We celebrated Tom's 40th birthday yesterday and discovered that we are definitely not the young urbanites any longer.
We stayed at a hotel in San Francisco and even had a view from our window all the way to the hill our house is on... we felt a little closer to our little ones knowing we were still "watching over them." My mom, having flown in that morning from Australia, was there with them.
We went to a funky bar that required the password "dame" which had been emailed to me a few days earlier (at least that was cool). The man who answered the door was obviously going to let us in (after all we had a reservation), but I still felt I needed and wanted to say the password. "Dame," I said. Wink. Wink. Nudge. Nudge. He didn't smile. Men in black fedoras and red collared shirts do not smile when given the password. It is cool to get a password, but is apparently not cool to actually use it.
We had amazing drinks. Mine was infused with cloves... yummm... Tom hated it, so I'm guessing mine was a girly drink.
In this economy, we weren't in the mood for a fancy restaurant (and besides who can afford one anymore), so we opted for eclectic. The real San Francisco experience. We decided on Chinatown and headed for Sam Wo's. Ten years ago, the food was good... or so I remember... I could have been drunk. Herb Caen made this place famous many, many years ago when he wrote about the waitresses that yelled at you. Honestly, they were probably just forthright Cantonese women. I know that Sam himself passed away, but it's the women who yelled anyway. But Sam must have been the cook and passed away with all of his culinary secrets.
We squeezed through the kitchen where a large Cantonese lady greeted us unoffensively (first bad sign at Sam Wo's) and up a set of stairs into the "dining room." I tried to ignore the pee smell of the bathroom that greeted us at the top of the stairs. After all, eclectic experience comes at a cost. We were seated at one of ten familiar faux wood paneled tables. Ours was table #5, according to the gold sticker above Tom (you know the kind of mailbox number stickers you find at Ace Hardware).
Many of the other tables were filled. Young people, old, asian, white, black; alcohol bottles in bags and others on display. These people had also not gotten the memo that this was way not cool anymore. Each carefully ordered dish tasted almost exactly the same as the next and what I imagine rubber might taste like. The soy sauce kind of helped. It was fun all the same, and we were pleased that the meal cost less than 2 drinks at the the bar at which we'd previously been. The largest, greasiest sesame ball I have ever seen, which Tom bought for me outside on the street, may have the food and drinks at even.
We had breakfast at Mama's in North Beach, where I should have ordered the French Toast. Being way out of the know in San Francisco urban life, we ordered lattes and an omelette. I looked around the packed restaurant when we sat down. American coffee and french toast. Interesting. My omelette was good anyway. I needed the protein.
It was a very fun retreat that we needed, but I was so excited to see Adeline on a walk with Lucia before we even made it home. She stared at us for awhile without responding (it was not a part of the plan and it takes Adeline a moment to adjust). She soon insisted on getting in the car with us and once home insisted on close to 20 books before I took off my jacket. George and Cole ran into my arms at school for huge hugs. Ah, we were missed. We were, at least, cool in Pre-K classrooms. And frankly, that's okay with me.
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