adrian is rad

Dave and Tina were in town yesterday, so I headed up to SF to hang out with them in the afternoon and evening.

We walked from Ghirardelli Sq, down Columbus to Giordano Brothers, a restaurant that serves “Pittsburgh-style” (aka Primanti’s) sandwiches. I love this place. They do this style of sandwiches well and it always helps/ calms my nostalgia needs. There’s also some good people watching in the area.

We then walked down Columbus (past the transamerica building) and then down to the Embarcadero. From there we made our way down past all the piers (picking up a much needed Slurpee near the end) before going to Musee Mechanique. It’s on Pier 45, right at the end of all those piers by Fishermen’s Wharf.

Musee Mechanique is a collection of coin-operated devices: penny arcade games, photo booths, flip-card movie machines (“Mutoscopes”), fortune tellers, moving dioramas and music boxes and other music machines. The collection has items from the late 1800s up until probably the 1990s, but most of them probably come from the first half of the 20th century.

It’s an amazing collection. More importantly, it’s a lot of a fun. I’m a big mechanical geek so the intricate mechanical ones are really cool to me. It’s pretty cheap: free admission and the games are 25 or 50 cents each for the most part, so for $5 or $10 you can play a lot of them.

An ancient and gorgeous sounding disc-based music box

After that we headed over the Mission to eat at Walzwerk, the always-delicious East German restaurant. Good food, good beer, not too pretentious. Winners!

Mel’s Bowl rounded out the night. It was really quiet, save a bunch of Warriors fans in the bar. We were one of two groups bowling. There was this really cute old couple next to us. The wife was asleep while he bowled. He was slower but was obviously good in his day. He had a lot of finesse still and was pretty good (he could easily beat me). I was cheering him on the whole time.

I bowled pretty badly with a 113 and 115, but I still beat out Dave to be the absolute champion.

more photos after the jump (way below)

this bowling game kicked my ass; I did much better real bowling later that night

creepy barbershop quartet machine

“Career Pilot”. I like the possibilities for careers: nudist, lion tamer, dictator, hot air artist, adagio dancer and, possibly the best, love pirate

I did not arm wrestle this guy. He looked good.