Today would be one of Norah’s favorites as our visit to Chinatown was a highlight of her trip. We had a short walk to Dragon’s Gate from our hotel and continued on to get dim sum breakfast at Good Mong Kok Bakery. I had read the lines could be long, but we were early enough on a weekday that we just walked right in. We took our goodies to St. Mary’s Square to eat and then met our tour across the street in front of Old St. Mary’s Cathedral. I had booked us a two hour walking tour with All About Chinatown and our guide, Linda Lee, was fantastic. She was born and raised in Chinatown and had a lot of personal details to share in addition to information about the history of Chinatown and what life was like there. We started in Portsmouth Square (also the location of public bathrooms in Chinatown) for some basic immigration and history information then walked around Chinatown with various stops (some places we went in, some places we just saw from the outside), including the Old Chinese Telephone Exchange, Golden Gate Chinese Cookie Factory, the “grave burner” store (not sure what these are officially called), Ma-Tsu Temple, a grocery store in what used to be a huge restaurant/banquet hall, a pharmacy, and some family associations. We loved the tour and how we went into stores we never would have gone in otherwise. The main one of these being the grave burner store, that contains all burnable goods you would burn at the graves of your family. We liked learning about this tradition and looking around at all the packages that covered any afterlife need. Linda jokingly picked up the paper people to burn and said she was wondering why in the world you would burn people, then found out they were servants. We decided that was the aspirational afterlife package. We were also fascinated by the various items for sale in the pharmacy. One of the most expensive being a caterpillar fungus called Ophiocordyceps sinensis (yes, I went down the internet wormhole on this one - pretty interesting). We were also checking out the dried tangerine peels that had “vintages”. The tour has an option to add a dim sum lunch, although we had not opted for this (we ate before the tour and would be heading to Japantown next). We thought the tour was terrific and my only complaint was that I easily could have done a longer tour - it was very informative and well done.

We did spend a little extra time in Chinatown after our tour - browsing in a few stores and getting tasty treats from some other bakeries - then we caught a bus to Japantown. Norah wanted to check out Benkyodo, which was closed when we got there (they sold out and closed early. Spoiler alert, we never did get mochi there because when we returned a few days later at opening time, the line was ridiculously super long). No worries though because Norah was also interested in shopping at Daiso, a Japanese 100-yen shop (basically a dollar store). We did more shopping then had ramen at Marufuku (delicious). By this time it was late afternoon and we had a few more things to see before going back to our hotel. We caught a bus to Alamo Square to see the famous view of the Painted Ladies and had fun looking at more colorful Victorian houses on our walk to Haight Ashbury. We went in a few stores and walked the length of Haight and then boarded another bus to take us back to Union Square. Back at Union Square we watched the cars at the cable turnaround, took a break at our hotel, and did Gold Rush room at The Escape Game to cap off our day.