San Francisco

After spending four weeks at home visiting family and friends, attending weddings, nights out, going on camping trips, and the like, it was time to say good-bye again to everyone.  We were leaving for part two of our trip, and we were excited to get back on the road. 

The second part of our trip is going to be focused on the southern portion of Asia.  Our flight takes us to Hong Kong (with a 2 day stopover in San Francisco), and after a few days in Hong Kong we plan on entering China and spending around a month there before moving to other countries such as Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, India, and possibly a few more. Naturally, we’re really excited about seeing these countries, as they all have quite a lot of extremely different cultural things to explore.  The food is going to be shockingly different, the languages completely foreign, and everything that we’re used to will be flipped on its head.  Asia is going to be very unlike South America.  In South America it was almost all Spanish, the food wasn’t that outrageous, and the overall culture was different and unique, but it wasn’t so different that it was impossible to understand. We can’t wait to experience some culture shock and we’ll be sure to write about it all in this blog over the coming months.

We left home Monday evening with Joh’s parents. Our flight was leaving Buffalo at 5 o’clock in the morning on Tuesday, so they offered to take us over to the airport and spend the evening in Buffalo with us.  We went to an authentic Mexican restaurant and reminisced about our time in Mexico together.  The food was good and very similar to what we’d had down south.  After an enjoyable time together we departed ways at the airport and we were faced with the question of what to do at the Buffalo airport for the next eight hours. Our flight left at around 5 in the morning so we didn’t feel like shelling out $169.99 for a hotel room near the airport for only four hours.  We walked to one or two hotels and begged and pleaded for a cheap place to stay for a few hours but to no avail.  We spent a few hours at a McDonalds using their Wi-Fi and then found a bench in the departure terminal and attempted to get a few hours of sleep.  It was pretty tough with the lights on full blast, music and announcements over the loudspeakers, and cleaning crews running around all night long. We did managed to get at least an hour or so, and by the time we caught our flight in the morning we were still tired enough that we managed to pass out in the airplane for most of the way to San Francisco.

We arrived in sunny San Francisco mid-morning, and jumped on the subway to downtown and walked a few blocks to our cheap hotel in Chinatown.  The hotel was pretty crappy, but it was cheap and in a spot close to everything so it suited our purposes well.  We took the opportunity to brush up on our Chinese food knowledge and chopstick skills and went straight to the restaurant that the receptionist at our hotel recommended.  We had some great dim sum at a family style Chinese restaurant and then we were ready to start exploring.  San Francisco is a city that Joh and I have always wanted to visit.  We’ve heard great things from everyone and it did not disappoint. We walked over through Chinatown towards the bay and checked out the Bay Bridge and all the walkways, parks, and buildings along the way down the bay past all the piers and Fisherman’s Warf. There was a fantastic market in the Ferry Building with all kinds of local organic foods.  We really appreciated all of it and ended up walking all the way down the walkways to the Golden Gate Bridge. After hours of walking around we really noticed that we weren’t quite ready to be walking all day again.  It has been quite a while since we’ve spent the day walking around.  Blisters and sore body parts were back. It will take some getting used to again.  In South America in the first part of our trip we were used to walking for hours on end without discomfort, so we’ll have to build up that ability again.

We wanted to book a trip to Alcatraz the following day, but unfortunately it was all booked up for the next few days, so we missed that.  We did get some good views of the island from the city, but I’m sure it would have been awesome to walk around the island and visit the jail there. Oh well, I guess we’ll have to visit the city again someday in the future.  I definitely wouldn’t mind.  After two days of walking all over the city we both agreed that it was the best American city we’d seen yet.  Great atmosphere, helpful people, culturally diverse, great food, and lots of great areas to walk around and explore.

The following day we spent more time walking around the city, visiting a few other landmarks such as Golden Gate Park, the crookest street in the world, the ball park, and a few more. We stayed in the city until as late as possible and then went back to the airport and spent another tough night sleeping in an airport. The following morning we got our flight out and we were on our way to Hong Kong.

We’ve been in Hong Kong a few days now and we’re actually finished it already and on our way to the next place.  Hong Kong is a great place and we’ll write about it in our next blog entry.  Stay tuned…