Play It! Say It!

Best tour of the trip

2010-10-13T21:17:00.000-07:00

I am absolutely exhausted! Today I went on a fabulous tour down the coast to Monterey and Carmel. It was sometimes fine and sometime foggy, changing depending whether we were on the coast or slightly inland. It made me realise how lucky I've been with the fine weather in San Francisco. Apparently, October is the best time to visit SF, as even the summer months are usually foggy.

After a hot drink and pastry stop in a very small town called Davenport, our first main stop was Santa Cruz which is a big surfie town. The houses there are expensive and totally awesome, each one is different and spectacular! Our tour guide was offered some weed while we were there and while recounting the story to us, an old woman up the back of the van yelled out, "why didn't you ask us if we wanted any??" haha

California grows a huge amount of produce for the rest of America as well as for export. It doesn't rain there much but they irrigate using water from the Sierra Nevada. We saw lots of artichoke crops, cherry trees, strawberry fields and pumpkins for jack'o'laterns. Here are some brussel sprouts. I'd never seen them like this before. Don't they look crazy?? (Oh and the strawberries and plums here are delicious.)

This stupid blogger won't import vertical images today. :/
Tilt your head for maximum effect.

Monterey was a great destination where we had lunch but sadly no time for one of the best aquariums in the world. I did however manage to fit in time to browse a shop called Everything Pink. Everything was also really expensive, so I just took a whole heap of photos. They even had Hello Kitty collector Pez and Hello Kitty Connect 4. :(

We drove along the coast some more along the 17-mile and saw some ritzy golf courses which cost $500 or more for one game. This course is right on the beach.

I think this is where we also saw "ninja squirrels" as the tour guide called them as well as Bird Rock which was covered in Sea Lions. (The guide said we were lucky the wind wasn't blowing in the wrong direction.)

As you can see the water was stripey blue and so vivid. The golfers and squirrels have a great view.

We then stopped to see this supposedly famous tree - The Lone Cyprus. As you can see from this photo and the previous one, the weather changed rapidly. But it actually made the day all the more enjoyable.

Carmel and Carmel-by-the-Sea just wasted my life. Everything cost a trillion dollars and were ridiculous anyway.

Though the houses were quite flashy. Famous residents apparently include Clint Eastwood, Jennifer Aniston, (was) Doris Day, Betty White and a stack of authors.

I would have much rather we had time instead to have a tour of the Carmel Mission, but really that is only a small complaint considering what a brilliant day I had otherwise.

Tomorrow is very exciting because I get to go home to Queensland!!! In the morning however I have an appointment with Atari Metcalf who was the brains behind a massive Australian-wide film training program for disadvantaged youth. I'm very lucky to be able to pick his brains for my new job at Club 12/25 in Canberra which I'm also very excited about.

Without a doubt, the coolest thing in all of America!!!

2010-10-12T17:56:00.000-07:00

Today I was in absolute heaven and I'm not exaggerating when I say it was the absolute highlight of my trip to America. Stepping through the front doors, I was honestly breathless.

At Pier 45 along Fisherman's Wharf is a free museum called the Musée Mécanique. But just because it was free, doesn't mean I didn't spend any money there. In my hand were 40 quarters and I had an absolutely thrilling time spending them all!

Photo from the museum's photo gallery.

A book about the place.

The museum is a privately owned collection of arcade games and machines, some over a century old but all in working condition, mostly costing 25 cents each. The moving musical scenes, fortune tellers, love testers, arcade games, peep shows and games of skill and chance kept me entranced for hours.

With great difficulty I won at Pong, which was especially hard controlling the game with little knobs that spun crazily. It's little wonder the newer arcade games were controlled by joysticks and buttons.

I also had my fortune told a few times. I've always wanted to have a little card pop out at me, predicting my future, just like in the movie Big. The "Grandmother Prophecy" told me that I have a sympathetic nature and that after some hardship in the immediate future "everything will turn out for the best" which is excellent news.

This fortune telling machine didn't give me a card, but for 25 cents the little room at the top lit up and in it popped up the message - "An elopement". Exciting news (or not).

Another game that had me cacking away at myself was bowling. For 50 cents this time, I played 5 frames and even got a strike! Somehow I made 87 points, which is pretty close to Paul's record with a full length game and the kiddy bumpers up...

I also took a walk up to the Ghirardelli chocolate factory. I was disappointed there were no tours of the production factory available but there were shops, which is where I had a Pumpkin Spice Caramel Hot Cocoa which was as good as the Pumpkin Pie I tried slash not very good at all. It confuses me no end that they like pumpkin as a sweet food. They have pumpkin soup but call it Butternut Squash soup as far as I'm aware. Most curious. The Ghirardelli chocolate is very yummy, however, and I have some to share when I get home. I have some cool lollies too. They have so much variety of all food types here! :D

Tomorrow I'm getting up early for a tour to Monterey. After booking it, I read some of the tour company's reviews. While the majority are fairly positive, the people who didn't like the tours really didn't like them. Like one person who is taking them to small claims court to get their money back. Okay, now I'm worried.

An Afternoon on Alcatraz Island

2010-10-11T19:46:00.000-07:00

I took a ferry over to Alcatraz Island today and learnt a little about its history as a military fort, prison, site of an American Indian occupation and its current incarnation, a national park. Initially, it doesn't seem so imposing when one hears that the original name was La Isla de los Alcatraces meaning the "Island of Pelicans" but it was creepy and the stories were horrible.

I was surprised to learn that many of the guards and their families had lived on the island also. The children who remember living there said it was lots of fun (they were hardly aware of the prison). When asked what she thought about living so close to all those murders, one woman commented that at least they knew where the bad people were. (I wonder what their dads were like though, it doesn't seem like they were very nice people.)

I also learnt about the escape attempts, from the most famous plan which lasted three days and ended with Marines shooting up the place, to a fellow who escaped out a window, decided it was too far to swim and then let himself back in through another window. (His life turned around when his daughter contacted him. He turned over a new leaf and was parolled after 20 years I think. Unimaginably, his daughter, who had moved her family to Oakland to be close to him, poisoned her husband and then she was sent to prison. The fellow married his former wife and they brought up the daughter's children.)

I learnt that after the Native Americans took over Alcatraz for 19 months from 1969-1971, President Nixon started to change the laws so that they were given their land back. "The underlying goals of the Indians on Alcatraz were to awaken the American public to the reality of the plight of the first Americans and to assert the need for Indian self-determination. As a result of the occupation, either directly or indirectly, the official government policy of termination of Indian tribes was ended and a policy of Indian self-determination became the official US government policy." (Before that, when the island was still a prison, Hopi men had been imprisoned there for refusing to send their children to government boarding school.)

I also learnt a bit about Al Capone and most interestingly, while the owner of dairy and meat factories, they were the first food producers to put used by dates on food when Capone became concerned about kids drinking sour milk! I also discovered that the prison was a silent prison. Inmates were only allowed to talk for three minutes during the morning and afternoon recreation yard periods and for two hours on weekends.

It was a really great day. The audio tour was very informative and compelling and the prison and prisoner stories fascinating. For such a little island though, there was a lot of walking. From the dock to the prison cells is a quarter of a mile walk, in the form of a snakey path up a very steep hill, equivalent to the height of a 13 storey building! But it gave us a breathtaking view of the bay, city and all the bridges and was definately worth doing.

Could this be the best day ever!?

2010-10-10T14:42:00.000-07:00

The weather is absolutely perfect today and everyone in San Francisco is outside celebrating because it's Columbus Day in America! I was lucky enough to come across San Francisco's 142nd Annual Italian Heritage Parade (San Francisco's oldest civic event and the nation's oldest Italian-American parade) at Fisherman's Wharf and it was lots of fun with lively marching bands, lots of Italian groups and soldiers & guards, including Canadian guards, all the while a fighter plane did fly-bys over head. (I did find it mildly amusing that young women used fake rifles to throw around in the air and men on horses shot blanks in the air with pistols - I don't think that would be allowed in Australia.)

(I'm staying on Mason St)

In the afternoon, the wharf was totally packed out for the Blue Angels air show.

The Navy is also in town. Their slogan and, I'm guessing, relatively new focus is pretty swish - "Defending Freedom, Protecting the Environment". So, not only are they protecting mankind against evil, but they also feel compelled to save the koalas for us. (That's a koala in the 'Y' of the sign.) Nice.

PS America is much cheaper compared to rip off Australia. A bottle of cold water - $1 and chocolate bars - 89c. Someone in Berlin commented that Australia was expensive, now I know it's true!

I finished the day off with pizza, root beer (tangy) and a directionless stroll through the throngs of people celebrating in Little Italy. It has been an enjoyable day. Tomorrow - Alcatraz.

A most pleasant meeting :)

2010-10-09T21:27:00.000-07:00

Today Andrew and I had an amazing meeting with Jack Heath , the founder of the Inspire Foundation. He was incredibly generous with his time and we had a great afternoon with him.

Jack kindly took us on a tour of the bay area during the unbelievably fantastic Blue Angels air show. We drove over the Golden Gate Bridge, spent a little while in Sausalito which has a brilliant view of the bay and San Francisco (and where we saw the rock balancer) and then back into the city via the Bay Bridge.

Also, for no other reason than the fire trucks here look cool, here is a photo of a fire truck! The sirens here though are really loud and far more distressing than Australian fire engine sirens. The firemen are probably just as hot though. ;)

We won again!!!!!!!!!!

2010-10-08T23:14:00.000-07:00

Beyond our wildest expectations, Play It! Say It! won the Roy Amara Prize this evening following our presentation at the Institute For The Future! Thanks to Andrew and Adam's idea with Jack's and my website and entry into the competition, we have won our first international competition!! :D

Here's a photo of the prize pack and cheque!!

The Roy Amara prize was $3000 and all the Bodyshock winners received a prize pack including a Bodyshock the Future t-shirt and an Institute For The Future t-shirt, an IFTF mug and most exciting for me, a big poster of their entry (in our case the Play It! Say It! logo which of course I designed - I'll be itching to get it framed and up on my wall at home). It was also a buzz to see our logo up on the wall at the Institute too.

We met lots of amazing people, including Kelly McGonigal who is not only amazing but incredibly beautiful and nice. It was actually a brilliant TED talk by her twin sister Jane McGonigal that led me to the Bodyshock competition in the first place.

We also ate today (which is lucky, because I love to eat) at a totally delicious diner that had pies of every type - cherry, coconut, pumpkin, chocolate pecan, banana, key lime, NY cheesecake and the list goes on and on - and also every ice-cream flavour you could ever imagine, including pumpkin ice-cream. (For which I don't hold high hopes - pumpkin pie just tasted like pumpkins, funnily enough.)

I had Carribean French Toast (perfection, though I had to stop after about 5 mouthfuls) and Andrew had eggs and hash brown pie.

We also had time today to explore Stanford University which has an enormous but beautiful campus.

And just as Granma had requested, I said "hi" to America for her (in the visual presentation I put a little "My Grandma said to say 'hi'") and the audience made a little noise like you do when you see something cute. So, I reckon that is a "hi" back Granma. :)

Palto Alto

2010-10-07T14:45:00.000-07:00

Palo Alto is an hour by train from San Francisco. So, here we are in a very fancy hotel working on our presentation for tomorrow night. Here is our visual presentation for those interested. :)

Play It! Say It! IFTF on Prezi

How's this for being in Silicon Valley - walking down the street just outside of Stanford University and Andrew was given a BlingTag (with a free $10 on it!) - the cool thing is that you just pass the tag over the checkout point and it automatically deducts the money from your paypal account. (I'm not sure what happens if it gets stolen.)

Over the bridge and through the woods

2010-10-06T18:22:00.000-07:00

A perfect hot chocolate to start the day, which unfortunately also went down the front of my white shirt, but no matter, it was still a good start to my first tour - over the Golden Gate Bridge (it's painted International Orange FYI), a walk through Muir Woods and finally lunch (Chili & fries) at the pretty seaside town of Sausalito.

In the afternoon for a long time I just chilled out at Fisherman's Wharf, soaking up the sun and unsuccessfully tried my first Soduku puzzle. After feeling my skin starting to burn, I took myself off for a walk, soon stumbling across one of my favourite attractions - Ripley's Believe It or Not!

This freak, Chungking, actually cut a hole in his scalp to hold the candle in place.

This is a disturbing but festive designer fantasty coffin which are made in Ghana. Their coffins reflect the occupation of the dead person, which in this case was for a former president of a local bottling plant.

And this happier one is a mural made from shoe laces and old sneakers. The photo doesn't do it justice; it is so colourful and lively in real life!

Finally, with much anticipation, I finished the day off with some real Mexican nachos and a pineapple flavoured soft drink also from Mexico. And it was delicious!

Oh, I also heard a neat story about the bridge today. To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Golden Gate bridge in 1987, it was closed to cars in order to let pedestrians cross it en masse. 50,000 people were expected to cross it but on the day about 800,000 people turned up, which is pretty incredible considering the population of San Francisco was 750,000 at the time. The bridge dipped down 10 feet in the middle.

The hills are alive ... with me panting struggling up and down them

2010-10-05T17:24:00.000-07:00

My first day in San Francisco, I walked wherever the many steep hilly streets took me. And first up was Fisherman's Wharf which had a great view of the bay, Alcatrez and some very content sea lions.

Note the boat name! - Kitty Kat :)

Next was Pier 39 which was very touristy and probably a total ripoff but it had a very entertaining atmosphere. Bubba Gump Shrimp Co was there but I didn't take a photo because I didn't want to look *too* touristy. And so was a Leftoriam, which I past once, but couldn't help but take a peek inside. And here started my souvenir purchasing. Something for Paul - it's a bit mean so I didn't buy one for you Mum :) - and something for Dad - you've probably already guessed what it is. ;)

I didn't know much about San Francisco, so this might be old news to everyone else, but 3/4 of San Francisco was burnt down in 1906. Apparently there was an earthquake that burst the gas and water pipes. Fires broke out all over town, fuelled by the gas, and were able to burn for 3 days because there was no water to put it out. The old Victorian buildings were saved by knocking down blocks and blocks of building to act as a fire break. Most of the houses here are made from Redwood timber, so were highly flammable. You'd never guess it though because it's a beautiful city with a very rich and fascinating culture and the buildings are so cute in all different colours.

This striking green building is owned by Francis Ford Coppola with apparently a very good restaurant he owns at ground level. The other building is the tallest building in San Francisco and had to be built in a pyramid shape so it didn't cast too much of a shadow over the rest of the city.

Little Italy for lunch of Funghi Pizza, which was superb! I also found a totally groovy shop and bought something for Jack (x2), Steve, Paul and me. After Little Italy, I hit Chinatown but thankfully only bought a bracelet made of duck mahjong bone tiles. Don't hurt ducks.

In the afternoon, I only barely was able to drag myself up the massively steep Telegraph Hill to visit art deco Coit Tower which gives a 360 degree view of the San Francisco area. The main reason I wanted to see it though, was for the 1933-34 Diego Rivera-inspired murals depicting the struggles of working class Americans. The murals are very commanding.

In the evening, Andrew and I went on a night tour of San Francisco - it was very cold and bumpy - but the tour guide, Reed, was really friendly and full of fascinating San Francisco history and local tips (like a fitness centre that operates out of an old cinema, so while you work out you can watch movies on a big screen!).

We had dinner at America's oldest Italian restaurant and, happily, ended up where I always end up - a yummy chocolate shop - and had a lovely flat walk home.

5 great things about LAX

2010-10-04T23:41:00.000-07:00

1. I didn't get shot, stabbed or mugged on my 100m dash between the international to domestic terminal
2. Starbuck's Salted Caramel Hot Chocolate (OMG - total taste sensation!!)
3. Gladstone's "world famous" chowder while watching Gridiron on a widescreen (great service and the best/first chowder I've ever had)
4. American service - turns out Americans are really chatty and polite (so much for the "friendly Australian" sterotype, I was a total grumble-bum going through customs which took *forever*)
5. A vending machines with ... wait for it ... ipods, nintendo ds, phones and cameras!

But you really have to try a Salted Caramel Hot Chocolate yourself, I absolutely insist! Here's a recipe I found on the internets for the extremely delicious drink.

Alice’s Salted Caramel Hot Chocolate Recipe

Ingredients:
3 tablespoons Caramel syrup, heated to luke warm
Hot Chocolate
Canned Whipped Cream
Pinch of Medium Coarse Sea Salt

Directions:
Pour 2 Tablespoons of caramel syrup into a mug so the inside of the mug is coated well. Add hot chocolate and stir everything. Top off with with cream, drizzle with remaining caramel, and sprinkle with sea salt.

We won!!!

2010-10-02T04:50:00.000-07:00

Last Thursday Andrew, Adam and I discovered that our idea, Play It! Say It!, is one of the winning ideas in the 2010 Bodyshock the Future competition! Thanks big time to everyone who helped us with our entry and who supported our idea by voting for it.

Thrillingly, this means that Andrew and I will be presenting our idea, in person, at The Institute of the Future in Palo Alto next week, 8th October 2010. At the same time, we will have the opportunity to meet with Microsoft and other organisations and people related to gaming and mental health who will help us make Play It! Say It! a reality.

Of course, I'm also looking forward to seeing America for the first time, so I hope you follow me on my two week trip, following our work and fun in California.