Day Trip to the City

Tuesday, we celebrated Bernie's birthday a couple days early and went to San Francisco for the day.

We had the usual leisurely lunch at Sinbad's (the best calamari tempura we've ever tasted, of course), sipping wine, watching the bay and the bar patrons (men in expensive suits having liquid lunches) and drinking in the sweet air of the bay. (The restaurant keeps doors and windows open, flies and mosquitoes being too declassee for SF.)

From there, we hopped a streetcar and went to Pier 39 to see the flower arrangements. Bernie was taken with a barrel of clarkia, their white ruffles dominating the planting. I got a couple good macros of them, and a number of shots of other plants there, but you'll have to go to Flickr to see the rest.


Walking around on Pier 39, we saw a kid hanging over a railing on the upper storey, with a seagull on the little overhang below, screaming at him. The bird wasn't begging, though, the calls were angry and warning. Suddenly we saw why: babies!

I had never seen a baby seagull before and was stricken by how unbelievably CUTE they look. They're fuzzy, and spotted. How on earth do they grow up to be such unutterable raucous rude squawking crap machines?

















Finally, we went on to the Aquarium of the Bay, and spent a long time in the underwater aquarium tunnel, watching a horde of anchovies. If I was Bill Gates, I'd have an anchovy aquarium in some room, with a sitting room beneath it.