March 14, 2005

Day 5:

Today was our last full day in San Francisco and we had a great time (a reoccurring theme in this journal). As always, we grabbed some breakfast at Pergamino and at 10AM we rolled out to go see Union Square. This was a dangerous move by our coaches. Just the sight of a Nordstroms and Niketown made the girls go nuts! Like I said, it was dangerous especially with three hours on our hands to do whatever we pleased. Everyone, needless to say, had a great time and bought some pretty cool stuff from the area. It was a great location too, with the towering buildings and the open square with beautiful flowers. The buildings in Florida are nothing compared to San Francisco's, at least the ones I have seen. Everything is so close and so large that you feel so small and sometimes insignificant to the whole array of hustle and bustle the city gives off. It almost reminded me of New York City, or at least very similar to it.

Everyone finally met at the parking garage and we were off to Chinatown to grab something to eat. Although we didn't have time to stop and shop around a little, it was still fun to look around the city and see the cool little shops. They had all these cool dresses and shirts, names written in Chinese and little Buddha and dragon statues. We ate fairly late for lunch at this place called Brandi's, who apparently pride themselves on the fact that they use no MSG. They literally had signs outside the restaurant and a huge sign on the inside. My table ordered some pretty good stuff but I guess some of the other tables didn't have as much luck. The downfall to the place was that we didn't even get a fortune cookie! Who goes to Chinatown and doesn't get a fortune cookie, honestly! What a bummer dude.

After we left Chinatown we headed back to the hotel to drop off our stuff and changed into something a little warmer. We piled back into the cars about 10 minutes later and then headed to the Golden Gate Bridge, but when we got there the bridge was completely gone! San Francisco is known for it's fog and it certainly proved it today because the fog was so bad that the entire GGB was completely covered in fog, absolutely nothing could be seen, not even the top towers of the bridge. We were going to walk across it, but it probably wasn't the best of times to walk across so we then went to Haight Street.

This place was, essentially, where the 60's movement originated and it was certainly an interesting place to say the least. The shops were very crazy, similar to a Hot Topic or Spencer's store, maybe even to another level. We ate at Ben & Jerry's and then walked around the town for a while, not a good idea. The people in this area were kind of scary, at least very different than anything any of the other girls have seen. I've encountered some situations with people like this in downtown Seattle, but nothing was ever this bad. Apparently Brenda had a good time with some guy, she was walking past this discount store and some guy standing outside, with a very raspy voice said, "Don't forget your tazer..." I think that's about the time the girls broke out in a run to catch up with coach and the other girls. So we finally made it back to the vans after visiting a music store (Amoeba Music where everything is really cheap!) and headed back to the hotel.

Some of the girls went out to the t-shirt shop again to do last minute shopping and also went to Walgreens again for more souvenirs and food for tomorrow's flights. It was a really great trip and I think all the girls had an awesome time. We had our ups and downs, but that goes with life. It was definitely a memorable trip that I don't think I'll ever forget. We did a lot of things and became even closer to one another than before. Guess what we did next though? Yeah, we crashed again, after we packed of course.