Chinatown

I have been wanting to go to Chinatown for quite some time now and today was finally the day!  No one was as excited as me though :(  The boys thought it would be boring and David only pictured Chinatown as in the movies.  You know, violence and crowded.  Two things he knows I can't handle.  But I also have such a love for different cultures.  They truly fascinate me.

 We parked in a garage at Portsmouth Square where there was some entertainment (singing) as well as the locals entertaining themselves (Chinese Chess).

We found a wonderful shop that we bought some yummy goodies who then gave us directions to Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory.  When you think of a "factory" you tend to think of this huge warehouse but there were only about 3 women actually sitting down and making the cookies.  It smelled so good in there!

Then it was time for us to make our way up and down the streets of Chinatown to see all that they had to offer.  This is my FAVORITE picture by far!  Remember the above mentioned fear of David's?  So I looked at this picture later and just started cracking up.  I showed it to him, pointed out the mysterious van in the background, doors open, ready to snatch up his family, shove us in their van and drive off right after he takes his very last picture of his family.  Yeah, I'm a brat.

This was the coolest fruit we saw there.  It is a Rambutan.  Not that I knew the name of it at the time of seeing it, or even after I asked the lady who was working there at the store.  She just smiled at me politely as I asked her what it was.  I'm sure she gets tired of us crazy white girls asking her all kinds of questions in a language foreign to her.  The Rambutan really wasn't bad.  David thought it kinda had a grape taste.  It defiantly had an odd weird texture, though.

This was the coolest instrument we saw being played on the street.  This man even tried teaching us how to say the name of it; Erhu.

We ended up ALL really liking Chinatown and spent way too much there in all the interesting stuff we found.  Brigham was the funniest throughout the whole day.  He was the one who vocalized how surprised he was that he liked Chinatown.  He was also the one to start acting like he could speak Chinese...errrrrrrrrr!  Yep, we had to have the "politically correct" talk with him.  Surprise, surprise!  It isn't the first time we have had this talk with him!  As we were leaving he said to me, "You know, when we act like we can talk Chinese at home, well, I am surprised at how much we actually really do sound like them."  Oh, brother!

After we left Chinatown, we headed off to Pacifica State Beach.  I wanted to take the boys there because they have an actual Taco Bell on the beach (that is the building in the background).  It is really cool because their "drive threw window" is for surfers!  You can't drive through it at all.  It is for the surfers not to track in sand.  Though, there still was quite a bit of sand on the floor inside. 

It was really cold, but that seems to be pretty typical at the beaches around here...even in August.  But the boys didn't care, as you can see :)  It was just another really fun Saturday in California!