San Francisco Part III

Firstly, if you ever find yourself with some obscure currency that you can't exchange anywhere, find the nearest Travelex as they will buy almost any currency. We've been trying to get rid of 157 Belize dollars for a couple of weeks now - no banks in Mexico were interested and even the main HSBC branch here in San Francisco would not change them. In fact, no one we've asked has even heard of Belize, which is a bit sad really as it's only a few hundred miles from the US (it's like a British person having never heard of Belgium or Holland or Luxembourg).

Being unable to resist the bargains, we went shopping again this morning down at Union Square. Emma bought some trainers, sorry sneakers, and I bought some more clothes for NZ. We also nearly bought one of these but decided to wait to see if we can get it cheaper elsewhere. It's a great camera - pocket sized but with a 10x optical zoom - perfect for our needs really. After lunch we made a few calls home (only $6 for an hour) and then took a walk down to the Ferry Building on Embarcadero and then up to the Golden Gate bridge. We checked out the City Lights bookstore on Columbus Street, which is a really cool and interesting place to hang out. Alcatraz was sold out for today so I guess we won't get to visit it on this trip. The car is booked for tomorrow morning and they even pick you up from your hotel, which saves us a half hour trek to Fisherman's Wharf with our backpacks on. So tomorrow we're probably going to drive down to Monterey and visit the aquarium and then spend the night in or around Santa Cruz.