Today was packed! We went to get some breakfast and other food at Safeway in the morning, then we drove up to Emerlyville on the other side of the bay to Pixar Studios where we met Cat Hicks, who gave us a tour of the Pixar Studios. Awesome! We got to see all the offices of the animators, some work-in-progress stuff, the apparently-famous breakfast room and the wide outside area with swimming pools, basketball court, etc.. We also had lunch in one of the cantinas, and after that we ran into Jeff Pidgeon by accident, it was great to see him again.
Sadly everyone had to continue work so after about 1.5 hours it was time to leave again after getting some photos with Kiki. Cat told us that there was a brick-and-mortar store of Mendels, a popular shop for buying for, so this was our first stop in San Francisco after crossing the Bay Bridge. The store was in the middle of Haight-Ashbury, making parking very expensive, so we couldn’t stay too long in this really interesting part of SF. Since we parked right at a Ben&Jerrys store, Henrieke finally was able to get some Colbert ice cream. Way too sweet for my tastes, that stuff. We ended up getting 7 yards of fur at Mendel’s and went to park our car in the Westfield Mall garage.
From there we walked up Powell street and watched some cable cars.
Then we took the bus to Japantown. It was of course much bigger than in San Jose, with it’s own very authentic looking shopping street and even a completely Japanese mall! We spent quite a while there, looking around in stores, playing on weird machines in the arcade, buying a Polar Bear’s Café book in the bookstore and getting more stuff from the 100 YEN shop.
We walked around a bit afterwards and ended up in Lafayette park, a beautiful park in the heart of San Francisco with a wonderful view of the city. Henrieke was busy spotting birds while I took a break.
Since it was getting late, we took the bus back and stopped in Chinatown. In hopes of some tasty Chinese food, we stopped by a restaurant, but the menu was in Chinese and the waiter barely spoke English, so we ended up not taking the risk of eating something weird and went on. We walked pas Union Square, back down on Powell street. An Urban Outfitters store sparked my interest as they were selling both Impossible and Instax instant film. They also had a wide variety of records for sale, sadly out of my price range.
We still didn’t eat, so we stopped at Panda Express before getting back to our car and driving down to San Jose again for a meeting at a place everyone just calls “Chicken”, apparently due to many changes in ownership. We spent a bit there, had a nice chat with some people and went back to Croc’s house at around midnight.