Last Saturday morning, Jimmy, some guys from the lab and I went to see “Batman: The Dark Knight” in an IMAX movie theater in SF. IMAX means that he screen is HUGE and curved such that it fills your whole view, with sound coming from behind the screen. Quite impressive…
Afterwards, we went for lunch in “The Stinking Rose,” an Italian “garlic restaurant” in North Beach:
The whole menu is built on garlic—enormous amounts of it. They even have “garlic ice cream” for dessert! We tried it, and it was not bad actually. Maybe because our taste buds were already completely saturated by then…
After lunch, I went to visit Chinatown. I entered by the gate on Bush Street:
It’s a colorful quarter that really makes you feel a little in China:
Compared to the ones of New York and Honolulu, SF’s Chinatown is pretty clean and open. Maybe that is because of the busloads of tourists that descend on the main street—Grant Avenue—every day. However, even the back alleys were clean and quiet, without the touristy crowd:
You can tell that you are dealing with “real Chinese” here from the old men playing Mahjong in the streets, giving the finishing touch to the China-atmosphere:
After visiting Chinatown, I returned to North Beach, the city’s Italian quarter. I certainly want to return here to sample some of the myriad of cozy Italian restaurants.
However, after our garlic-lunch I could not stand lingering too long in this neighborhood any more, so I continued along Columbus Avenue towards Russian Hill, a primarily residential neighborhood with some incredibly steep hills and matching views:
This is the quarter where you can find the famous “Lombard Street.” It is so incredibly steep that cars’ brakes used to give up on it every now and then, with tragic consequences. Therefore, the city decided to add some artificial curves to it, which makes the street so unique. The Sun was already low when I got there, and I could not manage to make decent pictures from the street, but if you look it up on Google maps, you can use “street view” to take a virtual walk around there:
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Then, it was time to go home again…
2 comments:
Let's hope the garlic-smell will be gone by the 16th of august. If not, make sure you're prepared for the inevitable death-rabbit question, early in the morning.;-)
I hope so too! Don't forget anyway to bring back to Belgium a couple of mouthwash bottles (they have a lot over there). But I also think to those poor Chinese guys ! I hope you did not decimate their population with your garlic breath that day ;-)
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