I left my heart in San Francisco

Along with a fair amount of money. Sorry I have not posted in a while, I had written a huge post about my trip and stupid frickin' blogger ate it.

Here it goes again, this time in smaller chunks. I really loved staying in Japantown. It's centrally located and close enough to a bunch of things one can walk to. On the day after we arrived, Jeff worked the wine event which left me to do WHATEVER I WANTED.

Our hotel anchors one end of a mall that has a ton of restaurants and shops so the first stop of my day alone was to the Kinokuniya Bookstore. I have been drooling over the beauty of japanese craft books being snatched up by crafters over the years so I was in heaven when I saw this store. I picked up two books, one on moss and one on papier-mache:


I kept meaning to go back and get more, but I ran out of time and luggage space. Next stop was the Kinokuniya Stationery & Gift store where I picked up some cool notebooks and some pens I read about in a WIRED magazine:
The pens are apparently hot among school girls because they have itty-bitty tips and come in a million colors. I am a pen freak so as soon as I saw these I grabbed a ton of them.

Next was a stop at Ichiban Kan. "Carefully selected best-selling goods from Japan--from kitchen utensils, packaged dry foods, stationery items and toys starting at $1 per item. Patterned after Japan's popular 100-Yen shops." (from the sfjapantown site) This place was super-cool and I thought I had died and gone to Tupperware heaven when I walked down the storage container aisle. This place had every single conceivable size and configuration of plastic food storage containers for A DOLLAR. If I would have had more room in my luggage I would have loaded up. Right now one of those little round jobbies is holding roasted garlic cloves from a head I had roasted and wrapped in a chunk of foil doomed to be hidden behind the milk and forgotten until a fridge clean out. I don't know how many times I have thrown away roasted garlic because I was afraid to open a wad of foil lurking in the depths of the refrigerator. The bottom two containers are segmented like little frozen tv dinners (love it!).

It doesn't take a lot to make me happy.

I also picked up some popsicle molds which won't be used for popsicles, but I will save that for another post. (Hint: did anyone see Colin Cowie on Oprah with his couture ice cubes? Did I just give myself away?)

The rest of the day was spent walking along Filmore and going into places like Paper-Source and Kiehls and my final stop was the Lush on Union where I loaded up. I had never experience the glory that is Lush and I really wanted to know what all of the fuss was about and if it was deserved. It is. It's made me want to try making these again. I made a bunch of bath stuff for Christmas one year when making bath bombs was the hip thing to do but haven't done much lately in that department.

More on my trip in another post. It's good to be back!