We had a great second day, and were sad to be leaving San Francisco after our all-too-short weekend jaunt in this fabulous city.
We started the morning around 10AM, packing, and discussing how anyone can afford to live in this city. We had had a long conversation with our Lyft driver the previous night, where he told us that anyone new to the city had to “know someone” in order to find affordable, rent controlled apartments. They existed, but people didn’t let them go and preferred to sub-let (which is not technically legal), but created a secondary market around “knowing the right people”. We also discussed the possibility of creating a business that targeted affording housing solutions for upper middle class (folks making more than $150K), who actually are some of the most hard-pressed people in SFO because they don’t qualify for subsidized housing or for rent-controlled apartments.
Final Meal Before Leaving San Francisco
We checked out of The Triton and left our stuff behind the desk and set out for a walk, which turned in to finding the dim sum place Dave had eaten at one of the last times he was in SFO. Of course we had to try dim sum before leaving San Francisco. We ended up at Yank Sing, which was located quite close to our hotel. It was a cruddy day so rather than walk around in the rain, we went to brunch. Our favorites were the regular dumplings, and the soup dumplings (pictured below).
Dim sum before leaving San Francisco
After (a very filling and delicious) brunch, we set out for another long walk to Ghiradelli Square for some dessert. It was about an hour’s walk, and luckily the rain took a break. We passed through the same Russian Hill area (but decided to skirt it through the North West edge of China Town). We found this cool building on our way.
We liked the old style facade and also enjoyed the car parking in the no parking zone.
Exploring Ghiradelli Square
We made it Ghiradelli’s Square, and walked around both outside and inside and I showed Dave (and reminisced) about the area where EMC through it’s massive party at VMWorld in 2013 (including a dessert bar), when I was still working at EMC and doing the conference circuit for our backup and recovery solutions.
Ghiradelli Square
We even had a drink at McCormick and Kuleto’s (where the EMC happy hour event started) when the weather turned sour. Hey, we had two fantastic weather days when it was blizzarding back in Denver – we didn’t have much to complain about.
The weather cleared up a bit for us to head in to Ghiradelli’s to share and ice cream cookie sundae. I would have taken a picture of it but it was gobbled up too fast 🙂
Leaving San Francisco, for reals
After our sundae we were pretty tired, and the rain had picked up, so we too a Lyft back to our hotel, grabbed our bags, walked back to the Montgomery BART stop, and were soon on our way for $9 a piece back to SFO, leaving San Francisco. We got to SFO way to early to even check in at Frontier and drop our bag, so we waited in the ticketing area and processed some of the drone photos. I walked around and did some research for my tripchi airport app.
The flight was on time, we grabbed some sandwiches to take on-board, and soon we found ourselves back in Denver. It was a great trip, and as the saying goes, while leaving San Francisco, we left our hearts too.