First things seem rosy regarding our visas, then slightly less so as we’re asked yet again for more documents than we were told to expect to give. Worse yet as we receive a call informing us the documents are unsatisfactory. Those are all the details I can give on that subject at this time. Suffice to say the situation is a tad frustrating.
So we spent Monday in the city, where we discovered that not only does the Virgin megastore have the smallest book section of any store ever purporting to have books, but that somehow it holds otherwise difficult to find (offline) books. I’ve been looking for The Illuminatus Trilogy for some time now, and excepting Amazon.com have had no luck. Virgin miraculously had it burrowed into a spot between the dozen other books on their shelf. I exaggerate, of course, but it’s a three-story building, with a sign on the door saying “Books Upstairs,” and they have maybe three hundred books in stock. I’m very excited that one of them was the specific Robert Anton Wilson title I was looking for.
Disillusionment: Apple, the company that’s all about aesthetic, functionality, user experience? Dirtiest place we went all day. Several of the things we tried to play with were broken. The first iPod I picked up was actually bricked. Still it was a pretty cool place, and it would be hard for their devices to survive the insane crowds that were in there.
Today we walked around San Rafel, which was an altogether more calm experience. Lisbeth discovered the brick-and-mortar home of a place one of her aunts orders supplies from, and found some cool yarn there. I stopped in a great game shop and picked up the GURPS rule books and the Illuminati University game for it. We ate great burgers at a place that smelled like the burger joint at which I was employed during high school, and when it was all done, James picked us up for a foray to Muir Woods and a lesson in how cold the Pacific Ocean really is. Good times.