Meeting people

Hey there – I hope you had a great weekend. Mine was fantastic, even though it was a real busy one this time ;)
Friday night we went to a party in Davis. Regine, another German girl, had a “not-having-a-birthday-party” (because her birthday is the 29^th of February :)) I thought I would make it my “having-a-birthday”-party” as well.
Regine lives with my friend Sheila and since I hadn’t seen her in a while, because she’s soooo busy with school, I thought it would be nice to go. We asked Stoyan and Claudia if they wanted to come too.
The party was ok – not really exciting, but at least there were quite a few new people (not only Germans!) and I got to talk to Sheila, which was nice. And there was this cute Turkish girl, Elcin, who was smiling at everyone! It was a real open and genuine smile :-) and I liked it!

I think we left the party around 11 pm and before we left, I went upstairs with Sheila to say “hi” to Tehya, her cute little dog. She’s grown a lot since I last saw her in September, but she’s still so adorable!!

We took Stoyan and Claudia home and then spent a little more time at their place before we drove back to Sac at 1 am.

Saturday we slept in – of course. After a shower and some breakfast, I got to go shopping – my Birthday present!!! :) I left around 1:30 pm, went to Nordstrom’s Rack first (because I had a gift card from there) and then went on to the Arden Fair Mall. God, shopping on Saturdays is just insane! I wish I could have gone during the week, but I just have more time on Saturdays – just like everybody else!! The lines in front of the fitting rooms were long and you are only allowed to take a certain number of pieces in, which means you have to get in line over and over again. Especially if you want to try something in different sizes :( (and I do that all the time!)
After spending a few hours there, I wanted to take on last shot at TARGET (I just like that store!) and then I still needed to go grocery shopping and it was almost already 9 pm.
When I got home, I could at least say that I was a very successful shopper :) I got quite a few things – 5 tops, a skirt, some surf shorts, shoes -see some of them here it was fun :)

Sunday morning I got up at 8:30 am, because I was going to San Francisco to meet with my Online-friend Viviane. I drove to Oakland and took the BART from there into the City. Then I walked over to Hosteling International to pick her up.
We had a really great and fun day. First we went back to Market Street, since there was a “St. Patrick’s Parade” going on -smart decision NOT to take the car into the City, especially if there is a parade or something like that!!

We walked over to one of the Malls and went shopping for sunglasses and I finally found some. I really wanted some with bigger frames, but they just don’t fit me (I personally think I look like an idiot with glasses anyways, so YAY I don’t need glasses in real life ;-) ), so I ended up buying some dark-colored glasses which I could somewhat stand.

We decided to walk over to Union Square and catch a bus to the Golden Gate Bridge from there. It really was a beautiful, beautiful day and we took some really nice pictures.

First we got off at Ghiradelli Square and went down to the water – the view of the Golden Gate Bridge and of the Skyline was gorgeous.

When we took another bus down to the Marina District. The Marina District has beautiful, mostly three-floor-apartment buildings with huge windows and nice staircases. Unfortunately, the Marina is geologically speaking- the most dangerous place in all San Francisco. The houses are built on poorly consolidated and/or artificial land fill in this area and the ground is highly subject to liquefaction during earthquakes. What happens is that seismic shaking settles the saturated, loosely packed sand, reducing the pore space, increasing pore pressures, and reducing the effective stress. The ground deforms either moderately (cracking) or catastrophically (flow) before the sand regains stability. I’ve seen pictures of “sunken” houses where the second floor was down on ground level as a result of the Loma Prieta Earthquake (1989)*uargh* nothing I wanted to think about in detail while we were there ;)

We took some pictures of the Palace of Fine Arts Exploratorium (a beautiful huge building with stone pillars – looked somehow greek to me!). There also was a little pond right next to it and we saw some water turtles which seemed to live there.
Then we walked over to the beach (Crissy Field) from where we had a great (and closer) view on the Golden Gate Bridge and quite a few surfers.

On our way back we stopped at Washington Square which is in North Beach, the Italian Quarter of San Francisco. We hopped on another bus up on Telegraph Hill and the Coit Tower and had a great view over the whole city!!
It was starting to get dark and cold and Viviane was freezing and we both were sooo hungry, so we had dinner at a tiny Italian Restaurant called “pasta pomodoro”. It was a really good choice and the food was delicious and they had really reasonable prices!!Back at Market Street, there was an “Old Navy” right there- and Viviane had talked about that store all day (I believe 99% of her clothes are from Old Navy *lol* :-D) and it was like a running gag. Earlier that day, when it was really warm, I thought that I should have worn my Flip Flops, so Viviane said: We could get some Flip Flops for you at Old Navy. Later, when she started freezing, because she had forgotten to take a sweater, I was like “Hey, maybe we can get a sweater for you at Old Navy” and so on :) it was so funny! And guess what, we DID get a sweater for there and I bought some cute light-blue Flip Flops :)

At 8:30 pm we had to say “Good Bye” then and I took the BART back to Oakland. It was a fun day, I must say, and we had really hit it off – we laughed and joked and laughed pretty much the whole day :) Too bad she lives in Oklahoma and we can’t meet more often!