champagne, pasta and ice cream!

after our river expedition, we were supposed to go to san francisco for dinner but decided to make a quick detour to korbel vineyards which make champagne.  ok technically, it's not really champagne if it doesn't come from the champagne region in france - at least that's what the french will say.  the soil and climate are apparently distinctive and peculiar to that region which makes it special.  ok.  not sure i can tell the difference.  anyway we arrived with about 20 minutes to spare, and got to taste some cham...er californian sparkling wine.

we tasted four types of their sparkling wine, and bought one that was on offer.  it was 50% off, and cost only $10.99!  woo hoo!!  

then we were off to san francisco and made a stop at vista point.  boy it was cold.  the wind was really blowing and i quickly put on an extra shirt.

looks like we were the only ones there doesn't it?  in fact it was really crowded.  we were at first on the dirt road leading to the view on the other side of the bridge that uncle jerry brought us to the first time we visited him.  do you remember that there was some kind of model posing for pictures there, and we also saw a wolf along the road?  anyway, there was a big jam on that road and we decided to take a different route to try and get to vista point.  as luck would have it, we found a carpark nearby which connected to vista point via a little underpass and we were able to get across quickly.  that was important because we needed to move fast so as not to get frozen!  i think it was about 12-15 degrees.

then to san francisco where we ate at an italian restaurant that was recommended by one of the participants on the program.  it's called delfina and when we arrived we were told we had to wait for one and a half hours if we wanted a table.  if we were ok with counter seats, it would be an hour.  so we decided to wait and in the end it was just about 40 minutes. 

the food was good.  mushroom salad and grilled calamari as appetizers.

and we shared a wild boar ragu (pasta) and pan-fried salmon.  very well done.

now before dinner, while we were walking around, we saw a queue outside a place across the street.  we discovered it was for ice-cream!  bi-rite homemade ice-cream.  and the line went around the block too.  so we decided not to eat dessert at the restaurant (nothing special anyway) and went to queue at bi-rite.  it took us about 20 minutes.  some people asked us what we were queuing for, and they looked like they didn't believe us, or couldn't believe that someone would queue for so long for ice cream:)  then some locals came up to the line and announced very loudly that if we wanted to buy pints or cakes, we need not queue.  nice of them though they were a bit loud.  here's vijay and ping-soon in the queue.

i finally made it into the store!!!  i had a scoop of brown sugar (which comes with bits of ginger and caramel) and a scoop of toasted coconut.  it was pretty good.  time to head back.  all in all, quite an eventful and interesting day.

on the way back to schwab, there was a jam because of people leaving a soccer game in stanford.  it was a major league game (like an american version of the english premier league) between the san jose earthquakes and the new york red bulls.  thierry henry is with new york but i heard he didn't play.  saw a boy cycling past wearing an arsenal jersey with henry's name on it.  there were 40,000 people at the game, which is quite a good turnout.  i think in america, it is packaged as a family event which is healthy for the game.  not like in england and europe where many fans are actually quite tribal and hardcore, and can easily turn violent.  in the bad old days, some so-called fans actually went to the games looking for a fight rather than to watch the game.