Dhammerica – Day Thirteen

Our chum makes oatmeal for breakfast for us, while we polish off a bowl of cereal. We do a quick tour of the Berkeley campus and then head to the street.
Since it is exams week, Wrigley’s is doing some promo and handing out notebooks, gum and a pen. The gum is supposed to help you tide over some of the tension.

There are 2 good bookshops amongst several (including the local B&N) in Berkeley. One of them is called Moe’s (short for Moskovitz) set up in 1962. Fantastic place for books. Only trouble is that there is no database search. But then the charming lady at the counter knows where everything is, more than making up for the lack of a database. I can’t remember the name of the other bookshop. There is another one called Shakespeare & Co, which is not bad either.

Once we shake off the bookshop fever, we head for lunch. Our chum has decided we shall eat at three places – starting with Sunrise which makes great hummus and falafel, Slurpy’s which has oriental food and then a crepe place which makes the best crepes we have eaten in life. We can’t but agree with our chum about Sunrise being the best hummus place in the Bay Area.

Now that we are fully loaded, we head to SFO on our own – resulting in some time delays and utter confusion. After using BART to get to the city, we end up Golden Gate park (thanks in part due to our chum’s direction) which is more than 10 miles away from GG bridge, which is where we wanted to go. After some negotiation with some bus drivers – including a curious situation when we didn’t have exact change (a lady offered to pay for us!) despite having a lot of money. The bus driver finally acceded and ferried us for free and got us to the bridge.

We must also thank a friendly hotel which gave us a map of the city while we were at Golden Gate park.
Finally, we arrive at the modern engineering marvel. This is a must see even if you are not an engineer.

Just like its cousin in NY, this one also allows tourist to traverse its entire length through a walkway. While we reach the vista point, it begins to rain. Oddly, there are also boards advising you against committing suicide and offering phones for help. We don’t remember seeing something similar at NY. Anyways, it is raining like nobody’s business when are trying to walk back. We have taken quite a few pictures of the city, including some of the Bay Bridge in the distance, which our chum likes more than the GG.

Dinner is with a few friends again. 4 guys – three of whom have been classmates at various points in life. In fact the three of them have been from the same institute (IITM) as well.

We are yet again at an Italian place. Not so great for vegetarian diners, but the really hot waitress convinces to eat all the veg pizzas they have and we do!

We head to some nearby place for coffee and then the time for us to part, is here.