Tourist in My Own Town -- Part III

-- Sunday morning and we are up and at 'em for dim sum! We arranged to meet Chris and Sharon at a place in Millbrae where none of us had been before. With a name like "The Kitchen", we were skeptical about the dim sum part. "Sounds like Denny's", I remarked to Chrissy, but we headed out anyway, excited to see Chris and Sharon (whom we had randomly tracked down in Sevilla, Spain a couple of years earlier and whom Chrissy hadn't seen since).

-- (As an aside, it cracks me up that two pairs of friends named Shari and Chrissy... and Sharon and Chris are hanging out together. Confusing much?)

-- As it turned out, we needn't have worried about whether The Kitchen served dim sum or not. We walked into a huge open restaurant with zillions of tables and every single one of those tables filled with laughing, eating, chatting groups of people.

-- I smiled at the hostess and before I could even open my mouth to say "Hi, we're meeting some friends here", she quickly jerked her head to the left and said "Over there. Around corner."

-- Sure enough, there's Sharon and Chris, tucked away at a small table for four, hidden behind a wall and jammed into a corner. We look around and see that we are literally the only table of non-Asian diners. We laugh as it becomes crystal clear how the hostess immediately knew which table we belonged to.

-- The food was excellent and we ate way too much... When the bill came, Chris picked it up and said, it's $45. I handed her three twenties and she looked at me and laughed, "No, $45 for ALL of us!" Sweet! Given how much we ate, I couldn't believe this, but I wasn't going to argue.

-- The girls gave us some suggestions of what to do in the city that afternoon, so we jumped back in the car after dim sum and headed back to SF. Parking at the Civic Center Garage, we wandered through Hayes Valley and enjoyed all the small shops and the fun architecture.

-- We stopped at Blue Bottle Coffee since it had been highly recommended by our brunch mates and I had a hot cocoa while Chrissy had the real deal. Both were delicious. On to Miette (gorgeous sweets shop) where we were good and just window-shopped... no purchases!

-- Outside one store, we stopped to talk to a guy who was pulling a wagon with two Daschunds. As Chrissy photographed the two docile subjects, our buddy told us the story of how he rescued Vinnie and Guido (no joke) and explained how they get a sponge bath every morning and they either ride in the wagon, in the basket on his bicycle or in his old school Cadillac. Vinnie, Guido and their Dad were all execptionally sweet.

-- We then walked down to the Haight where I wanted to stop in at the cafe "Love 'n Haight", but I honestly couldn't come up with another excuse to eat yet again.

-- We headed home around 6:00, made pasta for dinner and then .... yep, you guessed it, went out for ice cream! (You thought we'd broken the Golden Rule, didn't ya?)

The next morning, I dropped Chrissy at the airport and we agreed to do another girls' weekend before too long... I wonder where our next destination will be....