California Journey Evening Day 2

I guess we take a chance every time we book an excursion online, but usually we are lucky and pick great "field trips". This evening---not so lucky. This evening in San Francisco was billed as "An Evening of Enchantment"--not our definition of enchantment it turns out. We really thought we wanted to see Chinatown at night, but not being sure how safe it was, we booked this tour. The tour bus picked us up at our hotel and drove around to other hotels picking up other victims, er...clients and called that a "Bus Tour" of San Francisco. The driver dropped us off in the middle of Chinatown with our guide named HA. Our first stop was a Chinese Restaurant where we were the only people in the restaurant (gave us pause for thought, of course). The meal was served buffet style and was good, but very typical. Then we started our walking tour. The blurb on the internet told of all the wonderful places we would see: upon our arrival at the fortune cookies factory (where we were supposed to discover the secret of making these mysterious little cookies) our guide HA had us peer into the darkened store saying "If the store was not closed you would see the machines at work making fortune cookies". Next we walked by an ordinary storefront and he points out the stairs we WOULD have taken to see the Buddhist Shrine, had it not been closed for the day. We then wander through the alleys of Chinatown as he tells us the origin of the word Hooker and shows us the empty stalls that TOMORROW will hold a wealth of fresh Chinese wares. Now you must know that all this time we are wandering around in the rain and Jim and I are the only ones who brought umbrellas. HA even laughed and said, "Some of you might try to leave this tour, BUT none of you knows where the bus is picking us up-ha ha ha." Thanks, HA. Finally and at last this was over and the bus drove us across the Bay Bridge (just repaired that week from pieces of it falling off-true excitement) to Treasure Island to get an amazing nighttime view of San Francisco. Some days you just pray for the excitement to be over. MA ps You can see the mechanism of the cable car in the photo with Jim.