2024 San Francisco
Bay Area Visit
(6/7/2024 - 6/10/2024)
2024 San Francisco
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On Friday, June 7, 2024, Katherine and Brian travelled to our old stomping grounds in the San Francisco Bay Area and first attended a party at Pavni's house, then stayed for a couple days running around meeting up with old friends. Click on any photo for a much larger highest resolution original I have.
Below is a picture of Pavni Diwanji with her dog Cilantro in the foreground. We flew into SFO airport on Friday, June 7 and drove directly to the party. Among other things, the party was celebrating Maya's graduation from high school.
Maya (at the center standing next to Pavni) saying a few words.
Panning to the left you see more people who came. Pavni's parents (Maya's grandparents) came all the way from India.
At Pavni's party there was a photo booth that produced analog photos. I scanned this one in. It is all the people attending the party that worked together at Kendara in 1999. Kendara was a startup founded by the two people on the far left (Freeman Murray and Pavni Diwanji). The rest of us were employees: Wendy Riggs in blue, Jean-Michel Leon, Brian Wilson (me, tall, very light blue shirt) and Katherine Chung in lower right. Funny story: Katherine and Brian got married in 2022 (23 years after they first met and worked together at Kendara).
Katherine and I stayed at the "Rosewood Hotel in Menlo Park" kind of centrally located (and a couple miles from the last place we lived in the Bay Area).
The next morning on Saturday, June 8th, we drove up to Alameda to see Candace for brunch. Picture below is terrible, my selfie skills are awful.
After brunch with Candace, we drove back down to Los Gatos for late lunch (early dinner) of some Franklin BBQ Katherine and Brian brought from Austin. Stuart and Maggie hosted, and Lia and Van came up from San Diego to join us! Below is Lia, Van, and Stuart.
Then panning right here is Maggie with "Habibi" the dog.
Then back to the Rosewood to sleep, and the next morning we drove up to San Francisco to see Anbu Anbalagapandian and her 1 year old son Veera at Cafe Réveille, 610 Long Bridge Street, San Francisco, CA. Below Katherine is holding Veera.
I took the picture below to remind me which Cafe Réveille we met at.
Brian, Veera, and Katherine.
Anbu took these and they are digital, so we had several, LOL. The picture below is a better one of Veera.
After breakfast we wandered half a block to Mission Bay Kids Park, San Francisco. It's pretty cool. Below is a panorama. A lot of the most dangerous playground equipment has been redesigned since I was a kid, like the teeter totter (See Saw?) is safer and "damped" to prevent various injuries. But there was a climbing structure at the far end of the park that looked pretty dangerous still.
Anbu pushing Veera in a swing. They come here almost every day.
After brunch with Anbu, Katherine and I swung by "Amigos Grill" in Portola Valley (which we affectionately call "Ladera Mexican") for a marguarita. This is near where we lived for 5 years and we have fond memories of this establishment.
Next we drove back up to Oakland to see Jenny Fong and Michael Enslow. We met up at an art studio called "Norton Factory Studios" in Oakland. Below is Jenny facing us, Michael and Katherine walking towards Jenny.
We then took a quick drive to Brotzeit Lokal. In the picture below, Katherine is pointing out the chemical makeup of alcohol, which is organic!
The view near our table outside. It is very pretty and a nice day.
Back over the San Mateo bridge (highway 92) to stop at our hotel for 5 minutes.
Coming over the bridge, these are all very familiar drives and views to us.
On to our last set of friends we will see on this trip at Koi Palace in Milpitas! Now if you look closely, I am the only howlie in the restaurant. I'm pretty sure they only let me in because I'm with Asian people. (That's a joke.)
From left to right in front: Katherine Chung, Brian Wilson (me), Cecilia Luu, Evelyn Wong, Billy Ng in red on far right. From left to right in back: Kenneth Kim, Hannah Kim, Bryan Kim, and Jennie Kim.
The next morning, we get up, check out of the Rosewood hotel, and swing by Backblaze (my previous employer) so I could get coffee with Gleb, then we had to run off to catch our flight!
Katherine had me take this picture of left over Covid signs from the pandemic. California held onto this longer than most places, but I only saw a couple people wearing masks out of the thousands of people we observed this trip. Even in California things have returned to 2018 "normal" at this point where nobody wears masks, and people hug hello and goodbye again (not 6 feet of social distancing).
Katherine and I returned the rental car the morning of June 10th, and here we are zooming along in the "Air Train" at SFO airport. I used to start all my trips with this photo, just because it's a nice perspective and it's funny to have 1,000 photos of the same place before I start each adventure. But now I live in Austin so I don't get to take this photo as much. Bye bye San Francisco! See you soon again for our next visit!
That's it! That's all the pictures. All done!