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Published: September 26th 2011
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Uploading this a little late as our internet decided to break last night as we were trying to upload the photos!
Today we had planned to visit the California Academy of Sciences (a sort of natural history/science/living museum/aquarium), as it was one of the attractions that we could visit with our CityPass. We had a bit of a lie in and got up at around 9:30am. Emma used one of the showers downstairs (the one on our floor was occupied!), whilst Craig got ready in the room.
By the time we were both ready, it was around 11:30am and we decided to go and get some breakfast/dinner before heading to the museum. We had looked on the netbook the previous night at where the nearest KFC was, as Craig wanted some popcorn chicken, however, as we came out of the hostel it dawned on us that we had kind of forgot which road to go down, only that we had to walk for around half a mile in a certain direction. We chose to walk down Market Street, but after walking probably around a mile or so, we began to realise that we had probably gone the wrong way.
Not to be deterred, we caught the 'F' streetcar back down to where we started, and went back to the hostel to check on one of the computers in the lobby which road we needed to head down.
It turned out that we were pretty close, we had sort of gone in the right direction but we needed the road just before Market Street, which kind of runs parallel to it! We set off once again on our KFC mission, this time down the right road: Eddy Street! On our way, Craig noticed a man in a tan jacket smashing in the back window of a car then walking off calmly down the road. A few other people also noticed and a small discussion occurred which resulted in one of the guys calling the police, whilst trying to follow the guy in the tan jacket, who then somehow disappeared! We decided to leave them to it as we were getting hungry and we did want to get to the museum with plenty of time to spare before it closed!
We finally reached KFC at around 12:30 and Craig ordered a popcorn chicken combo, whilst Emma had a chicken
flatbread sandwich from the Taco Bell next door (for 99c - absolute steal!). We sat down to eat, and took a picture of one of Craig's "popcorn chicken" - I'm not sure what Americans class as popcorn size but the popcorn in the UK is certainly not that big! Once we were finished, we had a check on our map and saw that we could walk two blocks south to catch the number 5 bus, which would drop us by the museum.
We walked down to the stop and only had to wait about a minute until the bus pulled up. We got on, checked with the driver which stop we needed to get off at, then rode the bus to Golden Gate Park, where the museum is located. We got off and took the short walk through the park towards the building that we could see in the distance. On the way, we noticed music coming from near the museum, and as we got closer, we could see that there was some sort of meeting of people that were dancing around to the music, which sounded like old-school 50's swing music. We decided to not join in and
carried on towards the Academy of Sciences.
We reached the entrance and gave our CityPass to the woman at the doors, who tore out our tickets, gave our passes back to us and took a picture of us, giving us a little slip of paper so that we could look at/buy the photo once inside (this seems to literally happen everywhere over here!). We went into the main entrance area and took some photos of the full sized cast of the skeleton from a Tyrannosaurus Rex that stood in the centre of the room.
I won't go into great detail about everything in the museum as firstly, it will probably bore you to death, and secondly, the pictures kind of speak for themselves. Most of the museum consisted of a large aquarium downstairs, which you could also view from above; and a large dome in which a four storey tropical rainforest had been simulated (it was very warm in there!), complete with free flying birds and butterflies. We spent a few hours walking around each area of the museum, the main theme being that of evolution, and how the planet and the creatures on it came to be
the way they are now. There were quite a lot of taxidermy exhibits of various animals from all over the world, propped up and pinned down in what was supposed to be their natural positions and habitats, which weirded us out a little, however there were also a few other living animals such as penguins, alligators, tortoises, turtles, frogs, toads, snakes, spiders, etc situated in various locations throughout the museum.
There was also a large planetarium (unfortunately, we weren't allowed to take pictures inside), in which we sat in a small theatre with huuuuge screens all around and above us, whilst watching a projected show produced by the Academy that delved into the creation and evolution of stars, planets and life (and the possiblity of undiscovered life) within the universe. As we are both little science geeks, we quite enjoyed this, and the big screens really allowed you to lie back and 'fly' through the solar system and the life forms within it.
We spent around around four hours at the museum in total, and left at around 4:30pm. We walked back through the park and took some photos of our surroundings. We reached the road and got
on the number 5 bus which took us back to the area near our hostel. We came back up to the room for a little while and had a look through the pictures that we had taken today. Craig was getting a little hungry, so we walked across the road so that he could pick up a steak and cheese footlong from Subway. For some reason, there was nowhere to actually sit and eat in there (there were tables, just no chairs!), so we walked back over to the hostel and went into the lounge area so that he could eat it. He soon realised that he shouldn't have ordered the footlong, as almost three quarters of the way through, he admitted defeat and decided that he couldn't actually finish it (there was a LOT Of steak on it). Rather than having to go and buy something else, Emma finished off what was left for her tea.
It was starting to get dark by that point, so, knowing that there are quite a lot of strange people that seem to come out at night in San Francisco, we decided to stay in the hostel rather than go anywhere else.
We played a couple of games of pool in the recreation room, then came back up to the room. Emma played on the netbook for a while whilst Craig listened to some music on his MP3 player through his new 'Skull Candy' earphones that he purchased last night (forgot to mention that in yesterday's blog).
We ended up going to bed fairly late at around 12:30am, as we spent a while waiting for the netbook to upload the pictures from today onto here!
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