san francisco

We spent the weekend in San Francisco, and just came back yesterday morning. I was there for a couple days with my parents when I was a teenager, and then spent a very nice day there a couple years ago with Elizabeth, Susie, and Jenny. (That was when Claire still called it "France and Cisco.")

But these past three days were the most time I've ever spent just exploring the city, and wow, it's so neat.

We stayed at the Omni in the financial district ("FiDi"). It's a lovely hotel, with people just falling all over themselves to help you. We just loved it.  Their Christmas decorations in the lobby were so beautiful.

The entire financial district had really great trees outside. Everything would have been gray without them.

The Omni is on California Street, just down a bit from Chinatown.

I liked the layers of history and culture in this single photo below: the financial district represented by the high-rise (Diane Feinstein is criticized/credited for the "Manhattanization" of the area in the 1980s), and then Old St. Mary's Cathedral, which was finished in 1854 and survived the earthquake of 1906 (when everything in California west of the San Andreas Fault shifted north sixteen feet, and one-third of San Francisco was wiped out), and then Chinatown (which was established in the 1840s, and is the largest Chinese community outside Asia).

We got in Friday night, and Saturday morning we got up and walked uphill, up, up, up ...

... and more up, up, up (I kept stopping on the pretense of taking photos, but really, I was just gasping for air) ...

... to the Union Square area to have breakfast at Sear's Fine Food, famous for their Swedish silver-dollar pancakes. It was a long wait before we ate (our waitress was the busiest waitress I've ever seen) but yum, the pancakes were delicious, and we gobbled up everything on our table, so famished we were from our climb. (Eighteen come in a serving. We all three ate all eighteen of our pancakes!) 

Then we poked around Union Square for a bit, enjoying the big-city Christmas feeling. Say what you will about corporate America ... they are great with lights and trees. :)

Macy's had a tufted patent-red-leather theme going on inside, which wasn't really me, but chacun à son goût, right? Here Claire is sitting in Mrs. Claus's chair, and checking out a tree made of yarn balls, which I quite liked and fully expect one of you crafty girls to reproduce in your own living room mere minutes after seeing this.

The BEST tree was in Neiman Marcus, under their beautiful dome. 

The Union Square area is a really nice shopping district. We licked all the windows. :) 

After Union Square, we crashed at a Starbucks for a bit, and I gave Claire a little foot massage because she was complaining about sore feet. :) My feet were fine because I was wearing my old, super comfy brown clogs, which unfortunately were falling apart to begin with (I got them when Claire was in preschool) and which started leaking on Sunday, so that I had wet feet a good chunk of Sunday when it rained, and which therefore are now in the trash somewhere in San Francisco. R.I.P., good clogs. But Saturday was dry, and all was well.

So after cocoa and lattes, we headed toward the Ferry Building, which Bob had visited on business awhile back and thought I might like.

On the way, we saw some Santas.

Here is the Ferry Building from afar. It turned out to be my favorite thing we'd seen so far.

Behind the Ferry Building was the water and a good view of the Bay Bridge (which we'd crossed the night before coming from the airport in Oakland).

And inside the Ferry Building was a food market the likes of which I haven't seen outside Europe.

Local, fresh, sustainable, organic, gourmet, family-owned, artisan, and DELICIOUS ... all the words you want to hear about food. :)

Out front, there was a farmer's market, which I think is always there.

We ate lunch there at Gott's, which Bob remembered from a business trip as having super delicious hamburgers. He was right. :)

We sat outside. Bob was excited about all the northern California microbreweries they had on tap. I was excited because they had good sweet potato fries, and because Coit Tower is on the hill in the background to the left of Bob's head. Claire was excited because she saw the fattest pigeon she had ever seen (full of bread and sweet potato fries, I suspect), and because the chairs looked like they were dancing.

So that gets us to lunch on Saturday. :) I'll post more later about this fun city.