat), through a Ghirardelli chocolate store where I got to eat TWO absolutely DELICIOUS caramel-filled samples because my mum's sworn off all sugar as her latest health-choice (this improved my mood greatly from the grumbly, foot-tired state I was in after the Wharf and getting seemingly nothing accomplished yet for the day, despite having already walked all over the place), and then to Japaaaaaaaantown!! We ate at Mifune, because my dad's a Kurosawa nerd and I saw it listed in the less-expensive-places-to-eat section of this SF-guidebook my mum brought along. I wanted eel but I always get eel, so instead I got Oyakodon! It was tasty. I wish I could eat Japanese noodles thoughhhhh! Japaaaaaan, why don't you make noodles out of rice, huh? Cool places like Thailand do it!
After food and tasty green tea to warm us up (oh yeah-San Francisco was COLD. Like in the 60s, I mean-not unbearably cold for someone who lives in Michigan, but I was all thinking I'd be wearing sleeveless shirts and stuff and I ended up having to wear a long sleeve shirt EVERY DAY I was there. I brought two, plus a sweater (which I also wore most days), so I survived, but... that's the one part about SF that disappointed me, a little. Folks did say it had been an unusual year, weather-wise, though), I was off to find Kinokuniya. The part I found didn't have any manga, though! Oh no!! Where did it go?! So I asked at the checkout desk and they pointed me downstairs, and theeeeere it all was :D I bought manga and managed to convince my brothers to also buy manga (which I have since read or intend to read soon, bwahaha) and spent the rest of the trip reading(ish) volumes 2-5 of Bancho-sama whenever we were somewhere that required waiting around or empty down-time. I'm in the middle of 5 still. It's so much fun! Even only picking up about 30% (random guess-estimation) of what's going on. After Kino we went back to the hotel for a bit, then out again because we were going to a baseball game that night. On the way we stopped by this Metreon shopping center, which was apparently (according to my mum's guidebook thingy) some high-techy place with video game stores and comics and anime and all sorts of rad stuff, but it turned out Chronicle Books and the theatre and some claw-machines were the only things left there. Laaaaaaaaaaaame. We got our Scott Pilgrim movie tickets for Thursday night/Friday morning though!! $11 each (I still need to pay my brother back for that)... but I saw it the first time for free (and EARLY *gloating*), so it averages out to $5.50 each time, which is plenty reasonable.
Oh, the baseball game. Generally I am not particularly interested in baseball (or any sports (but I at least understand how baseball works, so I guess I like it a little better than other sports)) but I wasn't about to spoil everyone else's fun by saying I didn't want to go because that would be totally lame and evil, so I went and actually managed to pay attention to the game and, shockingly, it was a pretty cool time!! And the Giants won!! They did a really good job! Yaaay!
That's about enough writing for now. I want to read manga, and also go to sleep, because I'm still not fully caught up on the latter. But here's a brief outline of what's to come:
Thursday-gardens and science museum and a music shop and SCOTT PILGRIM at midnight (technically friday morning)
Friday-redwood forest and hopping around Marin County where I lived out the first two years of my life
Saturday-Nihonmachi Street Fair and driving north to my aunt and uncle's place
Sunday through Tuesday-hanging out at my aunt and uncle's place
Wednesday-leaving my aunt and uncle's place, driving, a fort, more Marin, SF on a SUNNY DAY, Thai food, airport
Thursday-airport, flying, airport, waiiiiting, flying, driving, hoooooooooome. Also Delta Airlines is officially my least favourite (out of my very limited experience). You'll find out why laaaater! (if my reporting-motivation lasts that long.)
[edit, almost entirely unrelated to absolutely everything: earlier today I was browsing photos from the trip and just as the song I was listening to (ピクニックには早すぎる) said something about honeybees, I got to a photo of a bee on a flower. Wah!! And then just now I was looking at the end-pages of Magic Touch 9 (I haven't read the volume yet, I was just looking to see if they'd been so kind as to provide a translation of the Japanese text in the cover illustration. They were not so kind) and reading the message from assistant Pochi Takahashi, I noticed I was listening to a song called ポチ (Pochi) and the singer had just sung that very word. I really love those kinds of coincidences.]
Start! Our flight out was earlyish in the morning, and I was up pretty late and then had an impossible time falling asleep, so I basically got like zero sleep before we left. Anyway, the first flight (out of three to get to CA) went fine. We landed in Milwaukee, and my brothers/dad looked at the upcoming flights listing and decided our next flight wasn't coming for an hour and a half, so we got breakfast. Or they got breakfast, since the food place basically had bread and things served on bread (muffins, bagels, sandwiches, breakfast burritoes). We sat for a little while, critiqued the lettering of some signs, I wondered about the time and looked at our itinerary (our airport only gave us boarding passes for our first flight, which was probably part of our problem) and saw OH NO OUR FLIGHT WAS TO DEPART FIVE MINUTES AGO. We were looking at the wrong listing, one for St. Louis instead of Kansas City. For whatever reason. So we missed that flight. So we had to scramble to find someone who could help us book a new flight, and there were six of us, so finding empty spots wouldn't be an easy task, and after much fussing and waiting, we ended up taking a total of four flights to CA (instead of three) and getting there around 7:45pm (instead of 11am or something). And the airports were soooooooooooooo lame. I'm pretty sure I hate Milwaukee now. Kansas City (where we had like a 4 hour layover) was also boring, though I discovered (10 minutes before boarding) that at least they had free wifi. And they had a cool ceiling that looked like the underground level of some sand-castle-fortress-thing. The flight from Denver was great, though-we basically ran directly from one gate to the next one and were ready to board (until they called us back because apparently the lady in Milwaukee gave us seats that weren't actually available? so they had to work that out, but whatever, they managed to get us on the flight somehow) and made it to SF at loooong last! And at takeoff I got to see Denver's view of the Rockies, which was pretty neat.
So that night we managed to get to our hotel and then find a place that was open for dinner at 10pm, and I had an actually-really-delicious salad at a Lori's Diner (which turns out to have locations like all over the place-we saw at least 3) with yummy avocado and nice, flavourful tomatoes and stuff.
Aaaaand... Wednesday! That's when we did, like, everything. We walked ALLLLLLLLL over SF, around some cool houses and some shops I wasn't interested in and reallyreallyreallycool gardens growing on the hillside with windy little paths going through them and a friendly grey cat, to Coit Tower, and up and down (and up and down and up and down) Lombard Street, including the really-curvy-part, to Fisherman's Wharf (I'm not sure why we went there, we only stayed like 5 minutes before deciding it was expensive and there was nothing we wanted to see, and turning around to find somewhere to eat), through a Ghirardelli chocolate store where I got to eat TWO absolutely DELICIOUS caramel-filled samples because my mum's sworn off all sugar as her latest health-choice (this improved my mood greatly from the grumbly, foot-tired state I was in after the Wharf and getting seemingly nothing accomplished yet for the day, despite having already walked all over the place), and then to Japaaaaaaaantown!! We ate at Mifune, because my dad's a Kurosawa nerd and I saw it listed in the less-expensive-places-to-eat section of this SF-guidebook my mum brought along. I wanted eel but I always get eel, so instead I got Oyakodon! It was tasty. I wish I could eat Japanese noodles thoughhhhh! Japaaaaaan, why don't you make noodles out of rice, huh? Cool places like Thailand do it!
After food and tasty green tea to warm us up (oh yeah-San Francisco was COLD. Like in the 60s, I mean-not unbearably cold for someone who lives in Michigan, but I was all thinking I'd be wearing sleeveless shirts and stuff and I ended up having to wear a long sleeve shirt EVERY DAY I was there. I brought two, plus a sweater (which I also wore most days), so I survived, but... that's the one part about SF that disappointed me, a little. Folks did say it had been an unusual year, weather-wise, though), I was off to find Kinokuniya. The part I found didn't have any manga, though! Oh no!! Where did it go?! So I asked at the checkout desk and they pointed me downstairs, and theeeeere it all was :D I bought manga and managed to convince my brothers to also buy manga (which I have since read or intend to read soon, bwahaha) and spent the rest of the trip reading(ish) volumes 2-5 of Bancho-sama whenever we were somewhere that required waiting around or empty down-time. I'm in the middle of 5 still. It's so much fun! Even only picking up about 30% (random guess-estimation) of what's going on. After Kino we went back to the hotel for a bit, then out again because we were going to a baseball game that night. On the way we stopped by this Metreon shopping center, which was apparently (according to my mum's guidebook thingy) some high-techy place with video game stores and comics and anime and all sorts of rad stuff, but it turned out Chronicle Books and the theatre and some claw-machines were the only things left there. Laaaaaaaaaaaame. We got our Scott Pilgrim movie tickets for Thursday night/Friday morning though!! $11 each (I still need to pay my brother back for that)... but I saw it the first time for free (and EARLY *gloating*), so it averages out to $5.50 each time, which is plenty reasonable.
Oh, the baseball game. Generally I am not particularly interested in baseball (or any sports (but I at least understand how baseball works, so I guess I like it a little better than other sports)) but I wasn't about to spoil everyone else's fun by saying I didn't want to go because that would be totally lame and evil, so I went and actually managed to pay attention to the game and, shockingly, it was a pretty cool time!! And the Giants won!! They did a really good job! Yaaay!
That's about enough writing for now. I want to read manga, and also go to sleep, because I'm still not fully caught up on the latter. But here's a brief outline of what's to come:
Thursday-gardens and science museum and a music shop and SCOTT PILGRIM at midnight (technically friday morning)
Friday-redwood forest and hopping around Marin County where I lived out the first two years of my life
Saturday-Nihonmachi Street Fair and driving north to my aunt and uncle's place
Sunday through Tuesday-hanging out at my aunt and uncle's place
Wednesday-leaving my aunt and uncle's place, driving, a fort, more Marin, SF on a SUNNY DAY, Thai food, airport
Thursday-airport, flying, airport, waiiiiting, flying, driving, hoooooooooome. Also Delta Airlines is officially my least favourite (out of my very limited experience). You'll find out why laaaater! (if my reporting-motivation lasts that long.)
[edit, almost entirely unrelated to absolutely everything: earlier today I was browsing photos from the trip and just as the song I was listening to (ピクニックには早すぎる) said something about honeybees, I got to a photo of a bee on a flower. Wah!! And then just now I was looking at the end-pages of Magic Touch 9 (I haven't read the volume yet, I was just looking to see if they'd been so kind as to provide a translation of the Japanese text in the cover illustration. They were not so kind) and reading the message from assistant Pochi Takahashi, I noticed I was listening to a song called ポチ (Pochi) and the singer had just sung that very word. I really love those kinds of coincidences.]