Free Pancakes!!!

More free stuff again :)

Today, IHOP gave away pancakes for free from 7PM to 10PM!!! Yup, it's to celebrate (their?) National Pancake Day (well, it's Mardi Gras, or Shrove Tuesday since tomorrow is Ash Wednesday). Of course, I couldn't sleep on that deal ;) . I went with husband and ordered 2 short stacks (3 pancakes/short stacks), we didn't get a bill as we didn't order anything else. We kindly left a tip and a donation to the Children’s Miracle Network foundation.

http://www.ihop.com/tellafriend.php

On a separate note, I don't think the 6 pancakes were worth the drive and the extra calories. The tip and donation didn't add up to cheap either. I make pancakes on weekends from mix and they come up to almost the same and plus we have genuine maple syrup from Quebec. It was more for the experience since I wanted to try all these American chains. I heard that IHOP overprice their pancakes and I wouldn't volunteer paying $5.29 for 3 pancakes (their regular price for a "short stack"), so it was a nice experience. Talking about trying out American restaurant chains, I have also tried Jack-in-the-Box and In and Out Burger, but still looking forward for my first time at Carl's Jr.

Tourists in San Francisco

Last Black Friday, my husband bought the City Walks: San Francisco: 50 Adventures on Foot cards. It was only $3.99 on sales at Borders. Since yesterday was Presidents Day and husband had a day off, we decided to go explore San Francisco on foot and make use of these cards to see if they are any good. If yes, then we can consider buying the ones for other cities like Paris, London... if we happen to go there :)

We got up fairly early, had quick breakfast, grabbed our backpacks and caught the 9:54AM Caltrain. We rode for over 1 hr before getting to San Francisco Caltrain Station (4th Street and King Street). We walked up 4th Street to reach downtown San Francisco and continue on Stockton Street and passed Union Square and reached Chinatown. That's a whole 1.6 miles! We stopped at the intersection of Washington Street.

Our first stop was for lunch, we randomly picked a restaurant in Chinatown. I wanted to eat Hong Kong/Cantonese style food - something I really miss. We found this place called "Washington Bakery & Restaurant" (華盛頓茶餐廳) on Washington Street at Grant Street. It is a restaurant where they serve Hong Kong-style Western cuisine. Restaurants like this one are typically called Cha chaan teng (茶餐廳) - something not common and hard to find in South Bay (the neighbourhood where I live). It was really busy, so you really can feel the hongkongese atmosphere. We were nicely greeted by a Cantonese-speaking server. Seeing our backpacks and camera, he asked us where we were visiting from. My husband was proud to tell him we were tourists from Sunnyvale, which is "only" 40 miles away. I think that was funny :). We ordered a house pan-fried egg noodles and a shrimp in egg sauce fried rice noodles, for drink my husband had a Hong Kong style lemon iced tea and I went for a Hong Kong style cold milk tea. Everything was delicious!! We definitely would recommend this place!

After the meal, we walked up on Grant Avenue visiting busy Chinatown. It was so nice, it was so busy and people were happy on this second day of the Chinese New Year. We stopped by famous Golden Gate Bakery (金門餅家) and waited in line outside for about 15 mins just to buy only 1 winter melon pastry (老婆餅) - it was good!!!

Afterwards, we walked all the way to Coit Tower and had a good look out at the city from the hill. We then took some back street recommended by our tourist cards. We walked on Filbert Street from Montgomery Street to Sansome Street. We were astonished to find a flock of wild parrots living in the middle of the city!!! They were noisy, they were loud, they were a good bunch of 20-30 parrots!!! It was so entertaining that we took videos of them. We also saw 2 humming birds, unfortunately, we failed to take good pics of them.

Finally, we reached Embacadero street and walked back to the Caltrain station. We got home just in time for dinner. At night, my pedometer recorded 21585 steps, that's double of my daily target :D yay!! A number I haven't seen in a long time!!

Health Insurance

Yesterday, I went to the career consultants' for a meeting . There I meet people just like me who got laid off. One lady said that her health insurance by her employer is running out, so she is shopping for some coverage for herself and her spouse. She said what she found was $850/month for a couple. Then, another lady in the meeting confirmed that it costs her $858/month from Cobra as well. I was sitting there speechless! Holly Cow!!! It's so expensive!!! I guess Canadians are really spoiled!! $850/month isn't really what the average person can afford. Oh my! J'en r'viens pas encore!

Some random facts

If you watch Hong Kong TV series, you probably recognize this face. It's Gregory Charles Rivers (河國榮, Ho Kwok Wing). He plays most of the foreigner roles. I just found out about him today by accident while browsing some TV shows.

He seems to have been an actor for TVB for as long as I could remember, so I was surprised to find out he's "only" 42. The other surprising fact is that he was a medicine student in Australia before he relocated to Hong Kong. I wonder why he chose to be an actor rather than a physician. He is also active in the Mac circle in Hong Kong and a popular blogger. His personal website is http://www.hokwokwing.hk/ You can even email him!!! (if you want to... :p~)

Import/Export

On Saturday, I went to an Import/Export seminar by SCORE. It was in Fremont, about 25 mins drive from home, so we had to get up at 7am to make it there for 8:15am.

I don't have intention of doing business in importation or exportation, so I just went for general knowledge. After 5 hrs listening to 3 different speaker, I confirmed that importation and exportation are so complicated that it is not something I want :p~

First, there's the financial and trust issues: how to pay the export agent? how to make sure the products will get here? how do you know you will get paid? Then, there's the legal/custom aspect: is this product allowed to be imported from this country? do the labels conform to the local laws?

Hmm... It may be a good way to make money, but it doesn't sound fun at all... so, not doing that for sure!

Well almost this time...

Yesterday was Sunday. That means the beginning of a sales week for a lot of shops. Our Sunday routine is to read fliers while eating breakfast. Have you ever heard of enviga? We saw a coupon for a free one in Longs Drugs weekly flier... woohoo!! After breakfast, we went to the gym and after gym, we went to Longs and grabbed one each. :) We had to pay 8.25% tax and $0.08 for CRV (deposit for can) which add up to $0.19!

How to get freebies...

Hi all... As I mentioned in one of my recent post that it is fairly easy to find freebies in USA. Yup, that is one cool thing here... buying things that are free or almost!!! Now, you must be wondering how do we find these deals...? Well, we read two websites: www.slickdeals.net and fatwallet

Two Sundays ago after dinner, my husband checked www.slickdeals.net and saw a deal that we couldn't sleep on! So we jumped in our car and went to Walgreens (it's a big drugstore/pharmacy chain in USA).

So, here's the deal:

Purchase $20 in Kimberly Clark products, get $10 Walgreens gift card by mail.
Regular prices count towards the $20 in purchase.

Based on this thread:
http://forums.slickdeals.net/showthread.php?threadid=442168

We posted on the same thread what we got:
http://forums.slickdeals.net/showpost.php?p=5528443&postcount=25

And we even made a profit of $0.39!!

Bedroom Furniture

It's been so many months since I moved here and we didn't buy bedroom furniture until two weekends ago. We were waiting for the perfect bedroom set, but I guess it's too hard to find something that is modern looking and yet not too expensive. I refuse to have a metal bed - it reminds me of hospital beds from the old days and husband and I hate colonial style. That doesn't leave us with much choices. Ikea have nice modern furniture at low price, however their stuff are becoming commodity and we don't like to have a bedroom set that everyone has.

Finally, after so many months of shopping around, we finally had to give up and chose a bedroom set from Ikea: the Hemnes collection. We didn't buy the bed, only the dresser, the chest of drawers and two nightstands. What we need was clothes storage and bed is not a necessity. We are thinking of seeing how things fit in the bedroom first and/or maybe wait for a sale this summer.

So, we haven't finished assembling all of them. Hope there's enough storage after that :)