Hi all!

We are writing to you now on the morning of our third day in San Francisco, and we have so so much to tell! Even though we've only spent two full days exploring this great city, we've done so much and walked so many blocks it's all starting to feel very familiar already. I guess before we give you the lowdown on our adventures so far in SF, we'll start right from the beginning with a few details on our epic plane flight.

After saying our goodbyes at Melbourne Airport, we began our first small flight to ease us into things with Melbourne to Sydney. It was all fairly non-eventful despite the fact the I (Ryan) have never actually been to an airport before, let alone taken a flight! It didn't take long to acclimatise however, and we had arrived at Sydney before we knew it (man, that was easy!). We then spent a few hours killing time in Sydney Airport, which largely included acquiring supplies for the next leg of our trip, getting snacks, changing currency etc., and queuing behind Catriona Rowntree at the check in for our flight. From this, we assumed that China Airlines must have been the most reputable airline to fly directly to Taipei, which gave us a newfound confidence in our choice of budget airfare - however, we did begin to wonder if this was the only airline that offered such a service!

Upon boarding the plane we were pleasantly surprised by what awaited us - friendly and accomodating staff, reasonably comfortable seats and personal television screens in the back of each headset, which included video on demand, music, games, TV shows et al. After adjusting to the melange of Mandarin/English announcements, we settled in for our 9 hour leg to Taipei! It was long, but we managed to distract ourselves from the monotony of the journey with the entertainment available - we both watched a couple of movies (including Oliver Stone's latest biopic W.) and I spent some some time numbing my mind with games like Luxor. The food was airplane food, but quite reasonable and finaly after a relatively uneventful flight, we landed in Taipei around 8pm. The airport itself was pretty crazy. It was all very quiet, bright and extremely clean. It was however, mostly just waiting around for our next flight to San Francisco! Upon boarding this flight, we made a tragic discovery - there were only communal television screens! This flight was loooong, but we did manage to get some sleep, largely becasue there were no distractions of the personal screens from the first flight. About 20 minutes before we landed, we took great relief in seeing the lights of San Francisco slowly appear as we descended, and had touched down and moved through customers and immigration before we knew it.

Waiting for us outside the airport was our first host for our stay in San Fran, Jessica. During our stay in the States, we will mostly be staying with people we have hooked up with through an organisation called Couchsurfing, which those of you who don't know about can find more info here: www.couchsurfing.com. Jessica has set the bar extremely high as far as our first couchsurfing experience. First of all, she picked us up from the airport, which was completely wonderful and made things so much easier for us. She drove us back to her apartment which is located in an area known as the Richmond District, in the north-west corner of the city and quite close to the Golden Gate bridge and extremely close to Golden Gate Park. From the moment we set foot through her door, Jessica has made every effort to make us feel welcome and at home. She let us get all set up and before we collapsed on her futon, she introduced us both to sake for the first time. Yum!

Our first day in San Francisco was, well , amazing! We started by catching a bus into the middle of San Francisco, and after getting our bearings in Union Square, began to wander through the city's hilly streets. We made our way up towards Nob Hill and Grace Cathedral. The building is quite an imposing figure, and it was great to get the opportuniy to go inside and see the murals while hearing the cathedrals organ being played, as well as viewing an interesting exhibition on survivors of gun violence in America. After Grace Cathedral, we made our way towards Chinatown, purportedly the best in the world. Let me tell you, Melbourne's Chinatown ain't got nothing on SF! Chinatown here is huge, spanning many blocks. We spent most of our time here just looking around, marvelling at the area's diversity. After Chinatown, we needed to find a payphone to call Jessica who was going to meet up with us and show us around. We started to make our way through Little Italy, and there were no phones in sight. We move down o the Financial District near the TransAmerica Pyramid and finally found a phone! But it was broken. We moved along to almost as far as the Embarcadero (the eastern most side of downtown SF) - still no phones. We began to pull out our map to plan our attack on what seemed to be a major flaw in the city's infrastructure, and set off a flashing tourist beacon above our heads. A passerby very kindly stopped to ask if we needed help finding anything. When we replied, "Yeah, a payphone", he respone with you're kidding right, everyone has cells now! We did however, finally make it to a (working!) payphone, and now happen upon them just about everywhere we go! Anywho, we finally got in contact with Jessica, and arranged to meet at Washington Square.

When Jessica arrived, we were all feeling a bit peckish, so we stopped in to get a bite to eat at Mama's on the corner of Union and Stockton which was delicious and had an all day breakfast menu. Afterwards, Jessica took us into Chinatown to visit her friend John, a purveyour of fine Chinese teas. I will start with a disclaimer, in that no words can do justice to the character that is John. He is a Philippino (derogatorily self-described as a 'Flip') in his late 30's. His personality is so big, it literally spills out onto the streets as he engages in banter which some may find offensive with passersby. According to John, he goes out drinking every night until 2-3 in the morning, drinks and smokes, and hasn't been sick in three years all thanks to the regenerative properties of his teas. And man were they good. We got a free tasting of about a dozen of John's teas, which included black lychee tea, red tea, vintage tea, white jasmine tea, and a whole buch of others. Along with the free tasting, we received a brief education on the history and properties of the teas we were sampling, interspersed with his incredibly entertaining and unique humour. If you are ever in San Francisco, you MUST visit John at Vital Tealeaf - he's at 1044 Grant Ave.

After the tea tasting, we grabbed a Chinese doughnut (delicious!) and made our way towards City Lights bookstore, famous for its connections to beat literature ala Jack Kerouac and Allan Ginsberg. This was an amazing experience, I'm a big fan of Kerouac's On the Road, and the store itself you could spend hours exploring. We then made our way to Cafe Trieste, where Jessica wanted to prove to us that it was possible to get a good cup of coffee in SF - and it was good! Before heading home to cook a dinner of Canelloni for our wonderful host, we stopped in at a restaurant supply store which had an incredible range of kitchenwares/homewares. It's essentially where a lot of restaurants in the area by there supplies from, so it's much cheaper than your normal homewares store.

That pretty much wrapped up our first day in SF which involved a lot of walking around, and also gave us a great opportunity to see the city through the eyes of a local!

Ryan

ps: we'll write about more when we ge the chance, we want to get a balance between bloggin stuff and actually getting out there and doing it!