china town, atmosphere, etc…..

Saturday:

saturday was the day of the chinese new years parade, so caryn and i kinda planned our day around that. i’ve only tried dim-sum twice, and she had never tried it so we decided to go to Chinatown and have at it. we went to this place called Yank Sing. it was kind of an upscale dimsum place, and everything we tried (except for peking duck, yuck!) was wayyy good! we definitely wanna have dimsum more often from now on…. but hopefully at cheaper dimsum places cause the meal at this one ended up being 80 bux!!

after lunch, we wandered around Chinatown for a bit. i’ve never really explored that area so it was interesting to check it out. there were tons of decorated balconies, interesting store fronts, and other neat stuff to check out. we go to see how fortune cookies are made. there’s an assembly line that brings out all these flat cooked dough discs, and a lady grabs them one at a time, puts a fortune on top, and then basically bends them in half on top of a stick to make the fortune cookie shape. weird eh? after wandering around some more, we still had time to kill so we wandered over to the ocean and chilled on one of the piers.

eventually it was time for the parade to start. the chinese new years parade in sf is the biggest one outside of asia and is considered one of the top 10 parades in the world. walking around near the parade route, we could feel the excitement building. people in costumes were rushing around everywhere, people were yelling, firecrackers were being set off. we were able to find a place right at the beginning of the parade route… but that ended up being a bad thing, since most of the marching band groups just marched in the beginning and didn’t play till later on. in fact, the beginning of the route was pretty disorganized, and people kept starting and stopping etc as they got ready. all in all the parade was pretty cool. some neat floats, cool lion dancers and dragons, all sort of monkey costumes… but i think we both agreed that we probably should have only stayed for like 30 minutes instead of the full 2 hours!!

by the end of the parade, we were exhausted but we had tickets to go see Atmosphere that night. at first we weren’t very excited to go to the show, but in the end we had a really good time. atmosphere was really good and Eyedea, who opened for them, was really good as well. the show was dope, but after standing on our feet all day long, standing up for another several hours was so tiring! after the concert all we wanted to do was go to sleep, but we had promised tom that we would stop by his 30th bday. we cruised by, but only stayed for a tiny bit.

finally, after a long day, we went to bed at 2:30am…. or so we thought. at 3am erica, kevin, brandon, and others came home totally drunk and yelling and screaming. they all stumbled into the kitchen yelling bout wanting more alcohol and rummaging around. other than the fact that it was impossible to sleep at that point, i thought “oh shit!! the bottle of cachaca tom brought from brazil is in the kitchen… they’re totally gonna open it and drink it all”. so i had to get dressed and rescue my bottle. after that brandon started banging on our door for caryn to come out, so now we’re both groggy and chilling in the kitchen. we ended up taking shots w/ them, and then randomly these two girls who it turns out are our new neighbors, come over to hang out. it was pretty crazy. john kept telling people that he could do a headslide, and then to prove that he could really do it… he actually did a headslide across our kitchen floor. it was nuts!!! finally at 6am.. we were able to get some sleep…

here are 2 short videos of the headslides…

Click 1 and Click 2

-v