Sunday, July 01, 2007

Beach, Bison, and a Windmill


It's Sunday morning around 11 a.m., and instead of drinking sweet milk coffee at a leisurely pace and reading the newspaper at home, I'm actually working at Stanford with an open can of Coke and wishing that there was a food vendor open at this time. Sometimes, when I am not moving for a prolonged period of time, the lights go off, and you can see me mechanically waving my arms in the air like I just don't care.


Things at work have been semi-productive, my greatest accomplishment this week has been cleaning the -80 degree freezer, systematically peeking inside every box to find long-lost blood serum samples that need to be catalogued and recorded. Although I was skeptical that the work could give me freezer burn, I am wiser now. After working through the spreadsheet yesterday, I am impressed by the contents of the serum database. :) More work needs to be done!


Yesterday was Saturday, so around 5 p.m., Jey finished his work as an intern at Santa Clara Valley and we drove up to San Francisco because I really missed the city. We stopped by my favorite boba joint in the Sunset district, "Wonderful Foods Co" on 22nd and Irving (I think) and Jey sampled the #2 boba with pudding. We also ran into a classmate there!


Then we drove to Ocean Beach and walked around a bit, but it was a bit chilly. The name Ocean Beach really bothers me, a beach cannot exist without an ocean. The redundancy hurts my head. Then we drove to the Beach Chalet and wandered around the edges of Golden Gate Park. We found a giant windmill and "Queen Wilhelmina's Tulip Garden," which contained only impatiens at this time. As Jey jokes, apparently the Dutch "two lips" were "too slow," and so they were "impatiens." The windmill is the most random landmark, I cannot even fathom why they would build a windmill in Golden Gate Park in 1902, but there is very little background. I am so curious to know who is Queen Wilhelmina and why there is a non-existent Dutch tulip garden in the middle of SF!


However, that was not the strangest thing that we saw in Golden Gate Park that day, we drove around and eventually found the famous GG Park BISON paddock! The bison were apparently moved to the Park in the 1890s to promote breeding. There were around 8 bison in the paddock, shedding wool and eating slowly.


Afterward, we drove to Paul's apartment. He was making ratatouille in honor of the new Pixar film and it was delicious. We also drank some non-alcholic merlot purchased during our recent jaunt to Napa and finished off with some lychees. Overall, a wonderful meal. :)


3 comments:

ecronen said...

Yes, you can have a beach without an ocean. That beach would be on a lake, a river, a gulf, or a bay. There are beaches on Walden Pond, the Willamette River, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Chesapeake Bay.

Unknown said...

I must concur with ecronen.

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