superstardom

Yesterday, D and I went with some friends to check out the King Tut exhibit at the De Young. It was a pretty cool collection, but the galleries were really crowded, so we only spent about an hour inside, before retreating to other parts of the museum. I do like hanging out in the tower.

Afterwards, we dispersed, and the two of us decided we wanted to go to Burma Superstar for dinner. Since it was only just 5pm, so we thought we'd stop for some coffee across the street at the Blue Danube Coffee House (one of my high school hangouts, yay!). As we sat in the coffee house, we saw that the restaurant was quickly filling up. At 5:20pm, we decided it would be smarter to just eat an early dinner, rather than risk having to wait for a table. Our decision was well-timed, as we got one of the last two open tables. By 5:40pm, I heard the waitress tell someone on the phone that the wait would be an hour!

Anyway, we ordered three dishes:
- Platha and Dip: This appetizer was kind of similar to roti prata, and kind of similar to scallion pancakes (no scallions, of course). The dip was a chicken curry, and came with a surprising amount of meat. It was a nice change from other fried dough dishes.
- Tea Leaf Salad: This was my favorite dish; the tea leaf gave the salad an almost fermented flavor, which was interesting and yummy, but I liked the texture best; the lettucs was tossed with sunflower seeds, fried garlic, and yellow peas.
- Chicken Casserole w/ Cardamom Cinnamon Rice: The casserole was generously portioned, and very flavorful. In fact, my one complaint might have been that it was almost too flavorful; I think I'm used to having blander rice dishes. I also would have liked more raisins, but overall I enjoyed the dish.

man vs nature

One of my coworkers organizes "Photo Fridays" every week, where we all bring our DSLRs and he teaches us stuff about photography. Most of the people who come are way better than me and have nicer cameras, but I like going anyway because it's fun.

Last Friday, another coworker arranged to have the group of us get into the nearby Computer History Museum after hours, to shoot some photos of the artifacts. It was harder than I expected; I took a bunch of photos but I wasn't all that happy with any of them.

Here are two of the "better" ones:



Then, on the way back, I took this photo while walking past a tree. I liked it best of all the photos I took that day:


Maybe I just like shooting outdoor photos best.

maybe I'm not a city person

A couple of weeks ago I went to check out the new California Academy of Sciences. It's a nice museum. The living roof is a cool concept, the rainforest part is nice, I'm always a fan of penguins, there are some very timely environment-focused exhibits, plus a really decent aquarium in the basement.

However, I did not have a good time. First, we stood in line for twenty minutes to buy our (not inexpensive) tickets. We were told the planetarium was already full for the day, but decided to proceed anyway. Then we stood in line again to get into the museum. After getting in, we found a huge line for the rainforest, so we decided to look at everything else first. The aquarium was full of people, so we couldn't sit down to listen to the show. At one point I was looking at some fish, standing about two or three feet away from the glass. Three kids ran over and arranged themselves in front of me, blocking my view. Two of the kids were on the small side, one was definitely not. Their parents (or adult minders, whoever they were) did nothing. Anyway, we finally did manage to see the rainforest, as well as most of the rest of the displays, but I was just not that psyched about the whole outing.

Maybe this is why I live in the Peninsula and not in the city...I'm not a fan of crowds, especially ill-behaved ones.