As you can see, my few days in San Francisco was fully booked. When I wasn’t at the Web 2.0 Summit learning and listening to the things going on there, I was visiting the offices of Zynga and Google and have some other meetings there. I did however manage to squeeze in two things. On one of the nights I managed to meet up with Kitteh’s best friend Angela.
Angela studies in Stanford which is not far from the Google office so she basically lives in San Francisco (almost). She came by to see me for a short while but the real reason why she came over was because Kitteh and her wanted to exchange stuff. When they knew I was going to San Francisco, they quickly bought each other stuff and got me to do the exchange for them.
On the last afternoon I was at San Francisco, I did manage to go to Fisherman’s Wharf.
I remember my parents taking me there when I was a little kid and I remember we bought this huge tin of hot chocolate powder that literally took us years to finish. Being there again many years later I can’t say that anything looked familiar to me though. I can’t tell if there was much of a change or that I just have really short memory.
Here’s Ming and I at Fisherman’s Wharf.
The cool thing about Fisherman’s Wharf is that standing there, you can see the most famous prison in the world: Alcatraz. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s this old prison they had on an island right off San Francisco and was once known as impossible to break out of. To date, nobody has ever officially succeeded in breaking out of Alcatraz Prison. (And I say officially because unofficially… JOHN MASON DID!!!)
The funny thing is that standing at Fisherman’s Wharf you’d think that it’s pretty near and that you’d make the swim over from the island to the mainland. The currents in the water though looked fierce and I would imagine even good swimmers would be swept out into the Pacific Ocean from the undercurrents.
Alcatraz is also known as The Rock and many of you might have known it for the movie The Rock that starred Sean Connery and Nicholas Cage. Kingston, Ming and I ended up having lunch together at a restaurant at Fisherman’s Wharf talking all about action movies.
We all agreed that The Rock was one of the best action movies ever made and they just don’t make action movies like that anymore.
My favourite quote from The Rock:
John Mason (Sean Connery): Are you sure you’re ready for this?
Stanley Goodspeed (Nicholas Cage): I’ll do my best
John Mason: Your “best”? Losers always whine about their best. Winners go home and fuck the prom queen.
Stanley Goodspeed: Carla was the prom queen.
John Mason: Really?
Stanley Goodspeed: [cocks his gun] Yeah.
Or well here’s the scene. It’s a spoiler if you haven’t seen the movie yet.
If you haven’t already seen The Rock. Go watch it! The movie came out some 14 years ago in 1996 but it’s still just as good. Here’s the trailer.
The trailer’s really 90s (because it was released in the 90s) but the movie was great.
Anyway, Fisherman’s Wharf is a really nice touristy place. Lots of nice touristy stuff that you can buy there. We even saw this store that sold autographs of famous artists, politicians or people from history. Imagine having Heath Ledger’s autograph from Batman’s The Dark Knight. We saw it framed up there.
Before we left Fisherman’s Wharf I got my hands on these little donuts.
They’re like little drops of Heaven. SOooo yummy!
The next day I flew to Vegas to spend the weekend there before coming home. Will blog about that soon 🙂
Timothy Tiah – Co-Founder of Colony, Kuala Lumpur Co-Working Space