San Francisco Jet Set Go

Holy Airplane Batman - I sure had me one wonderful astounding Labor Day weekend adventure!

For a long time I have refused to do much traveling for Labor Day. (I think an overcrowded crazy camping incident in High School is what afflicted me.)

But this Labor Day weekend I threw all caution to the wind and planned an incredible jam packed artsy girl weekend with my long time friend Karrie. I hopped an airplane early early Saturday and found myself in San Francisco by 8am. Karrie had driven up with her guy Noah the night before and they crashed at the Metro Hotel on Divisadero which is where I met up with them and we started our weekend.

The Metro Hotel had this great garden courtyard in the back where we took our first of many attempts at photographing ourselves.

I of course had to play with my Macro setting to get this cool flowers - anyone know what they are?

After catching up a bit we went for our first wander up through the Haight Ashbury neighborhood. I felt like I could have filled my camera with pictures of just the houses alone! Here are my two favorites:

The craftsmanship on these houses was amazing! And then I completely fell for this garden spot - I heard about people losing their hearts in San Francisco...

I also was quite taken with the graffiti in this neighborhood - this sidewalk spot is just a tiny taste of the amazingness we saw.

While we still had Noah and his car (before he left us to our adventures) we all went to Golden Gate Park. It wasn't until afterwards looking at a map that I realized the section of park we wandered in was only a small small parcel of the whole.

We visited the Japanese Tea Garden and I fell in love with this particular pagoda (a zillion more pics on my flickr!)

After wandering Golden Gate it was time to check into our accommodations at the Hotel Des Arts where every room is painted by a different artist. We splurged and got a double suite - and it turned out to be perfect for the 2 of us. Can you guess at the theme?

Above the door between the two rooms is perhaps the title, "Crazy Booby Rainbow"
Oh yeah!!
After freaking out on our room a bit we managed to extract ourselves long enough to wander through the Gates of China Town in search of cheap noodles. Window shopped and fed, we returned to enjoy the space and prepare ourselves for a trip to the San Francisco MOMA to see the work of Frida Kahlo.

The Frida show was packed to the gills of course but we both still greatly enjoyed it.
I could go on and on about it but I'll just touch on the biggest "eureka" moment of seeing her paintings in person:

I had NO idea how much of this piece was collaged!

We also explored some of the MOMA's other collections and admired among many great works a Warhol we both actually liked:

And this incredible piece that I'm now kicking myself for not getting the artist's name. Looks like shadows... but it's not! One of the more fun and subtle installations I've seen.

During our stay we had many more adventures and sights including:
Riding the Cable Car (twice!) to Fisherman's Wharf and catching the sunset over Alcatraz.
We also managed to catch a glimpse of the wild parrots of Telegraph Hill (but of course I didn't get a picture. Just trust me on that one!)

But out of all of it, one of my favoritest of pictures is this one taken at the Musee Mechanique:

Thank you San Francisco - I think I'll be back to visit soon!