Day #3 in California

November 15, 2013 – Friday

On Friday morning, Sara went to her morning class while Laura and I slept it. When I woke up, I went outside to sit on Sara’s front porch to watch the sun come up over the ocean. Like… WHAT?! I mean it was hard to see parts of the ocean because there were so many tall palm trees (again… WHAT!) but I guess it was pretty beautiful. So I sat out there for a while and then made pancakes with Laura. I already made pancakes with Sara before she went to her class but since Laura still needed breakfast, I just had to make another batch of blueberry pancakes and eat them with her, too. When Sara got back from class, we packed up her car and started our road trip to San Francisco! The drive to San Francisco was so beautiful – throughout most of the drive, we had the ocean on our left and then the golden hills on our right. Sara had a lot of road trip CD’s, most of them from high school so we spent the 5+ hour drive singing and catching up on everything from when we left each other in Orvieto on June 15th. I thought the drive would seem long, but after two hours, we stopped at a beach to collect sand dollars and soon after that, we stopped for lunch. I was so surprised at how friendly everyone was at all the restaurants or coffee shops that we went to. I would go up to order my food, and the cashier/server/waitress would be like “HI! What brings you to Santa Barbara/San Luis Obispo/San Francisco?” This always caught me off guard because I wasn’t ready to make small talk. Anyways, everyone was really friendly.

We eventually made it to San Francisco after 7pm and our reservation at this fancy sushi place was for 7:30, so we quickly dropped our stuff off at Ed’s (Sara’s boyfriend) apartment and then walked to the restaurant. It was pretty small and I’ve never had real sushi before (unless you count the California rolls they sometimes have in our dining hall – with cucumber and avocado but no fish) so I was pretty nervous about dinner. The four of us sat right in front of the chef and Ed told him that we wanted the “chef’s choice” so pretty much he would give us two rolls/pieces of sushi at a time. I should’ve counted how many pieces we ate but I think I lost count because they just kept coming! We had all kinds of raw fish, eel, mackerel, and sea urchin (this was the weirdest one). We also had fish eggs too but this was the one that I couldn’t finish. Pretty much all of the sushi was so good and I liked them all, but then I would remember that it was raw fish and then I would feel kinda queasy. After dinner, we then went to an ice cream place and I think I got some sort of chocolate ice cream and it was all vegan/organic. San Francisco was so organic and ecofriendly too – at least the part that we were in was really clean and there were recycling bins everywhere. After ice cream, we went back to the apartment and fell asleep right away even though it was only 9pm! 

My crazy hair made it's way into this picture

It was so cold here!