California Vacation Part 7: Chinatown

Our last day in San Francisco we found ourselves in Chinatown, which is the largest Chinatown outside of well...China. It was very much like New York City's Chinatown, but much bigger and more crowded!

We make our way over to the Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory. This was a small hole-in-the-wall place where you go in, pay .50 cents to take pictures, sample some of the broken pieces, and feel compelled to buy a bag of fortune cookies.

It was sort of awkward, but interesting to see how they are made.

That night, we had dinner at the House of Nanking, which had been recommended to us by someone on our Napa Tour. We ate our faces off here. We ordered 2 appetizers: a Fried Onion cake and dumplings

 Then for dinner we had Fried Rice,

 General Tsou's chicken,

and Sesame noodles - DOH! I don't have a picture of the sesame noodles.

We had a LOT of leftover food when we were done, and nowhere to put it at our hotel. I asked them to bag it up nice for me anyway...I had a plan.

One thing we noticed about San Francisco was that there were a lot of homeless people on the street, and that these homeless people were very well cared for by the surrounding community. One night we noticed a man walk out of a Walgreens and hand a homeless woman an entire pizza box. I'm not sure if it was a whole pizza or just his leftovers, but he was describing which slices were in there with what toppings. He was really casual about it, and it was almost as if he did this on a nightly basis. I noticed this all over the city, and also noticed the homeless were a lot less pushy and in your face than they are in NYC. It was certainly a different culture for me. I pass homeless people in New York City everyday, and have sadly become immune and jaded to the notion of actually giving them anything.

So that night, as we were walking through Union Square before we retired for the night, I gave our huge bag of leftover food to a homeless man on the street. It felt good to give our leftovers to this nice, non-pushy man, and I really hope it helped make his night a little better.