Memorial Day weekend

DALY CITY, CALIF. — To follow up on Saturday’s post, a recap of the last few days:

On Sunday Rajani and I decided to spend most of the day in San Francisco, so we went to Delancey Street for brunch. Unwittingly we got there before they opened at 10 a.m., but it gave us a chance to park the car and walk down the Embarcadero a bit. The weather was great, sunny and cool, and when we got back to the restaurant, we were able to sit outside on the patio, with a clear view of the Bay Bridge.

Afterwards we went to Yerba Buena Gardens. As we crossed the park, we saw the San Francisco Opera setting up for a concert. We found out it was part of the Yerba Buena Gardens Festival, a series of free outdoor concerts running May through October. The opera concert was to start at 2 p.m., which gave us a few hours to kill, so we went to the SFMoMA. One work I especially liked is Cyclorama by Marco Brambilla, which must’ve been installed sometime since my last visit; it “presents views from nine revolving rooftop restaurants in cities across North America. Shown on nine consecutive monitors in a custom-built cylindrical room, the videos are synchronized to erode any notion of distance or time zone, in effect merging the cities in a single panoramic skyline.” It’s pretty cool.

We got back to the park in time for the opera concert, where they sang arias from upcoming productions, including two of my favorites: the trio “Soave sia il vento” from Così fan tutte (Mozart), and the tenor-baritone duet “Au fond du temple saint” from The Pearl Fishers (Bizet). Rajani and I stayed for the first half of the concert, then bailed in favor of an early dinner. Chevy’s was close by, so we went there for much needed refreshment.

My parents were to arrive at SFO from their three-week vacation in the Philippines, so after a brief rest back at the house, Rajani and I drove to the airport to pick them up. It was all very Love Actually (you know, the scenes of arrivals at Heathrow).

On Monday, Memorial Day, after a lazy morning start, we all (my parents, one of my aunts, Rajani, and I) got some fast food to go and had our picnic lunch of burgers and fries under a cute gazebo at San Bruno City Park. That evening I drove Rajani to San Jose for her flight back home.

I spent the rest of that day and today mostly napping. Jet lag plus sleep debt means I’m not even on west or east coast time anymore–it’s more like Greenwich Mean or something. Tomorrow my long holiday comes to a close, and I head back to the east coast, back to my man and our cat, both of whom I’ve missed. Can’t wait.