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!!