Brian Kirsten

Honeymoon Day 6-10: San Francisco

May 11, 2004
Well, to finish off our trip we headed back into San Francisco (where we originally flew into), and checked into the Westin St Francis. The hotel is smack dab in the middle of Union Square, in downtown San Fran. Walking distance from shopping, museums and a whole lot of restaurants the hotel is near most of the action. Christine was a little creeped out by the hotel, it was built in 1927, so architecturally it's old, the place has been obviously upgraded to Westin standards, but just the smell and "feeling" of the place was "old". Also there was a chandelier in the room, and that was just kind of odd. The additional cool thing was the bellman asked why we were there and we mentioned that we were on our honeymoon, so 15 minutes later a bottle of wine was delivered to our room. Free booze is always good. We ended up making a dinner reservation at a place in the Italian district, "The Stinking Rose". What's this place's specialty you ask? Garlic, garlic on everything, so much garlic we had horrible garlic breath for hours (we got up several times during the night to brush our teeth it was so bad). But what a great resturant, well worth it. I had a prime rib there that was better than the prime rib I had eaten at The Ahwahnee Dining Room, we didn't try the garlic ice cream but all-in-all some great eats. The next day we headed over to the SF Museum of Modern Art, which was well worth the visit. The museum is very open and bright, I don't remember the last time I was in a museum of modern art, but this was certainly different than most of the bit more "stuffy" fine art museum's I had been to. The first floor was a mix of early 20th century modern art (Picasso, Dali, etc) and more recent artists. The second floor was our favorite, dedicated to Architecture and Design. We could have spent hours on that floor, it was one of my first complaints about the whole thing, was that this floor wasn't nearly big enough. The next floor was modern photography (which Christine enjoyed) and the fourth was dedicated to the "Pop" art exhibit which I loved but Christine didn't like all that much. The fifth floor was an personal collection that was some wild stuff, you have to see to understand. My only other complaints was the museum was a bit antiseptic feeling, but I guess that's modernity rearing it's head. One exhibit we didn't enjoy that much was The Art of Romare Bearden, it just didn't do all that much for us, pretty boring. The rest of that day was filled with POWER SHOPPING!!! Which is almost as good as free booze. That night we dressed up all proper and headed over to Farallon, a restaurant that we had booked a month before. That was an amazing meal, I love a restaurant that out of the blue brings out food you didn't order and goes "The chef would like you to try some of this", the extra food they brought out was a lobster bisque..AMAZING STUFF!! The last day of our trip we headed over to the coast, walked on the Golden Gate Bridge (scary!), drank some great beer over at the Beach Chalet Brewery & Restaurant (brewery first! then restaurant!), then finished the day by walking around the Golden Gate Park and visiting the Isotope, an unbelievably great comic book shop in SF. Ryan Yount was working that day and he signed copies of his hilarious comic Scurvy Dogs for me. Very Cool End to a great trip. Honeymoon: Complete

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