We decided to spend our last day downtown. After checking out of our hotel but leaving our bags there, we took the street car again and got off at Montgomery and Market. We managed to spend several hours in the Westfield Mall, which is huge and has several floors of mostly upscale stores. We had lunch there and then left the mall to walk to Union Square. We did some window shopping, but the streets were being torn up and it was pretty noisy and messy. For years I've wanted to see what happened to the old City of Paris store with it's beautiful stained glass dome. As a child I loved to visit the store every Christmas because they put up a huge tree in the middle that went up through several floors. The store was taken over by Neiman Marcus. They dismantled the dome, sent it back east to be cleaned and restored, and then installed it in their new store just 100 feet away from where it originally was. They've done a nice job of recreating the old City of Paris feel.
At that point we felt we'd had enough shopping and decided to try to walk back to the hotel. We walked up Stockton Street, which goes over a hill but has a convenient tunnel. Happily, we walked past the Victoria Pastry Company, which has the world's best cannolis. My father used to bring home a box of them as a special treat when he worked in San Francisco. We bought one and took it back to share at our nearby Starbuck's (which we visited often enough that they actually remembered what kind of tea David drank!) We spent several leisurely hours hanging out in Starbuck's until it was time to meet Dan and Liz for dinner. We had a delicious meal at Albona, complete with their yummy sauerkraut soup. It's an Istrian restaurant and has some very unusual food. By the time we finished it was time to head for the Amtrak bus back to Emeryville. The train was about an hour and twenty minutes late, but we finally got on and immediately went to sleep.
No comments:
Post a Comment