We got up early to ensure we didn’t waste any of the day! We met our new room mates, they are from Australia..Brisbane!
We made our way towards the financial district to get a better view of the Transamerica pyramid, the tallest building in SF. It is a business building so you can’t go in but it was interesting to see, shame we couldn’t fit it all in a picture! From the pyramid we went down to the Embarcadero which is where many of the ports are. We visited the ferry building as we needed to book bus tickets and mooched about the area. It is a very pretty area and very clean. The street is lined with palm trees and had quite an exotic feel about it, especially with the heat! The embarcadero was below part of the bay bridge so we could see across the waters to treasure island which is between San Francisco and Emeryville and the bay bridge goes through it. We follow the street all the way down to the AT&T ball park where the San Francisco Giants play baseball. The ball parks are massive out here, and this one was no exception! They had a giant coke bottle and baseball glove outside too.
On our way back into town, we passed through more of China town which was very busy as it was lunchtime. They always have good deals on at lunch, but we passed on the idea as we have consumed a lot of Chinese food recently!! Further into town and we discovered that some of the streets had been closed and were being closely guarded by the police and fire. We soon noticed the bomb disposal van and realized that there was a bomb scare! We couldn’t see much going on and the police didn’t seem worried so we carried on. Soon the whole city seemed very noise and we could hear sirens everywhere and 3 helicopters had gathered in the sky and were hovering! We popped back to the hostel to change as it was so hot and check on the news on the internet and discovered that there had been 2 bomb scares in the city..hence all the noise and commotion! By the time we went back out again it had all calmed down. We later found out that an empty suitcase had been left in a building and someone had put a shopping bag in a newspaper box!
We went for a mooch about the shops, not to buy, but to look! First stop was Macy’s where they had a cheesecake factory and café on the top floor! They had lots of different flavours of cheesecake, all of which looked very yummy! On one floor that had a huge section dedicated to the ‘holiday season’ (Christmas) already! Was pretty amazing though, all the huge trees with lots of decorations, and all different colours and themes! I thought it was cool, Mark was less impressed! Next stop was Bloomingdales! I wanted to the see the ‘brown bags’ but had a nice surprise when I saw ‘pink ones’ too!! It has been put on my ‘maybe’ shopping list for when we get to New York! We continued to mooch around the rest of the shops and then sat in Union Square soaking up the sun and the city atmosphere!
We still needed to finalize a few bits for a trip to the national parks so we headed back to the hostel. We had dinner at a Mexican restaurant which was yum yummy yum yum!!! Had more of a chilled day today as it’s been quite hot. We both like San Francisco, more than Seattle!