Yesterday I got back to Colorado from my spring break to San Francisco. I spent the week visiting with Alan, whom I had only seen once since high school graduation. His apartment is downtown just blocks from the Embarcadero, so we had easy access to all kinds of stuff. I got to hang out with a lot of Alan’s salesforce.com and Carnegie Mellon alum friends- lots of rock band, cupcakes, and hot tubs were had throughout the week.

I posted a stream of the more interesting places I visited on my Foursquare account. I particularly liked walking around in the Mission (in the sun 😀 ) and checking out some of San Francisco’s, ahem… more eccentric cafés (that link is mildly NSFW).

Towards the end of the week, I got to do some more catching up. I spent a day in Silicon Valley with family: Denis and Shana and my cousins Anora and Quinn. The kids have probably grown a foot and a half since I last saw them, so it was really fun to get to play with them. Shana works in HR at Google and took Denis and I around the Googleplex, which lived up to its reputation as a geek’s utopia. I also had a chance to meet up with Jessica, another friend from high school; we all went to Tommy’s Yucatan Restaurant, which is famous for their top-shelf tequila and is where my stepdad proposed to my mom.

So I had really great time overall. San Francisco is my favorite city in the United States and I’d love to find a software job out there. It isn’t making the prospects of living in Boulder, Denver or Fort Collins any less attractive, though; I had a great time there and I’m sure I’ll be having a great time there again regardless of where life takes me.

Below are the photos I took while I was there. (Denis took a couple of them while Quinn’s wrestling skills had me incapacitated.) I should also mention that Alan is way more of a shutterbug than I, and also spends a lot more time taking pictures of actual people instead of my transfixion on architecture and the like. He has a couple of great galleries from my time there: [One] [Two]