Saturday in San Francisco

Greetings!

This past week has been a lot of studying as usual. But the weekend finally rolled around and I got to go to SF yesterday with some friends from my Japanese class, and some acquaintances of theirs from the International Dorm. They were all really cool, and we had a lot of fun. I forgot my camera, so all of these pictures were taken by my friend L! Thanks for letting me use them!

This is the Palace of Fine Arts! It really was gorgeous, and there were really cute ducks in the pond. And a bunch of not as cute super vicious seagulls and pigeons. But with some careful aiming of bagel pieces you could make sure you only fed the ducks.

This pigeon seemed to be very fond of me. Which was odd, because I kept trying to kick it. It was fascinated with my shoes, I think.

A female duck came over to where we were and was chasing and biting some of the male ducks. We wondered why until we started walking towards the Exploratorium (which was our original goal anyway except we all got very distracted by the ducks). Then we saw that there were a bunch of DUCKLINGS!!! But our cooing was interrupted when another mother duck who had slightly older ducklings started attacking the smaller one, and it all escalated to a big duck fight. Fortunately none of the ducklings were injured.

Inside of the Exploratorium there was an exhibit on what determined cuteness and they had some of these Mitrushka doll decals on the wall.

SF was really cold and windy so I resourcefully made my scarf into a head covering to protect my ears and hair from the howling and mussing up of the wind. Unfortunately it made me look kind of like Baba Yaga. I guess its just the nose... sigh. I was warm though, which was all I cared about.

Our last stop was Japan Town, where we ate dinner at this cute restaurant called "On the Bridge", stopped by Ichiban Kan, and the Nijiya Market. I was kind of practical at Ichiban Kan and only got a couple of baskets for steaming vegetables and some steel wool, but made up for it at the grocery store and got shoyu (soy sauce) dango and some mochi you can make in the microwave and some Kirin milk tea! Yummm

Anyway, my 24 hours of frolic are done and now I must hit the books once again.
Ta!