Adventures in Chinatown

Where have I been anyways?? Well, the in-laws were visiting, so we did a lot of driving around. Hanging out with the new baby in the family and generally just eating ourselves silly. Didn't leave me much artmakinging, blogging or blog-reading time!
So one day we decided we needed to actually GO somewhere and picked Chinatown in San Francisco (since Alcatraz was sold out, none of us have ever been, and me a lifetime area resident!).
We took the BART from Fremont to SF, big adventure for us, being such country mice and all. My boys loved the sights from the train, and how noisy it all was. I liked that I didn't have to drive.
We walked through Union Square up to Chinatown and looked around. This is a beautiful round fountain that is made of cast metal,completely covered with little figures from scenes in the city, here is the dragon from the Chinese New Year parades.

Several spots were must-see's according to my youngest son who had gone on a field trip last year with his class. We made it to the Fortune Cookie factory, what a cool machine, and the people were talking a mile a minute as they folded all the cookies, and no, we did not buy the X-rated ones. We did buy the chocolate ones, eh, not really chocolate, more like chocolate colored.
Here is a fun toy, a random fortune cookie generator:*

Great and noble bear loom in near future. Run for your life. Add a fortune to your website orblog, clickhere.

* We had lunch at an absolutely terrible dim-sum restaurant (Golden Dragon, do NOT go there). Visited several herb shops which all smelled like my acupuncturist's office. Some of the food shops had very interesting dried things for sale, like swallow's nests, sea cucumbers, seahorses, scallops, abalone, and deer tail (eeew).
How about this, the 98cent pigeon!

My favorite site was getting to see the oldest Chinese temple in the US, to Tien Hau the Goddess of Heaven, Goddess of the Sea and Holy Mother of Heaven. It was just beautiful inside, mostly reds of course, and we had a personal escort who explained the whole thing to us.














I loved the juicy ducks hanging in the windows, and you can see me in the left part of the pic in the reflection (hah!).

So that explains where I've been! Now to go catchup on everything all....at....once!