US of A (Day 4)

4th Day: San Francisco (Castro) - Union Square - Burlingame

On the fourth morning, we gave ourselves additional time to sleep in and to hang around at home after a tiring weekend. Breakfast was a simple affair because we were pretty worried that we had busted our expenses on the second day in Gilroy.

Cinamon Donuts from Safeway (it's like Cold Storage albeit a much bigger version) which were really addictive

Wearing the coat that I was gonna wear for the day for fun and because it was pretty cold in the morning (yes, you can see the tag because it was new)

Breakfast in style

After taking our time to get ready, we left home at about 12 noon for San Francisco. Actually, we did a bit of strategic planning (which I will get to later)

Burlingame was really like a quiet suburb and was one of the richer and safer areas in SF

train tracks of Caltrain

Traveling to SF as an independent tourist really requires you to do lots of research and smart planning. Unlike SG, many of the places are not very accessible by public transport and even if they were, they have several kinds of trains (in SG, you just have to say the train and everyone knows you are referring to SMRT but over there, they have caltrain, bart to name a few). And for the caltrain, they have stipulated timings (about 1 hour between each train so you really need to get the timings correct cause missing the train would cause you lots of time wastage and for us, waiting in the cold) 

Fortunately or unfortunately, they have a rather known area within SF where we were advised to avoid because people there are known to cause troubles and instigate fights. It was a risky move on our part to travel there alone because we look every bit like tourists and very potential targets of bullying. Whilst waiting for the bus to get to Castro, we met 3 kids whom we had every right to suspect were from that area. They were throwing fart bombs at pedestrians, at the windscreens of drivers (yea, not kidding) and because they got on the same bus that we boarded, they threw it even in the bus. Thankfully, the bus captain did his part by chasing them off the bus and reported the incident to policemen patrolling the area. And, one thing about SF, it's really cold. I know I've mentioned this a few times but we thought Burlingame was cold enough. It turns out that the clouds in SF always cover the sun so it gets freezing cold when the wind blows even in summer.

In any case, we got to Castro (which sells vintage stuff like Haigh / Ashbury but on the more affordable end) 

  

Fresh and hot bagel which tasted absolutely delicious :)

We saw many saw country flags in this particular store

I tell you, our loyalty is dangerously wavering

Sadly, it was not a very fruitful trip at Castro for us because we weren't too sure where the hauls were. Instead, we went on a pilgrim in search for ...

That's the city hall in SF

That's the shop at Hayes. We spent some effort before we found this place but it was absolutely worth it. Can you already guess what it was?

Yep! Macarons!

This shop was initially known as Paulette. I have quite a sweet tooth and macarons are included. Before the trip, I was googling on best macarons in SF and this kept appearing on my google feed. 6 macarons came at about 12USD which was absolutely worth it in our opinions

Thereafter, we went back to Union Square for some shopping before heading back to Burlingame. We had cravings for vietnamese so we ended up at Ben Tre. The shop is opened solely by Vietnamese so the food tasted really authentic. I know we can debate about how authentic something can be if it's not located within its home country. But seriously, the shop name, owners and most probably chef are vietnamese, ingredients are similar to what they have at home, beef is fresh in US; there's really nothing more we can ask for.

Beef Pho. So Good. 

Vietnamese spring roll with peanut and sweet sauce dippings. Words cannot describe how delicious and addictive it was.

Because we were headed for LA early morning the next day, we went home by 10PM to pack our bags and  for an early night.

OOTD: Polka Dot Coat - Target || Jeggings - Target || Shades - Cotton On