A successful weekend

Jen looks at screen in the control room of the USS Pampanito, a submarine built in 1943 at the Navy Yard Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in just nine months, and at a cost of $6 million. After use in the Pacific during World War II, the Pampanito docked at San Francisco.

Dylan walks up stairs to Ghirardelli Sqaure in San Francisco, where we proceed to eat chocolates and purchase wine.

It was gay pride weekend in San Francisco when we went, and the Mission Doroles Park was a center for rallying around the cause.

Suddenly in San Francisco, there was lots of honking and people shouting out in the streets, as well as cars swooping by equipped with Mexican flags. We were walking back home and had no idea what was going on. Apparently, Mexico had won a soccer match against the United States. As Dylan said, "only in the United States would it be tolerated for the winning team to celebrate so openly in the losing team's country."

And I thought Americans tended to be overly patriotic

Sarah, Will and I went to Royal Albert Hall after photo class today to see the Classical Spectacular. To quote Linda Harkness, our amazing SULP student services faculty member who promoted the event to us,

"It’s a total musical extravaganza, a candy box selection of the world’s best loved classics (even the non music lovers among you will probably know most of them). But what makes it a ‘spectacular’ is that the show is accompanied by lasers, lights, can-can dancers and even canon fire in the finale of Tchaikovsky’s wonderful 1812 Overture, with uniformed Napoleonic soldiers standing guard around the area. There will be flag waving and cheering, so it would be fair to say it’s not an evening for classical music purists."

That describes the event remarkably well. The 1812 Overture was pretty sweet, and it's the first time I've seen a live performance of it. And they played Gustav Holst's Mars! Gahhh!

But then they played some uniquely British songs that I wasn't familiar with, and the entire audience waved their little British flags around.

The event was indeed a bit tacky.
Will stands in my way for the duration of the concert.