Have a Diva Day!

Where to begin? I have so many things to say about our trip, none of them being particularly important. I suppose I will just make a list of stories and observations.

• We stayed near Union Sq. which turned out to be very convenient. Our lodging was called Hotel Diva and is a holding of the Personality Hotels company. You get their schtick, I imagine. Anyway, when you request a wake-up call, because, say, you don't want to miss your flight in the morning, the recording tells you to "Have a diva day!" Otherwise, it was a nice place to stay.
  
• I've never been a huge fan of mooncakes, the traditional Chinese desert item (I think it's associated with good luck for the New Year), but I thought Evan should try one. Turns out I like them more than I rememberd, but those things are like real life lembas bread. You're full after one bite and a single tiny cake will last you a week.
  
• While El Farolito continues to be the absolute number one place to have your burrito rocked, I realized finally and without any doubt that it's the avocado salsa that makes its deliciousness unatainable by other purveyors of Mexican foods.
• Dim Sum is so fraking awesome. Evan now trusts everything I say about food.
  
• The bakery next to the Wok Shop on Grant still has the best baked pork buns of all time. It is also the cheapest place to eat that I've ever been.
• SF has been confirmed to be the absolute pinnacle of shoe-buying experiences. I think we came back with something like five pairs of shoes between us, some used, some new.
• On a similar note, I really love the style in San Francisco. It's so casually cool, really interesting, and doesn't seem to be trying so very very hard. Much better city for street fashion than New York.
• One day I was waiting in Union Sq. for Evan who was off somewhere eating breakfast. The cutest little kid, probably three years old, was there sporting short curly white-blond hair and wearing one-piece red long johns and tiny galoshes. He/she was calmly walking after some pigeons murmuring, "chickens. chickens."

I'll leave you with one final story. If you skip the whole bulleted list, at least read this, because it's one of the best SF stories I've ever been involved in.

Evan and I visited the Haight one day, went to thrift stores, checked out Amoeba Records, etc. Later, as we waited for the bus back to our hotel, an old hippie with a white beard and ponytail started talking to us about...about drugs. How he had been on hallucinagens for three days, or had paid off his friendly gambling debts with strips of LSD, or something. Somehow the conversation lead to him showing us a gruesome scar on his arm from "his first airplane accident." So I took the bait, and asked him if he'd been in more than one. As you might have guessed, he had. His plane went down in the jungles of 'Nam and he became a POW. He was stripped, hung upside down, and tortured. All the while he could hear a cat somewhere in the facility meowing and scratching at a door. At some point he was taken down and managed to get out of his shackels. He picked up one of the scapels lying there with the other tools of torture, got behind the door and started meowing and making noise in imitation of the cat. Eventually, the guard casually walked into the room looking for said feline. Our hero jumped out from behind the door and slit the guard's throat with the scalpel. Now armed with a gun, but still nude, he rescued the other POWs in the camp and they escaped to safety.

After he told us his story, the man on the bus politely gave Evan a pill full of mescaline, free of charge, and got off at his stop.