Birthday Week: Tourist Day!

This is my last Birthday Week post, I promise. I just wanted to document all the fun stuff I did to celebrate! If you missed anything, the other posts:

• Birthday Week in Boston
• Birthday dinner on an island
• Birthday weekend kiddie museums and gay clubs

This will also be the last “look what I did!” post for a while. I have much more interesting stuff coming up next week I promise. : )

Sunday of Birthday Week was a bit mellow at first. I woke up and celebrated by going and spending a lot of money at Trader Joe’s. TJ’s has absolutely been a GODSEND when trying to readapt to living and eating healthy (and affordably) in the big city. That’s another post, though.Today ended up being a Tourist Day, which fit because I was with someone who didn’t live in SF and someone who’s lived there almost all his life. I LOVE tourist days. I think that sometimes when you live in places that are very touristed (like SF, now, and Los Angeles, before I moved) you instinctively avoid tourist destinations since “you live there”… but most touristy destinations are that way for a reason: because they’re cool. Today ended up being a pretty awesome Tourist Day in SF.

First, Jeremy and Alex came over and we checked out the Haight Street Fair.

Background: the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood is where the hippie movement and Summer of Love that people so frequently associate with San Francisco, originated. It’s now a bit calmer, partly gentrified and partly run down, populated by families with kids and homeless teenagers with backpacks alike. It’s one of the most touristed streets in the city and is great fun on the weekends as people pour out from all over to hang out on Haight and in Golden Gate Park that borders it. It also happens to be where I live. #winning

Sunday was the annual Haight Street Fair, when the street closes down from Stanyan to Masonic and gets filled up with booths and vendors selling everything imaginable. We wandered around and had a good time. I bought a piece of African art to go in my apartment (pictures to come when I get it hung up!) and a bag of kettle korn for lunch. I really HAVE to stop eating bags of kettle korn for meals… but I just can’t help it!

This made me a bit nostalgic for Africa. Despite the whole vegetarian thing, I REALLY miss buying meat on sticks on the side of the road! Flashback.

I LOVE fair food. Love love love. Too bad that they were pretty much all meat at this place… in hippie veg/vegan central! What were they thinking?? I really thought about buying a funnel cake for lunch.

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After we wore out the fair’s entertainment value, we headed down to San Francisco’s trendy/hipster Mission neighborhood to go to Dolores Park. Dolores Park is probably… okay, deifnitely the coolest park in the city to sit around and people watch. It’s basically a big square of grass covered with people drinking, smoking (or eating) weed, throwing balls to their dogs, or playing with their children. It’s a great cross-section of SF life. And it has pretty awesome views of the city from the top corner.

One of the best things about Dolores Park is that right on the corner is Bi-Rite Creamery, probably the best ice cream in San Francisco. The line is always long even at 10pm when it’s 45 degrees and the freezing wind is blowing you over.

They have a ton of really interesting flavors and are probably most famous for their Salted Caramel. Which I think is pretty good, but it’s actually not my favorite. Neither is the honey lavender. It tastes like a perfume (but still manages to be delicious).

I went with the brown sugar with ginger caramel swirl (my personal favorite… until now) and ricanelas (my new favorite–cinnamon ice cream with pieces of snickerdoodle cookies in it) with their homemade graham crackers on top.

DIE.

Next stop: we traversed the city all the way to the Ocean (despite being the City by the Bay, sometimes I forget that we’re on the ocean until I like, run by it!)

We were at the Sutro Baths, a very cool (modern) ruin. See that big pool? This actually was a bath house 100 or so years ago. So crazy! And man is our ocean windy and cold. But it’s beautiful.

Light at the end of the tunnel, anybody?

Overall it was an awesome day and a superb end to Birthday Week. I have a lot of blog projects/goals over the next two weeks and one of them is making a list of things in SF I’m excited to do–even if they’re touristy.

I just dropped off an 18 mile run after 1 mile due to injury… that’s another post. But hey, I got to update the blog! Have a super Saturday, everybody!

What touristy things exist where YOU live? Do you enjoy them?

SIMILAR POSTS YOU MIGHT LIKE . . .

• Birthday Week: Dinner on an Island!
• Am I a San Franciscan yet?
• BIRTHDAY WEEK Cereal/Prize Pack Giveaway!