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Published: December 15th 2009
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Our morning started out early, with hopes of going through Golden Gate Park and marching far north to go over the bridge. I had seen pictures of the Palace of fine Arts in travel books, so we hoped to see that as well once we were in the Persisdo area.
While we had been walking through the Japan Center Mall, we saw a few pastry/bread stores that was decided to visit for breakfast. Our hotel, as awesome as it is, has a horrible deal for breakfast. For $14/person you can get the breakfast bar but you get little more then yogurt and cereal, for an extra $4/person you may add scrambled eggs and chicken apple sausage.
After we sat down to eat our breakfast and get a good idea of which direction to head to, we thought it best to walk through the city and skip taking a bus to the GG park. A thought I think I ended up regretting towards the end of our day. The city was awesome to be honest. It was incredible to see the huge rolling hills and how all the houses planted on them and cars driving through them had adjusted.
There was also a resting fog sitting over some of the larger hills, which was just amazing to look at. Reminded me of some paintings or pictures you would see of the fog in Japan.
Before making it to the park we stopped at a grocery store to pick up a few snacks and drinks and a much needed toothbrush for myself. The weather was in our favor for the most part, we'd been seeing lots of forecast predict rain through out the day, we got by with nothing more then a hard sprinkle at times, and good layer of mist. Once we did make it to the park, we could do nothing but compare it to Central Park in NY. It was incredibly different. The Golden Gate park was more like walking through a forest. The trees were larger then any tree I've ever seen before, with trunks so wide I promise a bus could drive through it. There were many different areas within the park and including two museums. We stopped at the history museum hoping that the tickets to get into the King Tut (forgive me for not remembering all the other syllables involved) exhibit weren't
$28/person as we had seen in a flyer before. Yay, we were wrong. They were $33/person because we came by on a Sunday, it was $5 cheaper during the week. Deciding that that was just ridiculous to pay that much for a 30+year old exhibit, we instead walked through the gift shop stopping to buy Jeff a shirt that will last longer then a few hour tour through the museum.
After we left the museum, we make our way towards the Japanese Garden. Jeff had mentioned that they have tea there and thought it might be a nice place to stop off. Again, our reading materials had mislead us as we thought it was a free tour through the garden, but instead it cost $7/person, while in comparison to the exhibit mentioned above, we both realized we've been to Japan and have seen the real gardens there, not needing to spend the extra money to see then in San Francisco. After walking around the Park some more, we made our way to the Shakespeare garden, which was beautiful, small, and free.
We must have spent hours walking around the park, and by now we realized we should leave
to find lunch and head far north to make it to the bridge. Once we finally make it out of the park, we realized we went too far south. We follow the main road back towards to buildings and houses and out of the park in hopes of finding lunch. It must have taken at least half hour before coming to a place where we could consider having lunch. Our choices were between Chinese and a NY Deli. We went to the Deli and took a much needed rest before finishing the journey towards the Bridge. As we kept walking, feet tired, both of us tired, we realized that the map we had took us towards the highway that drove up the bridge. There were no sidewalks on either side, and no way we could follow that road up. Jeff suggested that we take a path that MIGHT take us towards the bridge, but mentally I couldn't imagine doing all the extra walking for no promise of making it a successful hike. The path we took, took us down south through to a neighborhood in which we realized it might be better to make our way back to the hotel
rest and visit a few other places in Japan town that we didn't get to see the day before. We took no bus the whole day, and feet wanted to fall off, but we made it.
Back at the hotel, I took a quick nap before we summoned all the courage to walk again. But it was worth it, Jeff had promised to take me to conveyor belt sushi, a little restaurant we found inside the mall only to find out that there was no conveyor belt, but instead a mot between the sushi chefs and the guests in which boats circled in carrying plates of varying pieces of sushi. The plates were color coated and the color equaled the price. Half way through our meal a gold plate circled towards my way which had the beloved Toro, or fatty tuna. Very rare, very tasty sushi.
After finishing our dinner we retired early to the hotel to soak in the hot water of the bathtub, a much needed treatment for our achy muscles.
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