Wearing flowers in my hair

I finally have grabbed a few minutes on a computer at Margaret's office. I'm patiently waiting for her to finish up with her work before we go back to her place, so I thought "Hey, maybe I should blog."

My vacation phase 1: San Francisco, is so far a smashing success. It's averaging about 16 degrees celsius here and it's nice and SUNNY. My flight on Saturday was uneventful (I did get a cranky MEAN customs officer again) but it was a crazy long day. I woke up at 5am to catch my morning flight, and then I just stayed awake all day until midnight west coast time. I thought it would help me not be jet lagged and I was right. I didn't really have much time lag so it's been good. The sucky thing is that I've really wanted to sleep in and I've so far woken up at 8ish for the last two mornings.

The weekend was mostly shopping and walking around in some of the various cool shopping districts, hanging out with my sister in Berkeley and helping her come up with ideas for redesigning her one-bedroom apartment. Yesterday night things actually worked out with Ted and I got to meet up with him for a dinner & coffee so that was nice. Today my sister had to work so I spent the day solo - I subwayed into San Fran, walked around LOTS around Union Square and did some window shopping, took a cable car to Ghiradelli Square, hung out there for a while, walked to Fisherman's Wharf, hung out there for a while, took a ferry to Oakland, and now I'm here, waiting for Marg to be done so we can go out for dinner with our aunt and uncle.

My trip highlight reel thus far:

• the super tall guy that ruined my in-flight movie (and others I suspect) on the way here because he was sitting 3 rows in front of me and his head was directly blocking my line-of-sight with the viewing screen
• a 50ish year old woman on my flight who was wearing a leopard-print suit (that's right, pants AND jacket) and a fluorescent pink shirt
• a Tibetan man (I suspect he was stoned) asking me if I was Indian (do I LOOK Indian?!? my answer was "no")
• making friends with a homeless man while waiting for Ted to show up at our meeting place
• getting 2 catcalls from passing cars while waiting for Ted to show up at our meeting place (which I would like to point out was in the strip-club area)
• making friends with a homeless man on the subway today because I gave him some change
• seeing a bumper sticker (in Berkeley of course) that says "The Only Bush I Trust is My Own"
• seeing a man last night (it was already dark) in fatigues, standing at attention and yelling unintelligible things whilst standing in the middle of a BUSY intersection (my sister ended up slamming on breaks because we didn't see him until he was right beside us)
• a man asking me on the ferry if I wanted him to take a picture of me with my camera, me saying no, and then the man saying "oh I'm so relieved that you understand english!!!" (I really didn't know how to respond with that other than smiling)

Ok that's all for now. Tomorrow is supposed to be another glorious day, so I'm planning on doing some museum-ing and hopefully some sunning. I'm know Miami is going to be all about sun, so I'm not too worried about missing out over here. :)