I went to San Francisco last week for about 24 hours. I flew in on Thursday afternoon, did a night tour of the city, had 2 meetings on Friday morning and then flew home on Friday afternoon. Which of course put me home at 1am Saturday. Lots of travel for 2 meetings. But here's what I did while I was in San Francisco.

I got on the Greyline Sightseeing Tour bus aroudn 5pm. We made our way around the city. Above is a picture of the crazy hilly streets. You can see the trolly tracks on the street too. I learned that back in the day, this guy saw how horses were struggling and even being killed due to the strenuous work of pulling carts of stuff up the hills for construction purposes. So this guy (cant remember his name) said they needed to create a system that was like putting an elevator on its side to "pull" it up the hills. And that's where the trolly system came from.

Take a look at this action shot I took. "Rice-A-Roni, a San Francisco treat"

The main part of the tour was focused on Chinatown. The above picture is a building in the heart of Chinatown. See how the edges of the red parts flow upward...well, it seems that bad spirits tend to fly in a straight line. The Chinese felt that if a bad spirit flew into their home, it would get all caught up in the curly cues and land somewhere else.

Above is a lamp post in Chinatown. There are several of these on the corners of this part of town. They were a gift from the Chinese government. Notice the curly cue things again - they sure dont like those bad spirits.

The above picture is the first Baptist church in Chinatown. But that's not the only interesting part of this building. If you look closely, you'll notice some of the bricks are jutting out from the building. In 1906, this church was destroyed by the big earthquake. They decided to rebuild the church using the original bricks...but they didnt all fit back together as seamless as before. They used this feature as a reminder of the past.

Again, those gosh-darn bad spirits are lurking everywhere. Take a close look at the windows in this picture. Do you see the circular mirror looking things? Well, those are there because the bad spirits, flying in a straight line remember....will reflect off the little mirrors and not make it into the house.

At dinner time, our tour stopped at Cathay Chinese Restaurant for a lovely meal. Here are my new friends! To my left are three people from Georgia - they had driven all the way from Atlanta in their RV. And the people to my right are from Sydney...they had taken a 23 day cruise to San Francisco! Wow, I'd only flown 6 hours. They all took home their chopsticks as souvenirs.

The picture above is an alley in Chinatown. Looks kinda scary at night, but it wasnt. A lot of movies and TV shows are shot here. They also have a fantastic fortune cookie factory hidden way in the back. The fortune I received read as follows: Next to a beautiful girl, sleep is the most wonderful thing in the world.

And finally, here's the view of the sunset as I flew cross-country back to NYC. It was a lot more colorful than it came across on this photo.

My next trip - Austin, TX for my high school reunion. There are sure to be some good photos from that trip!!