Hangin' with Tom and Selena

Thanks to Kayla reminding me I just realized this morning that Selena and Tom were living down here, just out in Mountain View where Tom is working. Luckily I got Selena's MSN and we caught each otehr online. Since they had no plans for the day they just hopped onto the CalTrain and came into the city and we had a great old time.

We had lunch at a nice little Spanish restaurant on Valencia who's name escapes me. I'll leave it up to Zach to keep track of all the food. After that we walked around some of the shops in the Union Square area. I don't know how we managed to miss the giant Apple store on the corner of 4th but there it was casting its shadow, so we walked in today. The thing is unbelievable, with transparent glass stairs going up to the second floor, a presentation area with movie seats andd a huge screen, with someone giving an iMovie demonstration, all teh iPod accessories you can think of, and a huge 30 inch display that looked like a joke movie prop it was so big.

After that we checked out the Virgin Megastore across the street, then on to some clothes shopping. I bought a pair of jeans at Old Navy that turned out to be only $6. I thought the dude at the cash had made a mistake but that's how much they were on sale for. Our good luck streak continues.

We checked out the original Levi's store, but sadly they don't do that laser custom fitting thing that they used to.

Then we hopped on the trolley car that everyone thinks of when you say San Francisco, took it all the way up the big hills to where the water is. I'm loving having this 7 day muni transit pass, since you don't have to give a second thought to hopping on a train or a bus or a subway. After the trolley ride we went into this big two-level Barnes & Noble and then walked around the city for a while. We were thinking of getting a bus over to where we could get a good view of the Golden Gate Bridge but we were running short on time so instead we did something much much better: We went to In'n'Out Burger. The greatest burger chain on the planet. All they serve is burbgers and fries, none of taht other bullshit. And they do it exceptionally well. In fact they're the only burger chain the guy who wrote Fast Food Nation recommended eating at. That's another item checked off on the 'things a nerd whould do in California' list.

Oh, and since I didn't get to describe our road trip yesterday, I'll just link to Jason's entry for yesterday and you can read that. I loved walking around the UC Berkeley campus, it's built on a hill and the buildings are placed around the natural features. The total opposite of how Stanford is built, where they just took a flat, sterile piece of land and dropped the buildings in a totally man-made pattern. Both schools were really impressive, though.