Short review for a looooooooooooooong weekend - "regular" part of the weekend

Short summary:

Saturday: Learning and hanging around

Sunday: Learning and hanging around + Twin Peaks

Yeah... actually nothing really exciting... but visiting the Twin Peaks was really cool. The view was breathtaking... combined with the setting sun and the cloudless sky (with Jupiter and Venus clearly visible as far as I'm right) it was absolutely amazing...

Here you a have a little panorama of the scene, it's really worth enlarging it (click on the picture).

Take a closer look at the two "stars" next to the moon... Venus and Jupiter?

San Fran @ nighttime... maybe a bit overexposed, but looks cool :-)

The brightest street is Market St.

Short review for a looooooooooooooong weekend - Happy Turkey Day + Black Friday

... which has been over for quite while. Maybe (or probably) this has been overlooked by most of the non-American readers (consequently by most of them): Last Thursday we had Thanksgiving, also known as "Happy Turkey Day... it's one of the most important American holidays, click here if you want to know more about it.

We had no school on that day (and same for Friday). The majority of Americans use to have a big feast on Thanksgivings Day, with stuffed turkey and so on... We just spent the day hanging around in SF and went to the cinema (Four Christmases.... Angelika wanted to see this movie, but in the end she agreed with what i predicted... that the movie is crap)

The day after the Turkey Day is called "Black Friday" (on this day all stores operate in the black). As a lot of presents are made on Thanksgivings Day there are usually thousands of special offers on the day after... though it seemed to be a bit different this year, probably because of the economic crisis... unlike than in other years there weren't any really fantastic or special deals.

Weekend review (I'm becoming a faster poster ^^)

Saturday's gone... though it remains in our hearts, lol.

Ok, short summary: We checked out the Golden Gate Park... I already drove through across the park with the bike, but I actually didn't see much of it... First we got to the Japanese Tea Garden, the name is self-explanatory... it's a cozy place to hang out. Well, to be exactly you can't actually hang out there... just walking around and taking some pictures is possible... not to forget the 5$ admission fee.

Nevertheless it was nice to see all the little trees and streamlets. We also saw the M.H. de Young Museum (from the outside) as it is just near the Garden.

After hanging out in the Park for a while, we went to Chinatown and bought some groceries... yeah, actually nothing really exciting, but it was a cool day... and btw, I nearly forgot to mention that we went to the cinema in the evening, "Role Models"... nice movie, but not more than that.

Today is more an easy day... a bit learning and stuff like this.

Here some pictures from Saturday:

 
Japanese Tea Garden

 

    de Young Museum

...

And... I nearly forgot: We saw a nice little squirrel...

Religulous

Oh yeah... this is a great movie! I've no idea wether non-Americans ever heard of it, but I really recommend to watch it! (You know, there are ways to see it... even if the movies isn't showed in a cinema near your place)

Religulous is a kind of documentary, but very entertaining! As the name impliesl, the movie is all about religions, their believers, wrongs, human stupidity and conflicts which arise from the different beliefs. Although there is sometimes a lack of some more scientific arguments or specific points, the movie is brilliant!

Sometimes there is some resemblance with Dawkins "The God Delusion", but more entertaining and maybe a bit less clever... which in my opinion is good (as it is a movie and not a book)

This is a must for everyone who's interested in the topic of religious beliefs and their aberrations.

It's probably the best movie I've seen this year.  Click here to see the trailer.

Weekend review Part II

Saturday we finally came around to visit the Coit Tower while there wasn't any fog... The weather was awesome... it was nearly 30°C. Seeing the sunset from the top of the tower was nice, but not as breathtaking as when we saw it two weeks ago from the other side of the bay.

Afterwards we headed to (s)Nob Hill, together with Claudia and Sandro, who're also at the same school. The showed us a nice little Italian Restaurant... which gave a bit variety to the traditional American food (Mc Donalds, Burger King, Pizza Hut, Jack in the Box, KFC, Wendy's...) ;-)

Still not tired (we slept quite long that morning) we went to Lombard to see how it looks at nighttime. Before going home I went to Border's where I found some nice comic books (Get Fuzzy and Pearls before Swine , check it out if you've never heard of them before) 

Here some pictures:

View from the Coit Tower

Coit Tower at night, seen from the end of the crooked part of Lobard St.
(used a parked car as tripod :-D)

Weekend Review... finally! ... Part I: Friday & Quantum of bullshit

It's been a while since the last post and a lot happened during this time. No, let me reformulate this, actually there didn't happen that much, but we had quite a good time...

After hanging around with some friends Friday afternoon (Angelika was playing tennis) we went to the cinema to see the new Bond movie, Quantum of solace. I assume that you read the title, so I don't have to point out separately that it won't be my favourite film.

Let me give you some reasons:

- Bond is never ever saying "My names Bond, James Bond." during the whole movie

- he's never gambling 

- there are no gadgets!!!

- ... and no Q

- no appearence of Miss Moneypenny either

- not the old, traditional scheme with the two "Bond girls" (good and bad)

- and no exaggerated story about a man who want's to rule over the world or to start      a new world war

... and by the way, what happened with the sex scenes?

So, you see, enough reasons to be disappointed, I mean this is simply not a Bond movie. 

In addition to that, Marc Forster isn't able to make action movies... Men, it's absolutely unnecessary to shake the camera during a pursuit or just a simple action scene... You can't see anything, like in "Eagle Eye".

Sure there were some cool scenes, especially when Anatole Taubmann is talking in Swiss-German while he makes a phone call. Let me quote: "Ja Mami, s'isch scho chli heiss da...!"

(I hope I remember it properly...) We couldn't stop laughing after this, and all the people in the cinema were wondering what the heck made us do so :-)

But as I'd say this was the highlight of the movie... the rest was really disappointing. The movie might be not that bad, but it simply can't be called a "James Bond".

 PS: In the US, the movie was released just last week... 

American curiosity part II

After yesterday's post about Spam I wanna post another strange thing I discovered here... You probably know that there are a lot of fast food restaurants here in the states and that healthy food in general isn't very common everywhere... but nevertheless a lot of people try to live in a healthy way. That's the reason why you find a light version of almost every product you can think of... but I'll stop beating around the bush and post what I actuallly wanted to show you:

Uhmm... yeah, it's a bottle of water...