Last modified on 18:30:00 PDT Tuesday November 02, 1998 by Fire
Last modified on 18:30:00 PDT Tuesday November 02, 1998 by Fire
Summary
The full moon, Nth's Long March, the bustling Chinatown, Dr. Sun Yat Sen's historical meeting place, the hilarious meeting with CANINE, close encounters with the cable kind, sunset at Berkeley Hills and Tilden National Park, treasure-hunted Zachary's delicious deep dish pizzas, unexpected discovery of Mike W, San Francisco's citylights, a lost deer, wandering into a spooky biology research lab, a touching Japanese cartoon, sleeping by the Fireplace, shopping at Stanford, the Long Wait, Filoli's domicle, the Incredible Spider and the appetizing Udon are the necessary ingredients of an enjoyable and fun-filled gathering which were all present at our October 3 Mid-Autumn Gathering.
The First Day
Chinatown was crowded and the joyous festival atmosphere soon made us forget about the deserters. After walking around abit, we decided to have lunch at a historical place. This eatery in Chinatown was once the meeting place of Dr. Sun Yat Sen. The legend goes that the chair he sat on was still in the building. An even bigger attraction...or rather distraction... was the petite but sharp-tongued and loud waitress in the restaurant. For a moment, we thought we might ended up watching a fight between the waitress and one of the customers.
We didn't have the luck and we didn't want to stay there any longer after our meals. Nth suggested going to the restroom at a nearby hotel instead of the one in the restaurant despite the fact that we might use the same toilet bowl that Dr. Sun sat on. After that, we were beginning to feel thirsty. You must have heard the saying "what goes up must come down", similarly, what goes out must be filled too. While we're at the entrance of a Chinese cafe, my cell phone rang. It was CANINE! I decided to hand the phone to Nth since he was more familiar with the place and would be able to give the directions better.
Nth realized that CANINE was in Chinatown too and they were rather close to each other. However, little did we realized that we were standing next to each other! CANINE was on his cell facing towards the left and Nth was on the cell facing towards the right! Then both of them turned around and saw each other!
Needless to say, all of us were amused at this and couldn't help laughing at this funny and coincidental meeting.
CANINE introduced to us two friends(a guy and a girl) whom he brought along. We decided to go on separate ways since we had already explored the area and maybe meet up again later. So we left and went to visit the other parts of Chinatown and we bought some mooncakes. After that, we visited the Cable Car Musuem which gave us a thorough insight into the history of the cable cars and a better understanding of how those cable cars worked.
It was about sunset time and Nth suggested going to Berkeley Hills and Tilden National Park to watch the sunset. It was indeed a beautiful sunset as the setting sun made the whole city of San Francisco glows in a reddish warm hue with the Golden Gate Bridge glittering in the distance.
Soon it was time for dinner. Along the way, Nth drove through UC Berkeley and gave us a short tour. The place we were going to have our dinner was called Zachary Pizza. It was touted to be the "Best in the Bay Area" and we saw an amazing number of awards they had up on the walls. We were not surprised that we had to wait for nearly an hour for a table. However, it was worth the wait and we enjoyed the Deep Dish Spinach and Mushroom Pizza and the Deep Dish Chicken Pizza thoroughly. Furthermore these pizzas were our hard earned prizes for the treasure hunt at the Message Board! Thank you Mike W for the prizes!
We drove up to a high point in San Francisco after dinner to watch the night lights of the city. Other than the city lights we also saw a deer! Anyways, we decided to catch a movie but it was kind of late for a movie by then. But, we decided to explore Nth's biology lab and IRC over there. In the end, we didn't IRC. Maybe the spooky lab spooked us too much. Since it was getting late, we headed back to muajee's house and Nth went home.
The night was still not over though. Back at muajee's place, we decided to watch a Japanese cartoon which muajee recommended. The cartoon movie was "Graveyard of the Fireflies". It was touching story of how a Japanese kid and his sister survived during War World II. We had fun chatting with muajee till very late into the early hours of the morning. And we slept by the Fireplace!
The Second Day
After awhile, DaDoo arrived but with no red noses. Muajee showed us her photography masterpieces and entertained us with some piano pieces. Then we decided to go to Stanford for shopping. We went to a few stores and Bunnie bought some stuffs from Warner Brothers. Soon, it was lunch time. We went to Cupertino for lunch and chose a Taiwanese restaurant. This was where the Long Wait was. We were starving and yet it took exceptionally long for the food to arrive. We were on the verge of suing the restaurant for the slow service and was talking about using the McDonald's hot coffee incident as a precedent. We had everything planned until the food came and we forgot about suing and concentrate on eating the delicious food instead.
In the vicinity was a 99 Ranch Market (a Chinese supermarket). This was where I introduced Litchi Gummy to muajee and showed DaDoo what HawFlakes are. Finally they know me! We grab a few other items from the store and went to visit - guess who? Filoli! It was Filoli's domicle in San Francisco! We posed for pictures and even took a picture of the place itself.
Bunnie and I(Fire) reached Muajee's house right on time as expected however we had to wait for Nth since he misunderstood the travelling time and had to walk half an hour more than expected from the BART station to Muajee's place. During this time, Muajee checked her email and got an email from Dave who wrote that he managed to get a date today and will have to ditch us. Then Jcw called and said that his girlfriend decided to go look for houses and will have to ditch us too. Wow...and I thought we informed them very early in the week already. However, everything went on as planned. Nth, muajee, Bunnie and I headed straight for Chinatown.
Something was licking my fingers. I woke up suddenly. Oh...I realized it was the cat which belonged to muajee's sister. That started the beginning of Day 2 of our gathering. Muajee was still sleeping when we were having our breakfast. She must be tired. Poor muajee. When muajee awoke and came out of her bedroom, she did not see us and thought we had left! Actually we were in the dining room eating "Jian Bing" made by her mom but she didn't see us. Her mom actually fooled her into thinking we left too. Sorry muajee :P We had a good laugh when she found us.
Time passes quickly when you're having fun. It was dinner time before we knew it. We went to muajee's favorite Japanese restaurant in San Mateo. We had Unagi Sushi and Spider Roll. There were only 2 out of 4 pieces of the Spider Roll with the Spider and I was one of the lucky ones to eat the Spider head! The other lucky person was Muajee who ate the other one! The udon was unbelieveably good. It was homemade udons with eggs. Even though we just had our lunch, we still ate most of the udons.
Then it was time to say good bye. We followed DaDoo's car as he lead us to the freeway. On the freeway we could see the full moon shining right ahead of us. It was the Mid-Autumn moon shining brightly. We stare at the beautiful, enchanting full moon and thought of the enjoyable times we had at the gathering and the wonderful friends we met.