Chinatown

On my third day in San Francisco, I was on my own. Jenny and Mike were both working, so I decided to take a guided walking tour of Chinatown. I got to Portsmouth Square, where the group was to meet, and meandered about, looking for the gathering spot. The square is really rather ugly, hence the lack of pictures. It's a bit of a concrete jungle, and it is filled with Chinese gentlemen playing some sort of game - it didn't look like mahjong.
I spotted a girl walking around with the same map I had printed, so I approached her to ask if she was looking for the group. She was a lovely French girl, named Emilie. The two of us walked around looking for the rest of the group, and ended up spending the entire walk together. She hadn't really wanted to take part, but as she's writing a thesis about Chinese Americans, she thought it would be a good starting point for her research. It was a fortuitous meeting, as we ended up traipsing up and down the streets of San Francisco for the remainder of the week.

The tour wasn't bad, but it was far from amazing, content-wise, so Emilie and I ended up just trailing the group and occasionally paying attention to what the guide was saying. We spent our time mostly snapping away with our cameras.

The street lamps were quite pretty. We visited a fortune cookie factory, and shared a bag of cookies. The ladies that worked there didn't speak much more English than to say "wanna buy fortune cookie?". I'm sure that if they did, they'd be mortified by the fortunes, which were really quite obscene. There were interesting wares in the various shops: Other sundry photos: Posted by raptorgirl at June 14, 2004 01:24 PM