We hit town again, this time going from the Farmer's Market at the Ferry Building down by the Embarcadero to Pier 33, where the Alcatraz tours depart. Stepping into the Ferry Building felt like stepping into the Annual Food Show at the Caketin - specialty food stores offering some free samples and bustling with people. It was great, but not really for me - it's not like I'm actually cooking while I'm over here!

The Alcatraz tours had sold out for today so we bought tickets for tomorrow and continued our trek. We made our way further around, returning to Pier 39 where I bought $10 worth of taffy <3 and we got some better photos of the sea lions (since last time it was dusk). Further on, I got some seafood chowder in a bread bowl for lunch and we continued around to see these old ships that had been restored at Hyde Pier.

From the ships, we walked to the famous section of Lombard Street which has been named the crookedest street in the world. Then from there, we walked all the way down to the Presidio area to see the Golden Gate Bridge. It was an amazing sight, though the tips of the supporting structures were shrouded in fog (or fawg, as the Americans say). We also visited the Palace of Fine Arts, which has an amazing building decorated with columns and a huge dome with statues of muses adorning the outer rim.

Tired from all the walking, we bussed back to Powell Street. We saw a whole bunch of yellow go-karts that you can hire for touring the city, but they had balloons attached to them and people in Mario-themed costumes driving them - it was Mario Kart IRL!

We took the BART to 16th Street Mission to meet Tobias at the Monk's Kettle - also a favourite of Mike's. It was great to catch up with him and hear how he's settled in to San Francisco and how his new job is going. We spent some time at Amnesia around the corner before he left - Jimmy and I stayed a while listening to the live bands playing there, drinking soju (HAHAHAHA) and beer before heading home.

New Year's was pretty blah, we went for a good dinner then relocated to my uncle's house for more food and drinking. They had some really good pandan tofu fah which was served cold - nice and refreshing to counter the Malaysian heat. Midnight flew by pretty quickly with some epic booms heard in the distance, but alas, not many of the pyrotechnics could be seen.

Meanwhile, my cousins (who are 10 years younger than me) and their friends had gathered around the Wii and were playing Wii Sports and Mario Kart all night, and with nothing to do, I sat in with them and played along.

Whee.

I should go and pack - we're leaving for China tomorrow and I won't have Internet access, so see you in a week ¯\(º_o)/¯

Welcome to 2010 by the way.

The period between Christmas and New Years always seems so blah. It's like something's meant to be happening, but nothing does. ¯\(º_o)/¯

Anyway, we had an awesome feed on Christmas day. We had cheese platters (with some pickled onions, yum!), chicken nibbles, roast pork, glazed ham, potato salad, hot salad, green salad...and then for dessert we had these custard things in pastry cup...things. That were really really nice, so it's all good. And we also had a 5-layer rainbow jelly that took 5 days to make.

Since Christmas, I've been trying to get my sleeping habits back to normal after waking up at 4am to go to the airport. I think I'm back on track... kinda. Oh, and Sam arrived safely, so that's good too. \o/

I've been playing a lot of DS. Namely Pokemon...I've been breeding Larvitar and I finally got a good one ¬.¬ Anyway, that's half of my team, I need to get an Abra, Machop and Staryu now. Sigh. I wish the game makers would stop being so freaking stupid over IV Breeding and just make it some kind of max(father, mother, random) function. I also played Mario Kart DS over Wifi with PT, and that was lame, because he got a Blue Shell at the last course and pipped me to win the race. But all in all, we tied because I won the first two and he won the last two, so I'm not too fussed, and I fail at MKDS anyway so it doesn't bother me.

Lastly, I have also been hacking Pokemon ROMs. Yes h4xx0r lolz. I've been looking at the trainers' Pokemon. So far I've figured out level, dex number, item held and moveset. There's another number that I'm not too sure about...Weng Hao hypothesised it to be some kind of AI difficulty, and it makes sense, but I don't know of any way to test it.