These pass few days I have been at orientations mostly, so here are some pictures of AAU buildings and other interesting buildings around my area.

The Morgan Auditorium, 2 blocks from my place. Apparently AAU's been buying over a lot of buildings around SF city, and so far whenever I walk around to explore or do grocery shopping, I keep bumping into AAU buildings. This one seems to be a former church. There's another auditorium 3 blocks in the other direction, just opposite Grace Cathedral, that is a former memorial building.

And the interior. Looks like it will look good with an opera or orchestra playing in it.
A cafe near my place. They used mosaic to form the owls.
Another building with a creeping plant on it.
The facade of the Howard Brodie dorm (dunno why all the dorms have to look prettier than mine) It's just on the opposite side of the road.Oh well, simple as it is, mine is probably the most convenient graduate student dorm available. 3 blocks from Chinatown, opposite the gallery, cafe and recreations office, and neighbours with the Clara Gil Stephens dorm,where the gym, pool and dance studios are and where busses pick us up when there are events. Let's see if I can sneak in to use their pool table as well...
A mural I passed by in Chinatown.
Here's a lovely picture of a double decker blister that has been developing on my foot. Wondering if I should burst it and get over with the limping period.
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Also, a a note for those of you who are about to go overseas for studies, the most useful thing that you can bring over is a roll of masking tape. You can:

1) Use it to tape things to your walls (like schedules, photos, posters, etc) without accidentally peeling of some paint when it's time to shift out.

2) Use it together with advertisement fliers to make emergency containers or envelopes (I used it to keep coins to use for the laundry machines, they only except quarters, so it's a precious commodity to me now.)

3) Use it to tape shut boxes, such as sugar. I'm too stingy to buy a proper sugar container.

4) Use it to tape together your electrical wires if they are too long and you like them to be neat.

5) Use it as a lint remover, because the quarter-only laundry machine happened to not be as clean as it should be.

6) And it just occurred to me that you can use masking tape to hide important documents , for instance, taping it to the bottom of your bed (I didn't do this though, or I wouldn't have typed it here.)

Actually, come to think of it, it might be a good idea to bring along some rubber bands, or you would have to buy them in those ridiculously big packets which you will never finish using. You'll have to bequeath it over several generations before it'll finish. Or open a nasi lemak stall.

And bring along a roll of toilet paper too, because the place you stay at most probably won't provide one for you.

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Also, I went back to Chinatown to get some carrots, and discovered that, here too, they have a practise of slashing prices of fresh food near closing time. That would be around 5 or 5.30pm for me. So if you are a scheming student like me, this is the best time to get your veggies. Bananas sold at 19 cents per pound or they would be thrown out with today's trash. Actually I did see a trash bin stuffed full with unsell-able (but still edible, you now how fussy customers can be. Also, it's probably more expensive for the shopkeepers to store and refrigerate the vegetables than to get a new supply from the wholesaler) vegetables as I was walking back, which is a big waste. I guess the wave of people who have started eating out of garbage bins as an environmental effort have a point. They get to save money in the process too, although you'd probably still have to have a pretty weak gag reflex.

So this morning I went on the uni's city tour. The queue was really long to get on the bus...AAU must be doing pretty good business(the tour is for new students only). First stop was the Civic Centre. Just a short stop in the bus. Only managed to get a picture of the statue in front of the Centre.

And passed by the Symphony Hall, in the same area. Apparently the walls are supposed to look like a keyboard.

Up to Twin Peaks, which is the highest spot in San Francisco. Now you can see the mist. Pretty cold because of the strong wind. The rent for places around here are $2500 per month, according to the driver, but I dunno for how big a place. The cheapest would be in Tenderloin area, for about $800, but I wouldn't recommend that area...a bit dodgy...

And then back down to have a look at the Golden Gate Bridge. Not a very good position to have taken a picture, but I didn't have enough time to look for a better spot. I spent most of the time waiting in line to use the toilet. Should rent a bike one day and cycle across and get to see Sausalito as well.Renting bikes is a big thing here. Err...or as they say...make friends with someone who has a car.
We also passed by other landmarks around SF but didn't get off the bus, places like the Painted Ladies, Golden Gate Park, Palace of Fine Arts (which ironically houses a science museum instead) and drove pass the Castro, Fisherman's Wharf (need to try the sourdough clam chowder and Ghirardelli's Chocolate), Little Italy and Chinatown. Difficult to get nice pictures, so I'll probably go back and visit some of the places we passed, properly.

Here are some pictures of nice buildings around the city.

Some graffiti near the art supplies store, Blick (for you people in Malaysia, it's 3 or 4 times bigger than Multifilla, and a lot more organised and cleaner. Drool on.) Not really patronising Utrecht so far...its smaller than Blick, and according to the seniors, more expensive as well, eventhough they are literally next door to the main uni building. Apparently the grey wall is bording up another former art supply shop called Pearl. What an art-inclined city...
Some schoolkids performing on drums, that I passed on Market Street.
And right next to that was the building currently housing Forever 21.
And Wells Fargo.
The Jewish Contemporary Art Museum's Gift Shop. (Yeah, I found the gift shop's design more interesting)
Stopped by Yerba Buena Gardens for another performance. Today's was a blues performance, which I managed to catch only the last 3 songs.
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And for today's at-home show and tell:My sketchbooks
Figured I should get newsprint pads(it's the type of paper that your news gets printed on, and it's cheap. And additionally,I got them at 50% off.) so I can write or draw notes, or scribble on, without feeling like I'm wasting art paper or A4 paper.I used to write my notes on loose pieces of A4 paper, which I then compile neatly (honest) and paperclip together, but this time I want slightly more *cough* presentation.

It also felt quite nice to put on my lap or bed and draw, so I got 2 more, one for practising anatomy (I'm going to memorise that Dorling Kindersley anatomy book that looks like a medical textbook. That's my resolution this term)I'll draw the skin-on versions on the newsprints, and the bone and muscle versions on tracing paper. The other one will be nice to bring to the parks on free days and sketch the buildings, or the plants, or sneakily sketch any random leng chai with his dog, if I can find one.

And there are 2 sketchbooks I brought with me from Malaysia, one for neat drawings(see, I treat A4 paper with reverence. I'm either becoming a greenie or a scrooge. Or both.) and the other for doodling.

As for the rest of the art supplies, we haven't been told what we have to buy for our classes, so I'll just see how it goes.Meanwhile, I've signed up for a (free)discount card at Blick that offers 10% discount all year round, so that should still be ok.

Updates on where I went yesterday. Today is a rest day for me, I found a blister on one of my feet, so I'm looking around the uni's website instead (it's massive...)

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So, yesterday I went to have a look at Yerba Buena park, right next to my uni's main building and right opposite the Museum of Modern Art. Kind of a nice touch to have parks in the middle of the city; besides this one, there are several smaller parks scattered around SF. Also makes a difference that the weather is cooler here and the air is not so polluted. Most people walk or cycle or take public transport(mainly the electric bus:it's connected to a wiring system at the top of the bus,like the train or the trams in Melbourne)

SF is quite bike friendly, they have bicycle lanes here, and you can bring it with you on the subway and buses. SF is quite dog friendly too, come to think of it. Just today I saw someone bring their dog into Borders, and it wasn't a service dog either.

The MoMA as seen from Yerba Buena park.
Some interesting building, I dunno what it's function is.
The park is having their Yerba Buena Gardens Festival until October. I just wandered in without expecting to see a performance going on.The one on that day was folk music, if I'm not mistaken, it was Mexican.
The Shaking Man sculpture.
The Martin Luther King Jr. memorial. It's a waterfall with a wall full of quotes behind it.

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After that, it was to Chinatown to top up on potatoes and then back home to cook another freeze-able meal. On the way, I bought this canned drink because I thought it was pretty. That's double the size of a usual canned drink. Tastes almost exactly like Justea (yay, I found a substitute) Bananas are pretty cheap to,you can get some for 30 something cents per pound, and that was organic, fair trade and imported (but still the cheapest I found) as well.
Here's the amount of ingredients I used for making Sheperd Pie. So it better be good.
Imagine the sheperd in question was semi vegetarian. Yup. I think I'll make a new policy of eating less meat and more vegetables. The battery farmed animal thing is pretty scary, I don't think even battery farmed animals in Malaysia have it as bad as they do here. At least I know the goats get to smell the same polluted outside air as Malaysian humans do.

This is the inside of the pie.
And the outside.
And I think the top is supposed to be more burnt than that. In the end it tasted more or less the same as my beef stew with mashed potatoes, except more spicy. But then again, the ingredients were more or less the same anyway.

Oh, and here's a fun fact. Did you know that nutmeg (buah pala) in large doses can be used as a kind of drug?I heard that desperate prisoners use it that way (although I dunno how they can get huge amounts of spices in their cells in the first place) That's why if you have any food cooked with nutmeg in it, you shouldn't feed it to your pet dog.

Today, I went to see Grace Cathedral, which until today I only passed by while going grocery shopping. It's built in the Gothic style, and is famous for it's labyrinth and Ghiberti doors

This is the labyrinth that you'd walk for meditation, based on the medieval labyrinth of Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Chartres. There's this one, and another one outdoors as well.
The nave. The lighting is a bit wonky, makes me think I should have gotten a dslr instead and be able to control the iso and white balance.Doesn't really do the building justice.
The rose window as seen from inside.



Ribbed vaults(the x shaped supporting beams at the ceiling), which are typical for Gothic cathedrals




The Names project's AIDS quilt
If I remember correctly,this is a plaque commemorating the founding of UN in San Francisco
Entrance to the cathedral
The Ghiberti doors.From Wikipedia:They are a copy of the doors of the Florence Baptistry by Lorenzo Ghiberti, also dubbedGates of Paradise

And more pictures of the exterior


So after that, I walked to Lafayette park, exploring the neighbourhood on the way.

Some interesting buildings.

Finally got to take a picture of the tram.
The view from Lafayette park. It was getting misty in the evening.
Some weird looking tree.
And another interesting building.I suspect someone actually lives here.