Those who have been tracking Joyce’s and my travel blogs must feel that we are continually travelling. That is true. (Remember our Passion for Travel?)

Although we technically live in San Francisco, we have been spending so little time here that when we do get back home, we feel that we have to act as tourists in our own city, just to catch up with what is new. After all, as we explain in our blog, we also have passions for the San Francisco Bay Area, food and wine, and art and theater.

When we found ourselves with almost an entire week in the city, between our New England and Alaska trips, we decided to catch up on as many of the city’s restaurants, theaters, art museums, and as much of the city’s history, as possible.

So, as discussed in our next blogs, we took in three plays:

• Armistead Maupin’s entertaining, Broadway-bound Tales of the City at American Conservatory Theater (ACT)
• Anna Deveare Smith’s poignant Let Me Down Easy at Berkeley Repertory Theater (BRT); and
• Franz Kafka’s haunting Metamorphosis, at Berkeley’s Aurora Theater.

Reveled in one of the four big art exhibitions that we plan to visit:

• Picasso, Masterpieces from the Musee National Picasso, at the DeYoung Museum.

The other exhibitions that we plan to visit during our next interlude in the city are:

• SFMOMA’s The Stein’s Collect;
• Contemporary Jewish Museum’s complementary exhibition Seeing Gertrude Stein; and
• Palace of the Legion of Honor’s Dutch and Flemish Masterworks.

We also went on a very informative historical and architectural tour of our Russian Hill neighborhood, guided by Rick Evans and sponsored by the Commonwealth Club.

 

Finally, we enjoyed three new (at least for us) dining experiences and revisited some old favorites. The new experiences were:

• Sons and Daughters on Nob Hill;
• Ippuku, a Japanese Izakaya in downtown Berkeley;
• A very healthy, and delicious three-dish meal that Joyce discovered and managed to find time (with my invaluable assistance) to prepare.

Repeats of a couple of old favorite restaurant experiences were:

• Dim Sum at City View; and
• Happy hour at McCormick & Kuleto,

We discuss each of these in our next four blogs.