Grand Final Party

I did some research and found an AFL Grand Final party organised by the Australian-American Chamber of Commerce. It made for a great Friday night, the game went from 9:30 - 12 am. The location was a restaurant-bar right on the water in the industrial area near San Fran city.

They were selling a very limited Aussie menu. A Coopers Red and meat pie set me back US$15. It was almost worth it. They offered Coopers and Tooheys something. I was pretty shocked to see loads of people drinking the Tooheys. Then I noticed a correlation with Tooheys drinkers and wearers of knit striped shirts so I guess that identified all the Sydneysiders.

It was great to be in room with 500 Aussies all swearing at the TV and each other. The game was forgettable until the last quarter which was fantastic. Barry Hall is a blight on the game but I was gunning for Sydney while Sashi was going for West Coast. Hah I won.

Stanford

I saw some students walking around and it was kinda shocking how young they were. When you see American college students in crappy dramas they are always played by 35 year old actors.
They must be rich little s*** too. I hear Stanford fees are some of the most expensive in the country.

Chapel

Stanford at Night

A couple of weeks ago I decided to practice my night photography and make use of my new ultra light tripod. So I went to Stanford University down the road one full-moon night.
Played with apeture and shutter speeds. Despite the LCD making a lot of the pics look good, a lot of them were out of focus when I viewed them on the pc. I got better results with a smaller apeture and longer shutter time (which is not surprising). Any Tips Matt?
Here are some better ones.

Peanut Butter Dilemma

These are my attempts to find peanut butter in the US. I get cravings for it from time to time and while the Americans love their peanut butter I am unable yet to find something suitable.

1. Got given a tub of 'skippy' PB. I quite liked it but after the taste hit your tongue, so did the bucket of sugar that was squeezed into each spoonful. Went in the bin before I'd finished it.
2. I bought a jar of a 'home-style' PB from safeways. Can't remember the name. I kid you not there was at LEAST 5 cm of oil sitting on top in a layer. Again, this PB was fairly nice (a bit rich) but every time I looked at it I could feel my arteries hardening. I threw it out when I realised I was consuming vast amounts of the oil even though I was trying to dig the paste out by itsself.
3. Passing through Trader Joe's I picked up a jar or macadamia nut butter. Seeing as macadamia nuts rock I couldn't see how one could go wrong with this. Utterly horrible. In the bin.
4. I subsequently noticed a jar of something called 'Better than Peanut Butter'. Geez I'm a fool. Claimed it was 85% less fat and 40% less calories. Sounded like my kind of thing. Imagine cheap chocolate mousse and then imagine it being peanut flavoured. Straight in the bin.

I think I could feed a small third-world country with all the peanut butter I have thrown away.

The Chocolate Festival

The deal was you bought tickets (15 for $20) and you got to trade each ticket for a sample from the stalls present. It was so crowded you couldn't pick the 100m queues from the crowd and you could hardly move. We had chocolate dipped strawberries, tira misu, chocolate liqueur (Sashi had to show her ID - hehe), gellato, chocolate truffles, and hot fudge sundaes.
I don't really like sweet things which is a huge problem when trying to eat anything in America. So I got really thirsty and a little sick but I suppose it was worth it for $10 and 1.5 hours of queing. Then I went into the shop and spent like $38US on chocolate that's not really that good.
Their 'normal' chocolate is pretty much like anything you can buy at home. Their expensively wrapped caramel-filled chocolate was almost exactly the same as a supermarket-bought bag of caramello koalas. Very unspectacular. I do feel sorry for them. Unfortunately products like Hersheys set the bar extremely low. Peter A says when he smells Hershey chocolate it smells like vomit and makes him want to do the same.

San Fran + Chocolate Festival

Yes I know this is a boat and not a chocolate festival. That is coming. Sashi and I went into San Fran mostly for me to buy presents of some sort to send home for various peoples birthdays. This old sailing ship that sits on the Hyde street pier used to travel between SF and Adelaide. Called the Balclutha, it was open for free (you normally have to pay). It got me some good photos of SF from the ship and besides everything is more enjoyable when it is free.
People kept recommending to me Ghiredelli chocalate so I thought I'd get some to send home. I'll save my opinion of it for the next post. We walked into the Ghiradelli Square to find that there was a chocolate festival in progress. Ooh yeah.

WHY, WHY, WHY!!

The Americans haven't even adopted the metric system yet and they have already corrupted it. I saw on the side of a truck the engine size quoted as "6.5 Liter". And yes they always spell it that way. Dear god why??
Everything they touch........

Mazatlan at night

This is the first time I used my new 650 gram ultra light $70US tripod I bought the week before. It is also the last of my Mex-selection I'll publish. The steps on the left leading up from the beach were to our favourite restaurant "El Capitano". This place was awesome - gigantic cocktails for about $3US, huge meals that were fantastic and two bands that played every night - a Mariachi band and an electric band that did hillarious Mexican-accented versions of 80s songs. They were fairly good though.
We didn't really have much cash with us when we left the US and we never found an ATM but a handful of credit card uses and $160US easily did two of us for four days including all meals activities and shopping! Flight and three night accom only cost $650US per person.

Mazatlan

Some of the city was very pretty. Some was pretty dirty. Loved walking down the boulevard on the shoreline.

Downtown

We went for a walk around the old town on Saturday. This old cathedral was pretty nice. Had all the catholic stereo-typical bells and whistles you could think of.

Mexico

Friday before Labor Day, Sashi and I made a four weekend out of it and went to Mazatlan, Mexico. We flew Alaska Airlines which seems a bit like taking Air Tahiti to Moscow.

The difference between here and the US was more startling than I expected. Mazatlan was VERY hot, humid, poor and VERY quiet. Must have been the off season probably coz of the heat. The number of people trying to sell you stuff on the beach outnumbered the tourists. This got a bit tiring after a while, I prefer exotic or third world locations for holidays but you rarely get such a tourist driven culture as in Mexico. I should have guessed that would happen in a place frequented mostly by Americans.

There really wasn't very much to do apart from sleep, eat, shop for tourist crap and go to the beach. The water was so warm it was almost hot but sometimes the hotel pool was better as it was cooler and you didn't have to put up with a million people hassling you to buy stuff.

The building in the background turned out to be a nightclub/restaurant complex. Sashi thought is was a church.