San Francisco’s calling us

I still have a boatload of Amsterdam photos to post, but I thought I’d take a little detour and instead introduce you guys to my (new-ish) residence, San Francisco. I’ve lived here for 9 months now, which is scary crazy, especially when I realize that I haven’t been back to New York in nearly a year, a fact that freaks me out to the point where I feel compelled to go back in May, because dear lord, have I missed that city something fierce.

Anyway, this past month has been super in that I’ve had quite a few college friends visit me, which means I get to play Tour Guide and shamelessly do touristy things in a very non-ironic fashion. And as much as I do love jetting off to new locales, it’s nice to have a good staycation every now and then! This particular one happened about three weeks ago in early April (see, I’m getting better at this posting-things-on-time business!):

George and I woke up bright and early to brave the hour-long line outside of Mama’s on Washington Square, a cute little brunch place that gets as much notoriety for the long line as it does for the amazing food. We got there around 9am on a Saturday (an extraordinary feat, if you think about it), and we still had to stand outside for a good hour before we were seated.

Spoiler alert: the food is actually REALLY, REALLY GOOD. And yes, worth the wait.

I had the Dungeness Crab Benedict, which is — you guessed it — eggs benedict with dungeness crab. And spinach too! And HOLY SHIT is it good in that mouth-watering, brb-I-can-go-die-happy-now calibre of good. I’m usually not a brunch person (the thought of me waking up early enough to eat brunch is a completely laughable concept), but this? This is downright porn for the taste buds.

George got the breakfast sandwich, and I might have been tempted to steal a bite off his plate if it weren’t for the fact that I have an extremely irrational dislike of tomatoes.

The weather was so nice that day that it was practically begging us to take advantage (hurr hurr) and do something that didn’t involve being a hermit and staying indoors. Not too hard of a challenge, right? Anyway, we decided to bike across this random bridge to Sausalito and Tiburon. Apparently, this bridge is really famous and tourists dig this shit:

Once we biked downhill to Sausalito, we treated ourselves to ice cream at Lappert’s, where I got a pistachio cone.

Biking to Tiburon was a relatively easy ride, though we were tempted once again by the allure of ice cream (what! It was a nice day!), this time at The Grass Shack Organic Ice Cream, where I got a honey lavender scoop. By the time we caught the ferry back to SF, our energy levels were basically feeding off of two ice cream cones. No lunch — just ice cream and breakfast that we had gotten hours ago. Yep — talk about a balanced diet.

Once we were back in SF, we went to Gigi’s Sotto Mare, mostly because George wanted to try the cioppino, which is rumoured to be the best in the city. He seemed to agree:

Unsurprisingly, we passed out before 11pm that day. Now keep the old geezer jokes to yourself. 😛

The next day was relatively low-key, as our asses hurt from all the biking. Since I live relatively close to Japantown, we walked over to the Japantown Center and grabbed lunch at Maki:

We then took a bus to Chinatown, where we checked out a bunch of the shops and bought some egg tarts, before I went to arguably the best concert of my life: Jeff Mangum of Neutral Milk Hotel fame. Let’s just say that every single expectation I had was completely blown out of the water and I have been forever ruined into thinking other concerts will be just as great as this one. Hearing your absolute favorite song of all-time (and your absolute favorite album of all-time) live? That’s mind-blowing in and of itself. Also, the fact that he performed April 8th on April 8th? Priceless.

So, yeah. The verdict stands: it was a good weekend.