Day 6

Today we went on a walking tour of Chinatown. Our tour guide, Frank, grew up in Chinatown and told us a lot about the history of the neighborhood.

The first stop was at a bustling park. Quoted from Heidi’s blog (because she already explained it so well), “According to Frank, the apartments in Chinatown don’t have living rooms. Instead, people hang out in the park. Moms and Dads go to work, the grandparents (particularly grandmas) get the kids to school and then spend the morning in the park. Gambling.”

Old Chinese Telephone Exchange

The tour included stops at a Chinese art shop, an apothecary, Grant Avenue, Ross Alley (seen in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom), the Fortune Cookie Factory (my camera stopped working, check Heidi’s blog for pictures), a Chinese grocer, and a tea shop.

Again, my camera wasn’t working at this point in the trip, so I’m borrowing this description and photos from Heidi’s blog.

“Also in Ross Alley is the barbershop of Jun Yu. He’s cut the hair of Frank Sinatra, the Beatles, Clint Eastwood…Perhaps they were drawn in by the price. $5 for five minutes, $6, for six minutes…Jun Yu must have Hollywood in his blood because he was also in the The Pursuit of Happyness. He didn’t act in the movie, but played his erhu. It’s a type of Chinese violin with two strings. His specialty? Red River Valley.”

While he was performing for us some crazy lady stopped and started singing along with him and telling him to play it differently!! He was adorable though and very talented.

Then we walked to the Ferry Building where we wandered around and had lunch.

We took the ferry to Sausalito which we found very unimpressive. It’s touristy, which we expected, but DULL. We were out of things to do there relatively fast. We took a bus back to the city and picked up some dinner to eat at the hotel.

Day 7:

We were pretty much done with San Francisco after a week. We felt like we’d seen everything! So we rented a car and drove to San Jose where we visited the Winchester Mystery House.

From Wikipedia:

“The Winchester Mystery House is a well-known California mansion that was under construction continuously for 38 years, and is reported to be haunted. It once was the personal residence of Sarah Winchester, the widow of gun magnate William Wirt Winchester, but is now a tourist attraction. Under Winchester’s day-to-day guidance, its “from-the-ground-up” construction proceeded around-the-clock, without interruption, from 1884 until her death on September 5, 1922, at which time work immediately ceased. The cost for such constant building has been estimated at about US $5.5 million (if paid in 1922, this would be equivalent to almost $70 million in 2008 dollars).

The mansion is renowned for its size and utter lack of any master building plan. According to popular belief, Winchester thought the house was haunted by the ghosts of individuals killed by Winchester rifles, and that only continuous construction would appease them.”

And the house is full of quirks…

“Today the home is owned by Winchester Investments LLC[5] and it retains unique touches that reflect Winchester’s beliefs and her reported preoccupation with warding off malevolent spirits. These spirits are said to have directly inspired her as to the way the house should be built. The number thirteen and spider web motifs, which she believed had some sort of spiritual meaning to her, reappear around the house. For example, an expensive imported chandelier that originally had 12 candle-holders was altered to accommodate 13 candles, wall clothes hooks are in multiples of 13, and a spider web-patterned Tiffany window contains 13 colored stones.”

The tour painted her out to be pretty crazy. But it didn’t seem that way to me. Rather, she just seemed eccentric and superstitious to me.

(Some of the crazy easy riser steps that take many steps and turns to get a short distance!)

We also visited the Egyptian museum in San Jose. Then we stopped at Target (yes, I go to California just to go to Target…) so I could buy a duffel bag to get my stuff home!

Day 8

Took a shuttle to the airport for our early afternoon flights. My flight was fairly uneventful except for the fact that there was about an entire pack of chewed gum all over my seat. I had sat down in a hurry and didn’t notice it until I’d already sat in it! The flight attendant got me a blanket but it was ALL over my pants. Yuck.

It really was a great trip! The best part was having so much time to spend with Heidi. I miss being neighbors!

The End!

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