Location | SoMa, San Francisco

The morning began in a slight frenzy. I found my friend, whom I call Panda, in his room practicing guitar. I got ready and we went to have brunch with our two friends, Angel and Andrew. They met us at a restaurant called “Bill’s Cafe” in San Jose. After polishing off our food (we are kind of beasts with food… we’ve known this since our time together in Taiwan), Angel, Andrew and I headed to Palo Alto to check out Santana Row, an outdoor shopping mall and Stanford‘s campus. Panda headed off to church.

Santana Row - Andrew, Angel and me.

Santana Row was ok (and unaffordable). We ended up going to Stanford’s campus pretty quickly and just walked around. The campus was eerily quiet, but they were in the midst of finals (plus it was the weekend). We hung out in the oval lawn in front of their main campus building.

The famous columns at Stanford's campus.

Panda met up with us again, but we had gone to downtown Palo Alto by that point (we were sitting at Starbucks eating a crepe I had bought across the street and drinking iced tea and coffee). Panda drove us to San Francisco where we met up with some of his friends (one was Jeremy Lin‘s older brother – random coincidence) and we had really good Vietnamese food at Turtle Tower in the area of Outer Richmond (not the one in the Tenderloin). I hadn’t had good Vietnamese in a very long time, so it was especially nice to have good spring rolls and a hot bowl of noodles.

My friends are really hungry...

We headed out to Humphry Slocombe, one of the most unique ice cream places I’ve been to. They only have a few special flavors a day, but flavors included things like Blue Bottle Vietnamese Coffee, Chocolate Sea Salt, and Strawberry Balsalmic. I chose the Chocolate Sea Salt and Strawberry Balsalmic (so good!). My friends were a little freaked out by the flavors, but I loved it.

Me, Panda, Angel and Andrew at Humphry Slocombe

After wards we hung outside for a bit, doing some awkward dances (thanks to one of Panda’s friends) and then I was dropped off at my friend’s apartment near the Embarcadero.