Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas, everyone! Here are one or two photos we took yesterday:


Here are a few photos from today...

This morning I drew the short straw to get up at 6.45am and move the car out of the parking spot for street cleaning. Usually I just drive round the neighbourhood rather aimlessly fighting over car parking spaces, but this morning I decided to take the camera and take a few pictures instead of hang around 4 or 5 streets for half an hour or more waiting for the cleaner to pass.


This is the beach next to Fisherman's Wharf - so gorgeous early in the morning.



Lombard Street (aka SF's crookedest street) early in the morning... what you don't see in the photo is the busload of tourists....

I also attended the 4pm service at Grace based on the Kings College Cambridge 9 Lessons in Carols, and Brendan and I attended the Midnight Mass with a fully-packed church. It was absolutely amazing and I'm still buzzing a little bit! I've never seen the massive bronze doors open before...

More Christmas pictures

Gratuitous harbour photo down at AT&T (Baseball) Park, a block from work. I walk here at lunch sometimes.

On Saturday we drove down to San Jose and, amongst other things spent an hour sending our families Christmas presents. It is supposed to get there in 6-8 business days - given there are only 6 business days before Christmas, that is worrying! Apparently today is the busiest postage day of the year.

OK: Christmas decorations from photos I've taken recently - just because you all need to see just how cool it looks here. I love the photo of the Christmas ornament - the background is Union Square, and it's the huge tree in the middle. It's around 8.15 am in the morning last Friday, and the sun is just rising. Click on the photos to make them bigger.


Nob Hill Park and Grace Cathedral with Christmas lights:


Down at the Embarcadero Center (American sp!) somewhere....

Our first parking ticket...

Tonight when we got home from the gym we met a very distraught neighbour, the one who lives underneath us. She was carrying a box to jump-start her car, which was parked on the top of the street and had a dead battery, and the jump-start portable battery wouldn't work. We tried to charge it using our car, but it really didn't want to work. So in the end she called her ex-boyfriend, whose car it was. I can hear her yelling at him right now. (She is very distraught, poor thing.)

The other day I came home and saw a police car parked outside our house. I was a bit concerned for a moment but went inside and everything was fine. No police at the house of the crazy lady next door, etc etc. Turns out that just before I came home there were 6 police cars outside our apartment, with police crouching outside the door of the neighbour downstairs, guns at the ready! They somehow thought she was involved in human trafficking of underage Asian sex workers! Seriously! Apparently it's a huge issue in California right now, which is horrible - people come in on boats, she told us, and are smuggled through the country.

Tonight we also discovered our very first parking ticket from here! It was $40, for not moving on Monday when the street cleaning truck came by. For a long time, the sign which told you when you had to move had been vandalised, but I noticed last week that it was back up. Guess that should have been our cue.... remember to move it every Monday before 7 am!

But, we're really not too concerned. After all, it would cost us $35 a night to park in the parking buildings around here!

Top 8 Awesome Things I've Found in San Francisco

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Abercrombie and Fitch fun

Abercrombie and Fitch is an American (mostly men's) store which is known for its expensive clothing, attractive and snooty salespeople, and promotion of a certain "affluent sportsman"/ "preppy" lifestyle. The tagline for their website says "The highest quality, casual, All-American lifestyle clothing for aspirational men and women", and they only use actual employees as their models for their ads. Anyway. I could spend a long time deconstructing their messages... but you're all not media students, so I won't.

Here is a link to a series of video skits which mock the brand...

And here is a picture of me with one of the models who stood at the front of the store and posed. Seriously. That's all they did. Look left, look right, pose. Look left, look right, and... pose. There were two guys dressed in identical red jackets, jeans and sandals, both just as "ripped". They didn't seem to mind me asking one of the salesgirls to take a photo. I got the impression they had that all the time. (Look at the photo behind us, as well...)

The skits aren't actually far off!!

Christmas in San Francisco

While we're not in the midst of suburbia, where I'm told the residents really go nuts with Christmas decorating, San Francisco is still quite cool during Christmas. Here is a small glimpse from photos today... (finally done the Christmas shopping for family - many shops were perused for their respective benefits. We hope they like.)

Inside the mall on Market and 5th Streets:

Street view including the Apple store looking along Stockton and Market: (not strictly Christmas but still interesting - and yes that is steam coming from a manhole in the road - it always happens - and if you look in the background, there are lights from the outside of Macy's.):

Macy's shops around the outside of Union Square:

They also put up the Christmas tree in Union Square every year: (sorry if it's blurry)


On the left of the Macy's store, a large tree has been put up in the Neiman Marcus store - this one and Macy's are kinda like Kirks department store in Wellington:


Anyway, that's enough photos for now - I didn't take that many today. I just have one more, but that has its own post!

MUNI Rant

This morning, on the bus, an old man asked me if his breath smelt like garlic, and breathed on me. I replied, "I don't know!" Seriously! How disgusting is that? Who asks a perfect stranger if their breath smells like garlic? I really don't want to know.

Maybe I should dye my hair brown.