Home from the Bay Area

I think San Francisco is one of my new favorite cities to visit. It is in a beautiful and picturesque setting, and there is so much to see and do there and in the surrounding area!

Friday morning a couple of us walked over to the postcard row of Victorian homes called the "painted ladies" near Alamo Park. Then heard a couple of talks at the conference before having lunch at a Thai restaurant near the conference hotel. I then went back to the hostel to work on my talk, then headed to the conference and presented my talk at 2:00. After my session was over, I met up with another friend from UT and we rode the bus west out of downtown toward the Presidio. We must have exited quite far from where we were going though because we then walked and hiked for hours through beautiful residential areas and then through the entire Presido itself (part of Golden Gate National Recreation Area - http://www.nps.gov/goga/). This place is breathtaking! We found a trail that wound its way at first along a beach on the Pacific, and then up into the cliffs leading up to the Golden Gate Bridge. The trail also passed through some old World War II bunkers. All along the trail we were treated to various vantage points of the Golden Gate Bridge itself, which appears larger than life - it is huge! I'm excited to see it with my own eyes after having seen so many pictures of it and after hearing about all my life. Well, after gazing at the sight a while and at the surround bay area, we got on another bus back towards downtown San Francisco. We got off the bus near Chinatown and began exploring for a restaurant to eat supper. We found a place called the Oriental Pearl Restaurant and it was delicious. The meal began with green tea (which lasted throughout the meal) and some dim sum appetizers. Hot and sour soup was then brought out, followed by the main course of three entrees: almond chicken, sweet and sour pork, and fried rice. Dessert was of course a fortune cookie. It was a really nice and delicious place.

Saturday we didn't make it north across the Golden Gate to Muir Woods or Sausalito. Several of us did, however, ride the BART east across the bay to Berkeley and looked around the University of California campus (http://www.berkeley.edu/). Set on a gradual hillslope overlooking the bay and the Golden Gate in the distance, the campus is quite picturesque. We had a delicious lunch in Berkeley at an Indian buffet before heading back in to San Francisco. I then had to work the rest of the day at the conference. For dinner I met up with a couple of friends from UT and we walked down to the financial district to eat supper at a German restaurant. The waiter was a very large, jovial German of course! It was a fun meal!

Well, I finally got back to my apartment around midnight. The flight from San Francisco to Atlanta arrived in ATL almost 45 minutes early at around 6:00 pm (about a 4 hour flight), so I had an even longer layover in ATL, and didn't leave there until almost 11:00 pm. But the flight from ATL to BHM is only around 20 minutes. Everything went smoothly though.

Now I get to dive into the final couple of weeks of the end of the semester at UAB. Need to start and finish two large research papers by next week. Plus some other homework of course. Then, there is this performance at the BJCC that I'm playing in with my church orchestra. I think we have dress rehearsals there tomorrow evening, and Wednesday and Thursday evenings. I think the performances are 10:00 AM and 7:00 PM Friday and 2:00 PM Saturday.
Also, my parent's college friend from Israel, (Tamar), is arriving for a visit on Friday, and leaving to fly back to Israel on Saturday (she is in Atlanta this week for a meeting with her family business consulting group). Hopefully I'll get to visit as well in the midst of all this other stuff.