San Francisco Chinatown

The San Francisco Chinatown is definitely bigger that the Japanese one, but it is much much more touristic too. On entering through the dragon's gate, we were greeted mostly with souvenir and "art" shops. The Chinese style buildings did look cool though, especially in the shadows on the financial district's skyscrapers. Also, most of the ads and signs were in Chinese, like big car ad billboards, and posters about the mayor elections. At this point we were starving (we had breakfast at about 7 in the morning with our weird sleep schedule) so we went to a famous "bakery" that actually sells dim sum dumplings. Contrary to my advice Seamus ordered 2 of each dumplings, so we ended up with a solid kilo of food, for 15 dollars. As the place was takeaway, we ate it sitting on a curb. I felt completely full after eating about half of them... Being in a food coma, we walked to a nearby park still in Chinatown. It was a really funny place to sit around, with live Chinese music (especially the singing ones were especially "amazing"), and groups of old Chinese ladies playing cards. Apparently you need to dramatically slap down each card you place too. We also visited the smallest alley in Chinatown - the sign said that the city decided to confine the Chinese population to a certain area, so they had to create these tiny alleys. The funny thing is that to our eyes it was completely wide, in most Spanish or Italian towns cars would have been driving on it with ease. We visited a fortune cookie factory in the same alley, where you can see them folding the cookies in front of you, and also try some of the still warm unfolded cookies. They had some interesting flavoured ones too, i was especially curious about the green tea one, but you could only buy an enormous bag, so we decided against it after all.Read more