OUR SECOND DATE

Things are really starting to happen now! We had our second meeting with Caesar this week; since Caesar and I both had Veteran’s Day off and Chris was able to schedule his work for later in the day, we all spent Wednesday together in San Francisco.

CHINATOWN
We met Caesar with his social worker, Tricia, at the BART (commuter rail) station and took the train into the city. We decided to go to Chinatown, since there is so much to see and do, and because he had never been there. The crowds weren’t too bad… Chinatown is always crowded, but it wasn’t as insane as I’ve seen it on weekends, so it seemed like a good time to be there. We started off walking up Grant Avenue, which is one of the main streets and is mostly tourist shops selling flip flops and mini license plates with names on them (one place actually had a “Troy” license plate, but Caesar came to terms long ago with the reality that he can never find his name on souvenir license plates, keychains or refrigerator magnets). He was really taken by all the sights and sounds: the red lanterns hanging on buildings and in the street, the stores with huge ivory sculptures in the windows (boo, ivory!), the old man playing a traditional Chinese instrument in front of a church. We did a lot of window shopping and people watching, which is one of the best things to do anywhere in San Francisco!

It was about noon at that time and we were getting hungry, so we stopped for lunch. We decided to go to Brandy Ho’s , which is a chain restaurant that I’ve seen in several places now. I was hoping to go to a traditional dim sum restaurant where they roll carts around the restaurant with many small appetizer-sized plates (like Chinese tapas?) and you pick the items you like and everything gets tallied up at the end. However it turned out to be a good choice to go to Brandy Ho’s since Caesar is a bit of a picky eater… he does like a number of foods but he hasn’t had a lot of experience with various cuisines so it was good to go with something he was familiar with at first. We got pot stickers and pork chow mein, which he knew he would like, but we also tried some new things too. We got a vegetable dish that had carrots (which he knows he likes), bok choy (which he had never tried but is similar to things he likes), and tofu (which he had never tried and is probably nothing like anything he had ever eaten before). We had a few other dishes and were pretty stuffed by the time we finished.

After lunch we started walking back toward the train but walked down Stockton Street this time. While Grant Avenue is more of the touristy side of Chinatown, Stockton Street caters to the Chinese residents of the city. Most of the signs on the stores are all in Chinese with no English. Instead of souvenir and electronics stores, there are produce and fish markets and stores that sell Chinese herbs and medicines. We also ventured into some of the alleys between the main streets. I have lived in the Bay Area for 16 years and had never known they existed, so it’s no wonder that there were very few tourists in the alleys. There were some smaller stores and shops, and people living in the floors above had their laundry hanging out to dry on the fire escapes. In one of the alleys was a fortune cookie factory and we decided to go in to check it out. Basically it was a big room with a couple of machines cranking out the big, flat, round cookies and two women who sat next to the machines and folded them into the fortune cookie shape one after the other. We bought a couple of bags of fortune cookies and headed back toward the train.

SHOPPING!
Before we got back on BART we decided to stop in at some of the big department stores – Macy’s, Bloomingdales and Nordstrom – just to take a look around and maybe get an idea of some things he might like for Christmas. He had never been to Bloomingdales (I know, right?) so it was neat to see his reaction as we went from department to department. When we finally left Nordstrom we were dumped out into the Westfield Mall, so we went to Hot Topic, which is a store that caters to teens and which Caesar is a big fan of. So now the tables were turned and he got to show us around someplace we had never been. The two things that caught me off guard were the cases (yes multiple cases) of body jewelry – nipple rings, belly button rings, etc., as well as the fact that the music they were playing sounded a lot like the music I listened to in high school. Ah well, le plus ca change…

MOVING RIGHT ALONG
All in all, it was a successful visit. Yeah, there were times when we were just hanging out and not saying much, but when we had something to talk about, Caesar would participate in the conversation and had no problem giving his opinion on things. We definitely want him to like us, so we’re nervous about saying and doing the right things, but we realize it’s just going to take time for us to get to know each other. That said, the next step is going to be us bringing him over to our house. And this time without his social worker! We’re planning to pick him up on Sunday morning and take him out to breakfast, maybe see a movie, and then just hang out at our house. Basically a typical Sunday afternoon for us. At some point in the afternoon we’ll all go food shopping for the week and then make dinner together. I think it will be nice to just sort of hang out together, since life is not all trips to the city or one big adventure after another. I think this will let Caesar start to see what life with us might be like.