Day Three

Another slow start to the day, but who cares! It's the weekend and I'm in a totally different city having a nice holiday (for the time being, I'm really here for work. Really.) We made our way to Valencia Road where they have a pirate shop with all sorts of cool merchandise. I bought a t-shirt that says "Cannons don't kill people. Pirates with cannons kill people".

We headed in the direction of the Castro District after that, but on the way we found the Mission Dolores Park, where hundreds of people had gathered to enjoy a brilliantly sunny Sunday afternoon. Coincidentally, I also found Tobias wandering around there (Damn world, so small!) so we made plans to communicate further on MSN and meet up some time during the week. We continued our trek to the Castro, dodging dogs and dog poo along the way.

The Castro District was interesting and...quite intense. The place is decorated with rainbow flags and many of the shops have some awesome innuendo - the Sausage Factory restaurant, Moby Dick's bar, Hand Job massage and beauty therapy parlour, to name a few. Of course, there's plenty of gay men and lesbian women walking around as well, and we did see a guy strutting down the street in the nude too. Yeah...

From the Castro, we took the Muni Metro to Forest Hill and walked up to the summit of the Twin Peaks (we got a bit lost but that's okay, we made it in the end and it was totally worth it). The sights are amazing. Panoramic views of the whole city, from the Golden Gate Bridge in the north to the Bay Bridge out east, the Pacific Ocean in the west and Silicon Valley all the way out south. The weather was absolutely perfect for sightseeing and I'm glad we managed to see the city from this angle.

We returned to the Castro and then to the BART station to go back to the hotel where we had a quick meal and some drinks before crashing for the night. Afterall, it is a work night and we're heading to the office tomorrow, so we should look and act professionally!