City on the Bay I

I have become expert at buying cheap airline tickets.  On January 9, 2020, Dave and I both flew round trip to San Francisco for a total of $183.  I have scheduled five temple trips this year, based on deep discount tickets.  "This temple obsession will get expensive fast," Dave warned me.  No.  It will be cheap and fun.  In San Francisco, we stayed at Hotel Emblem, a boutique hotel near Union Square.  Its theme was the 1950s Beat Poets, who lived and wrote near here--writers like Ferlinghetti and Kerouac.  Walls in the lobby were lined with books, and there were books to read in our room.

There were murals of the Beat poets in the bar.

 We walked a block to the St. Francis Hotel, with its iconic bellman.  This man was celebrating retiring after working for 36 years in his outfit.

Union Square is noted for its many restaurants.  We ate at Scala's Bistro.

 Dave said his salmon was excellent.

 The palm trees on Union Square were lit for the holidays, and skaters swayed by on the ice rink.

We stopped at the splendid Williams & Sonoma flagship store.  I have visited the Williams & Sonoma outlet store in Vegas numerous times, always with delight.  I enjoyed seeing the elegant Williams & Sonoma products in their proper, elegant setting.

I couldn't resist an on-sale Imari-style bowl for my Japanese dinners.

 On Friday morning, we attended an endowment session at the Oakland Temple, on the top of a hill with a view of Oakland and the Bay.

The temple was newly redecorated and very beautiful.  The rooms were gold, with geometric motifs and, in the celestial room, slabs of gold-veined jasper and large panels of polished wood.

 We drove over the ridge into Sacramento, where we also attended a session at the Sacramento Temple.  It was located in a large park.

 Blue was the theme color, with murals of the Sierras.

The decoration in the celestial room seemed almost rococo, with dainty light blue satin couches, etched glass windows, and curlicues on the windows and ceilings.

 While we were in Sacramento, we stopped by the excellent Crocker Art Museum.  I lingered in the special exhibit on contemporary Indian (Native American) art titled, "When I Remember, I See Red."

 A number of the pieces combined Western and Native American stereotypes (the hat, the neckerchief) with modern symbols (the sun glasses).

 A number of pieces expressed the rage of Native Americans at their treatment by Anglos.

 One of my favorite pieces was this pair of high fashion, stiletto heels, decorated with intricate Indian beading.

 This painting is a take on the all-American pictures of Betsy Ross with the American flag.

This image combines a beautiful, modern fashion model and a stylish hot pink background with traditional Indian dress and artifacts.

And this piece is a sardonic reaction to the old-time statues of Indian chiefs advertising cigars, which were placed outside many stores..  This is supposedly a white man posing with a cigar.

Dave and I consulted Trip Advisor for a great restaurant nearby.  The Boiling Crab had a one-hour wait on Friday night, but the waits at other top-rated restaurants were even longer.

The restaurant was fun, but not quite our thing.  We each ordered a pound of shrimp, flavored with cajun seasoning.  The waitress brought us a plastic bag with our shrimp cooked inside it in sauce.  She dumped the contents of the bag on our plastic coated table, and we began shelling those shrimp!

 The Boiling Crab was in an Asian section of Sacramento, next to other restaurants advertising Vietnamese "pho."  We stopped at this large Asian grocery, decorated for Chinese New Year, which is coming up on January 25, 2020.

I would love to own this real mandarin orange tree, decorated with red and gold money envelopes for Chinese New Year.