Back to the US part 4: Full Houses

So back to my USA trip blogging:

Saturday - in addition to visiting the Apple Store, we also went to SF with my friend Wilson and his friend Scott.

土曜日の写真です。友達と一緒サンフランシスコへ行った。

When the Eyeh family unit dropped me off at Wilson's place in Foster City we got a brief demo of the absolutely awesome video system that the company wilson works for makes.  Its an extremely high end video server system for uber-movie nuts (people like directors and oil sheiks).

It has a cool 'cover flow' type feature that shows movies in your collection that are similarly themed. 

Yes they have a pinball machine... this is their dinning room actually, the living room has a projector, but its less convenient to fire up for a few minutes so we used their secondary system here.   Wilson is a super geek when it comes to this home automation and A/V stuff...  visiting his house is like visiting the future... touch panels on the wall and super universal remotes.

僕の友達一番大きいな電気オタクです！家見て！

Anywawy, flash forward to the afternoon, they took me to the new Bloomingdales next to the Metreon: (I leave for a few years and there's all this new shit!)

They had a nice foodcourt in the basement. I got a quesadilla supremo!

サンフランシスコの中央に新デパートで食べました。も一度Mexicanを食べた！（ケーサーディヤーでした）

After that we went to meet up with another friend of theirs who lives near Alamo Square Park ( google map)... which you may know better as that famous hill in all the pictures... aka 'The Full House' street:

Its hard to get a really good picture... there's a tree in the way and you need a good ladder to get the right angle to see the houses and the buildings behind it.  I couldn't get city hall, the hill, transamerica building and the houses to fit into one good picture.  Zooming helped a bit:

この所を知って居る？とても有名なSF景色！フルホウスのテレビ番組見たことが有る？

I showed it to a friend in japan and she said 'Full House!' ('Furu Housu!' actually)

After meeting up with the friend we visited a victorian down the street that her brother was in the middle of fixing up.  This place was a REAL victorian, like pre-1906 Earthquake old!  they had already done a lot of the work, but there was still a long way to go:

その後友達の友達の鬼さんの家へ行った。このビルとても古い。今再建ている。このビル１００年前ですから。たくさん重労働要ります！

It was interesting to me, as someone who studies design and has an interest in architecture and engineering (and history).  plus its interesting cause this is like 180 degrees away from the kind of housing you find in HK or Japan where I have been living the past 3 years. 

That said, I wasn't too impressed w/ some of the design choices they made.  They rearranged some of the original floor plan and some of the rooms were a bit odd in shape and only a small fraction of the original interiors were being kept:

Basically the crown moulding on one of the kitchens... that was it.  I'm not sure what status the house was in when they bought it, but I'm guessing there was more than /just/ this.

Being SF,  if this place is at all affordable you know there's gotta be a good reason... this is one of them:

Click on the picture on the right to read what it says...  when we drove up there were like 4 police cars in the parking lot...   :-P

このところ分かる？マリファナクラブです。カリフォリニアにこの所は法行為です。怖い！

But actually this area is improving,  apparently the porno shop across the street  was just replaced by a pet store and they've clamped down on graffiti on the store fronts.

Later on we went to see Die Hard 4  and then grabbed a late bite up the street at the Mel's:

今夜Diehard 4.0を見た、その後ダイナーの料理を食べた：

geeky Wilson still coveting his iPhone...   I got the french toast this time.  it was good!

Ｗｉｌｓｏｎは新ｉｐｈｏｎｅが有る。とてもオタクです！僕はフレンチトーストを食べた。美味しかった！

ok, almost caught up. (cause I didn't take hardly any pictures on sunday!) :-P