Chineese New Year Flower Festival in San Francisco

Our family took a little trip to San Francisco's Chinatown for the start of the Chineese New Year festival.  We have wanted to take the ferry into the City for a long time and finally found a day we could do it.  We drove to Vallejo from our house and then tried to catch the ferry into San Francisco, but the ferry was too full.  So they boarded us on nice buses and we drove just as fast over the bay bridge into the city.  It was a beautiful day in San Francisco.  70 degrees and beautiful blue skies. 

We were dropped off in the Financial District at the Ferry Building.  Alex imediately spoted the bow and arrow and wanted to go and check it out.  We had plenty of time so we went to see it.

 Afterwards, we went and found a yummy place to eat some lunch.  Then we walked over to Chinatown.  We entered through the Dragon Gate.

  "the only authentic Chinatown Gate in North America. Unlike similar structures which usually stand on wooden pillars, this iconic symbol conforms to Chinese gateway standards using stone from base to top and green-tiled roofs in addition to wood as basic building materials. The Gateway was designed by Clayton Lee, Melvin H. Lee and Joe Yee in 1970." -Wikipedia

 Then it was time for shopping.  Every Chinese nick-nack and do-dad you can imagine was in Chinatown plus some really cool stuff.  We told the kids they could each pick one souvenir.  The hunt was then on.    Alex picked a panda bear, Sarah a scarf, Lily chose a pink umbrella.

 We went into lots of Shops and saw some really fun things. 

 Chinatown has lots of beautiful colors. Mommy enjoyed taking lots of pictures of all of the colorful decorations for the new years celebration. 

 We came upon a dragon dance.  It was really neat. 

 The dragon chased the ball but never caught it.

 Of course, a flower festival needs beautiful flowers.  The orchids were gorgeous.  Mom found one that she wanted to buy, but Dad didn't have enough cash.  They started to walk away and then the man selling the flowers called out to her that he would sell it to her for what she had.  Mom really wasn't trying to haggle, but did end up with a pretty orchid for a good price. 

 On one street corner, we saw some girls dancing with pink cherry blossom umbrellas. Lily really like this and decided she wanted an umbrella just like theirs.  Luckily, they were easy to find.

After shopping and mingling in the crowds, we met up with Uncle Mark and Aunt EJ.  They had driven into town after work.  We found a yummy Chinese restaurant to enjoy dinner together. 

One funny thing that happened at dinner was that Dad had lost his voice from a cold he had that day.  By the end of the day it was mostly gone.  When we went to dinner, somehow, Dad was the one that the waiter kept talking to for our order.   He could barely communicate with him because of the language differences and let alone not having a voice left.  When the they brought the food out to us not all of our food was there.  Later Daddy told mommy he kept trying to communicate to the waiter that the order was wrong and then finally he just gave up.  Mommy remembers him looking very stressed but didn't know why. She thought maybe he wasn't happy with what we were ordering, but she was sitting on the other side of the table and had no idea what was going on.  So our dinner turned out a little sparce.  No Cashew Chicken tonight. 

To top it off we found out that that restaurant only took cash.  So Dad (because he is the fasted runner of our group) had to run 3 blocks to the bank pull out cash and run back.  Needless to say he was pretty worn out after that dinner experience.

 We rode the Trolley Car down to the Financial District, because our feet were so tired from walking all day.

  Then we caught the Ferry home.  The Bay Bridge was twinkling outside our windows.  It as a fun adventure.  Everyone (even Daddy, as tired as he was) had fun.