Thursday on Clement Street with Susan & Rich

Penny skipped one of our days in San Francisco.  The weather here in Pittsburgh is a balmy 49 degrees so it warmed me up enough that I could look back on our trip without weeping over our current temperatures.

Susan and Rich drove in from St. Helena, over the Golden Gate Bridge, and she has a wonderful photo to prove it.  It's different from our photos because she was able to take a shot from the middle of the bridge.  I thought about that when we were crossing the bridge but I wasn't sure that Penny and Fernando would want to stop the traffic for me...

Since they drove in with their Honda CRV and parking is tight on Russian Hill, we decided to drive out to the Richmond District, to Clement Street, which is supposed to be the new Chinatown.  I remember going there in the early 1990s with Mother and Daddy and finding fresh soy milk.  And I remember the Asian supermarkets as being new and clean but 20 years have certainly taken their toll.  Give me the Wheaton H-Mart any day -- although in 20 years it might not look so inviting either.

Our first stop was B-Star, the sister of the popular Burma Superstar restaurant.  Susan and Rich were already familiar with the one in Oakland so we looked to them for guidance on what to eat.   We ordered 3 salads and two hot dishes but the salads were the most popular, maybe because it was lunch and salads are always more refreshing.

Then we wandered the neighborhood, picking up some new books at a used book store (how weird is that...) and ending up at Kamei Restaurant Supply which had all sorts of Japanese bowls and clay pots and stone bowls.  If only we had been driving back to Pittsburgh...  Susan was quite taken with it all and does she know that the Japanese don't use settings for 10 but instead have a different design for each dish?  Unfortunately I only trust plastic in my carryon and so only picked up a set of chopsticks and a small white plastic condiment dish for the black ink in my oriental painting course (how boring is that?).  Below you can see a photo of Susan's new acquisition that she posted on Facebook (I left my camera in the apartment on this trip).

View of Mt. Sutro

UCSF Medical Campus

University of San Francisco

Then Susan and Rich took us to the de Young Museum tower which is 9 stories tall and offers wonderful views of the city, including Moffitt Hospital at UCSF on Mount Sutro where Will and Camila were born (and where I had a lot of dental work done...).  Towards the downtown area you can also see the University of San Francisco and its Lone Mountain campus along with St. Ignatius cathedral (or is it a church??).

Eventually we made it back to our apartment and found a place for Rich to park nearby for a couple of hours.  We had to take them up the Green Street Steps and along Macondray Lane before they went home.  I had had visions of doing a lot of stairway walks while we were in San Francisco but my knees haven't been cooperating.  I'll have to save the walks for the next visit (I have the book in my Kindle account) and hopefully the knees and legs will have recovered (cross your fingers) and not deteriorated further!  Although I'm sure that some other part of my body will be moaning and groaning by then...