Day 356: The Bull In The China Shop

This past week, we took a lot of time doing activities surrounding the Chinese New Year. Today was the grand finale of the week, by going to Chinatown in San Francisco. 

Actually, we were supposed to go yesterday, when there was a big Chinese New Year street fair going on. But due to unforeseen circumstances (I had to work), we had to skip the street fair and go today instead. 

Before we actually went to Chinatown, we visited a Japanese Tea Garden inside Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. It is a beautiful, peaceful place with immaculately trimmed trees and shrubs, large Koi swimming in ponds that you cross via stone steps, and beautiful pagodas built in the early 1900s. I loved this garden, and it was probably my favorite part of the day trip. 

Outside of the garden, we stumbled upon a fountain featuring a panther fighting a serpent. With a seagull on top. 

After an hour or so at the tea garden, we packed up back in the car and drove the 6 miles across the city (and 35 minutes later...holy downtown traffic batman), parked, and walked to the Dragon Gate: the entrance to Chinatown.

Chinatown is like entering a completely different city, even though it's in the heart of San Francisco. The roads narrow, the building architecture is vastly different. Colors of red and yellow dominate the signs, the street lamps, the stone and bronze statues, the paper lanterns strewn all over the sky. Everything is written in Chinese, and most of the spoken language you hear is Chinese as well. Most of the shops are touristy knick-knack shops, but there are some more traditional markets and medicinal shops as well.  We spent the majority of our time here wandering up and down the main street, poking into a couple of stores here and there, but mostly just people and building watching outside.

We told the boys upon entering Chinatown that they'd each get a small amount of money ($5-$10) to pick out something towards the end of the day. Keep this in mind because there's a story. 

Of course, with my kids, there's always a story. 

The first store we actually decided to walk into, we played the usual game of telling the kids to "put their hands behind their backs" to ensure that they don't touch anything. Especially since a lot of these little shops had glass and porcelain figures. Naturally, this is a "do as I say and not as I do" rule, because I'm an adult and dammit I can touch something if I want to. 

Just as I was reminding the kids to "not touch anything", Calen shoots his arm out from behind his back and snatches this porcelain owl thing. And of course, he drops it. It doesn't break, but the ear of the owl chips off. 

Since we had just learned about the Zodiac and discovered that Calen is an Ox, he is now, officially and accurately, a Bull in a China Shop. 

Tough lesson for him, but he had to use his fun money to pay for that stupid porcelain owl with the chipped ear. Many tears ensued, out of embarrassment and disappointment that he didn't actually get to pick what he bought today, but maybe next time he'll listen when we say "don't touch". Especially since he's a Bull. 

My little bull with his Ox. Gotta love him. 

The coveted ridiculous bobblehead owl that ended up coming home with us unintentionally

That catastrophe aside, we went to lunch at a Dim Sum restaurant that I had researched the night before called Great Eastern (it's actually really hard to get GOOD Chinese food in Chinatown). It is not your Americanized orange chicken with a side of white rice Chinese restaurant. This place is about as authentic as it gets. We were seated in the center of the room, and upon a quick glance around the crowded place, we stuck out as the only English speaking white people there (in my book, a good sign) that had to special order forks for the kids. Camden kept complaining that they spoke Spanish. I corrected him, and then he'd say "They keep speaking China!!"

We ordered pork buns and shrimp with cilantro buns and authentic spring rolls (not your pan fried in oil kind). It's a very unique way of ordering, you fill out a menu with what you want and how many helpings, then a waitress comes downstairs with stacks of dim sum baskets and serves them to you without speaking a word. Then as you eat, they sneak by and take away empty baskets. 

The food, in my opinion, was delicious. The textures were incredibly different from anything I had ever had, which was fun and exciting to me. The kids devoured the savory pork buns and Calen ate the entire plate of a type of spring roll (that even Brad and I didn't like as much as he did). 

Story time number two. 

Before we left the restaurant, Camden went into the bathroom (visible from our table). After a while he hadn't come out yet, so Brad went to check. 

Cam had decided to poop. In order to poop, he had removed his sweatshirt, thrown it on the bathroom floor, and then proceeded to take off his shoes. 

Did I mention we're still at the restaurant and not inside our private home??

Luckily, I didn't have to take any part of that nonsense since it happened in the men's bathroom. Thanks Brad. 

Once Cam redressed, we left the restaurant and Google Mapped (thank goodness, or we would have never found it) the Golden Gate Fortune Cookie company. This place is a literal hole in the wall in a side alley. It's a one room factory where fortune cookies are hand made by two Chinese women, and "tours" (aka step inside and watch the women) are free. It's fascinating to see a real working factory and watch the batter being poured and fried, the women bending the cookie around a fortune and just dropping it into a 5 gallon bucket. We paid 50 cents to take a picture (seriously), and bought a small bag of fortune cookies on our way out. 

The alley walking to the fortune cookie factory

Making fortune cookies by hand!

We were done with Chinatown but Camden hadn't picked his little souvenir yet (Calen still had his owl). He went inside a couple stores and couldn't decide but as we were leaving one store he shouted "WAIT!! I want the shiny hen!!!!" 

A shiny hen?!

He snatched my hand and pulled me back into a store, where there was a small, plush rooster decorated in shiny fabric for Chinese New Year. It is, after all, the year of the rooster. 

So Cam bought his "shiny hen" and we called it a day, drove out of the city and came home in time to watch Big Hero 6 (because, San Fransokyo, obviously) before Calen's first baseball practice of the spring season. 

Chinatown is definitely a "one and done" kind of place to visit (the Japanese tea garden is definitely repeat worthy), but I would like to go again next year and try to make the New Year festival next time. 






 

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