boon's log 0306.02: Fine Dining

We were honored to be invited to one of our finest fine dining experience, so far. IL's ex-boss, who is also our good friend, in the States invited us over to the bay area 2 weekends ago (yeah, back-logged entry, again...) to dine with him and his wife-to-be at Michael Mina's located inside Westin San Francisco. Michael Mina is an internationally acclaimed chef, and has a few chain/restaurants opened across on the West Coast, but they say that the one in San Francisco is closest to his heart.

Well, it was indeed an excellent and exquisite experience. The food was great! And it's not just food - it is also art. You can really see the passion and the culinary skills expressed in creating the food. Well, I'm no food connoisseur, but it does not take that to really appreciate it and also the atmosphere played a part in making it a unique experience.

We had the Six-course Classics Tasting Menu. Food came in small portions, but they came in a variety of cooking styles and made with different ingredients - and part of the waiter's job was also to explain each and every dish (and sub-dish) to us... otherwise, we wouldn't know where to start and how to tackl the food. The whold dinner lasted about 3 hours. By the time we finished, it was almost midnight.

We spent the night in Hyatt and departed back on Sunday. We managed to get a room with view of the city (meaning sky-scrappers...). Here's a few of them...



View from Hyatt, San Francisco

After the dinner, I was joking with IL that I wonder what will happen if I asked the waiter for some tomato ketchup... :P

boon out...

P/S:
Oh by the way, while we were there we went to the Macy's at Union Square and saw this little vending machine in the food court area...


hi-tech vending machine

Looks like a normal vending machine, right? Well... NO! If you look closely (sorry for the poor resolution - it's my camera phone again... :)), you can almost make out what it is vending - on the top right 6 shelves, it's the iPod Shuffle while the top left 6 shelves are iPod Nanos and the bottom shelves are the Sony PSPs.

...

Yeah! In a vending machine?! Well, that is something that you don't see everyday (except, of course, if you are working in Macy's).

Well, imagine this, you are down in the lower ground having a pretzel with your family (or girlfriend, or whatever) and then you stroll along the corridor and suddenly feel the need to quench your thirst for portable-music (as opposed to the normal folks who suddenly feel like quenching their natural thirst due to dehydration...).

What do you do? What do you do? Gosh, thank goodness for iPod Vending Machines! Once again, technology has saved the day!

:|

boon's log 0206.02: Happy New Year 2006

**this blog was written in the time span of a week... gosh, imagine the workload...**

Went missing for a while - I was away for the Christmas/New Years holidays. Though I had my laptop with me and the temptation was there to login and update my blog, but the flesh was weak... especially with all the running around. Where was I? IL and I went to one of IL's dream vacation spots (yeah, there are a couple of 'em...)...


Cinderella Castle, WDW Orlando, Florida

We had quite a blast in Orlando - except for certain parks where it really s*cked! We were especially disappointed with Sea World Orlando; we think that the one in San Diego is much better. But like what IL said, if you've gone to one Sea World, you've gone to the rest of 'em. And there is only "that" much that a killer whale or a dolphin can do...


Shamu at Sea World Orlando

Our advise? If you're in Orlando and you've been to Sea World San Diego, you've pretty much seen everything and save your dollars (and your time) for something else.

Universal Studios comes in as #2 as our parks to visit while in Orlando. Some pretty cool rides - you may have already read or heard good reviews of the Spiderman 3D ride. Yeah, for us jakuns, this was the first time that we took a 3D ride, it was really cool - as oppose to the already-bland 3D (or so-called 4D) effects where your chair moves with the movie and waters squirts out at you in-synch with the movie... but the Spiderman was cool (among other things...).


The Amazing Adventures of Spiderman, Universal Studios

And because we cut short our SeaWorld time from 2 to 1 day, we managed to squeeze in a surprise visit (that which was not in the agenda in the first place) to Kennedy Space Center. It was an interesting visit - but if only if we visited it first, because I guess we just had one theme park too many already by the last day. Really liked the idea of being at NASA - we've heard and talked and watched so much about in on the college/university and the television/movies.


LC-39A, Kennedy Space Center

Will post more pictures of the trip later.

Was rained-in also as the year drew to a close. Was supposed to meet up with CL in San Francisco, but the freeways were flooded and had to be closed and the rivers were overflowing and stuffs. We even tried Napa on one of the weekends, but were stucked in a 2 hour still-traffic along the I-80! And that is not the worst, at the end of the 2-hour ordeal, we found that we were detoured to another township which does not lead to Napa and we had to doa U-turn and head back home! Well, 'twas a wet new years. Will (definitely) try to meet up with CL sometime this year - it's been umpteen years!

Alright, I guess I better post this entry first before I drag it any further... it's New Years T+10 days already...

... back to my Mt. Everest of work...

boon out...