San Francisco

I guess it’s about time for me to stop being lazy and post some of the photos from my trip to San Francisco.  The fun started shortly after I disembarked from the plane.  I couldn’t get a very good picture while maintaining any sort of discretion, but believe I saw the Blues Brothers, or at least their Mexican counterparts, at the airport.  The gentleman closest in the picture had the complete look – black suit, white shirt, skinny black tie, Raybans, and fedora.  I couldn’t understand them since they were speaking Spanish, but I believe they were on a mission from God to get the band back together.

Later that evening I attended a San Jose Sharks game – my first NHL game.  There were 3 fights within the first 5 minutes – apparently the Sharks and Calgary Flames don’t like each other.  In the end, the Sharks lost 2-1.

In previous trips to the bay area, I had never visited the Winchester House of Mystery.  For those unfamiliar with the story, widow Sarah Winchester, heir to the Winchester Rifle fortune, believed that she was haunted by the ghosts of all of the people killed by the rifles over the years.  In order to confuse the ghosts, she had to continually build more and more onto the house – building stairways to nowhere, windows and closets with nothing but walls behind them, and second story doors that open to a 10 foot drop.  But despite all of this building, she never installed heating and it was pretty cold throughout the tour. 

Here’s a nice panorama.

And here is the famous door to nowhere.

We made a trip down to Golden Gate Park where I visited the resident buffalo.  The appeared to be bored. 

In the trendy marina district, I was fascinated by the Squat & Gobble restaurant.  Looking at the menu and peering in the windows failed to reveal any insight into the name.  Chairs were plentiful inside – no need for squatting.  The menu contained a variety of items, not simply turkey.  Perhaps I will never know what this is all about.  But since it is human nature to fear what we do not understand, I will admit to being a little scared of this place. 

One of the main attractions I wanted to see while there was the King Tut Exhibit. It was at the de Young Museum, and while interesting, was a little disappointing since approximately 75% of the items in the exhibit didn't belong to Tutankhamun. Some of the artifacts belonged to his father, King Akhenaten, some to Queen Tiye, some to King Thutmosis (the IV I believe), some to Yuya and Tjuya (I'm not even sure who they were).  Also, most of the more spectacular items like the golden burial mask no longer go on tour.  I guess I will have to take a trip to Egypt to see the good stuff. 

  

Photos were not allowed inside the museum, so all of the museum photos I have are of non-Egyptian things. Things like the second nice bench. 

Sure enough, right nearby was the first nice bench.  Sadly, the naughty bench could not be located. 

Had I been able to find the naughty bench, I have no doubt that it would have been near the Mezo-American sculpture of dogs mating.  This beauty was dug up near Mexico City, and though I thoroughly searched the gift shop for a replica to give as a Christmas present, I sadly left empty handed.

This thing I thought was pretty fancy.

After a lot of asking around, I was finally told that the giant thing up on the hill is a TV tower.  I was relieved to have that mystery solved before I left town. 

The museum had a nice tall tower which allowed for a 360° view of the city, and luckily an opportunity to play with the panorama feature in my phone again.

The good times came to an end with this abomination.  This plane pulled into the gate next to mine as I was boarding the plane out of town.  I don’t know if WSU had one of their teams in town to play Cal or Stanford, or if Horizon just makes some of their passengers ride on that.  What I do know is that I was happy to see the UW plane safe at home back at Sea-Tac.