Cindy’s Column 10/1/2007

San Diego Visited and Reviewed

Well, we arrived in San Diego at around 7 pm on a Friday night.

Dad had some Hyatt points so we stayed at the Hyatt Regency Mission Bay.

(http://missionbay.hyatt.com/hyatt/hotels/index.jsp?xactionid=114e68a809a&pid=sanis&_requestid=202005). At first, I was a little apprehensive but it turned out to be really nice. It was under going a renovation, but of all the hotels we stayed at recently, I liked it the best. I liked the style and the service was good from the moment we pulled into the valet.

The price was like half of what we paid at the last two hotels we stayed at and best of all (for my dad at least) nothing was wrong with the internet! He plugged it in and it worked! Wow! What a miracle!

After we checked in, I did a quick change and freshened up then we decided to go to the Gaslamp Quarter (http://www.gaslamp.org/) for some late night shopping and dinner. That’s where most of San Diego’s shopping, restaurants, clubs and entertainment is supposed to be.

We parked at the Horton plaza mall, (http://westfield.com/hortonplaza/ ) and although I see it gets a lot of bad rap on the internet, I really liked it.

It was really nice. It’s an outdoor mall and made me feel like I was in some other country

-- like France or something. Unlike the internet comments, I found it easy to get around and I’m not from San Diego. (If you are from San Diego and can’t figure it out, well I seriously don’t know about you.)

I think the Horton Plaza is a good place for teens and young adults to shop. There’s a lot of the usual shops like Sears, Nordstrom’s, Banana Republic, Brookstone, Louis Vuitton, Coach, Macys, Hot Topic, Victoria Secret, Abercrombie and Fitch , etc. There are not a lot of boutiques in the mall, but there are a few.

So we did the shopping thing for a while, then after shopping, we decided to take a bike ride to get to know Gaslamp Quarter better. There are these guys who ride bikes with carts for people to sit on back of them. Now that was fun! The guy did it for twenty dollars and it lasted about a half hour. ( And he was really, really cute too. He reminded me of Jason from “The Hills.”) We went to fourth and Broadway and then he took us up and down fourth, fifth and sixth street. This is how we learned fifth street is where most of the things were happening..

Now fifth street was really cool. It had all these restaurants and bars and stores that were still open. The bike ride is a good idea for a tourist. Gives you an idea of where to go real fast.

So as soon as we finished the bike drive, we went back to the mall, got our car then drove down to 5^th street and parked at a valet. (Traffic and parking was really bad, though.) We walked around and went to a few stores for a while ( I bought a cute little necklace!) and then decided to get something to eat.

The restaurant we ate at is called Chianti. (http://sandiego.citysearch.com/profile/41968082/san_diego_ca/chianti_restaurant.html.) It was kind of cool looking. I tried this pasta and seafood dish, but I really didn’t like it. But my parents were ok with their food. (Hamburgers.) Actually the food was good, I just didn’t like the crab or whatever was in the seafood pasta.

Afterwards we checked out some clubs. We didn’t actually go inside the clubs as they were all 21 and over. (And I’m still 19!) But it was real easy to check them out as the music was loud and you could hear it outside as well as see into the clubs through their plate glass windows.

There were two places that it seemed like the most fun and the hottest spots – Henry’s Pub (http://www.henryspub.com/) and Whiskey Girl (http://www.thewhiskeygirl.com/ )

Henry’s Pub looked very cool. It had a lot of dancing, but it had a real long line to get in. It looked like you don’t get to get in that much. Well actually, Whiskey Girl’s line was just as long. Anyways the thing that sucks is that you have to wait in line for like a long while to get it. Henry’s Pub was playing mainly Hip Hop music when I was listening.

Whiskey Girl seemed really cool too…from what I saw of it…there was a lot of young people. They look between 21 and 30 and it just looked like a fun place to dance…like flashy and stuff. There were a lot of people in there.

These seem like the two best places, but I think I would like the Whiskey Girl better because they play more dance songs, not only hip hop…they played Justin Timberlake and Madonna and Michael Jackson, like GOOD dance music.

So after checking out the clubs for a while, we suddenly got pretty tired and decided to go back to the hotel and call it a night.

Saturday morning, ummmmmm……breakfast was good. The best we’ve had at any of the recent hotels. I had eggs and bacon, and dad had a continental breakfast, and mom eggs Benedict.

Yummy!

After breakfast we decided to go to Belmont park which was real close to the Hyatt.

I really, really liked Belmont Park. It is down at the beach and it is like an amusement park. It has a roller coaster and some rides, and this thing called the “endless wave” for surfers and boarders. (http://www.belmontpark.com/ )

After we got there, we walked all the way to the end and they were having a skate competition and a skate show. It was called Super Girls…and was all girls and was SOOO cool. All the girls were like tom boys and they were all skating and it was really cool. We took pictures and stuff…but I really, really, really wish I could have stayed a lot longer… There were bleachers and you could just sit and watch them for free.

Anyway, Belmont park, itself, is sort of rundown a little bit. But there’s arcades and there’s a carousal and a few games and stuff. I guess it’s a little like Santa Monica but not as many freaky people – just regular people.

We went on the roller coaster. It was fun.

After Belmont Park, we decided to go to the “world famous” San Diego Zoo. (http://www.sandiegozoo.org/ )

The Zoo was fun too. We saw a lot of sleeping animals like the lions and the bears, so it wasn’t as exciting as it could have been. We didn’t see the tigers, but we saw the Panda and they were awesome! There were two Panda and one was really cute. He was walking all around and stuff. After the Panda, we saw kangaroos, monkeys, birds, reptiles, gorillas and a bunch of other animals. We stayed at the Zoo a long time. It was a warm day, and we had to walk a lot. After a while our feet were hurting, so we finally hobbled back to the car and made our way back to the hotel.

We had dinner at the hotel, rested awhile, then decided to go back to 5^th street and check out some more clubs Saturday night.

We found a couple of places that looked cool with no long lines. One was this place called Jimmy Loves (http://www.jimmyloves.com/ ) It has music and you can eat there too. It’s live music and you can dance. It looks cool, and there was no line.

And then there’s also Xaviers Bar and Grill. (http://www.xaviersbarngrill.com/ ) It’s like a smaller club, hang out type place. And it was really crowded in there. There was even people dancing a little bit outside. You can eat and drink outside. And there was no line.

It was a long day. After checking out a few clubs, we went back to our hotel and the comfort of a soft bed.

Sunday morning we slept in late, woke up and had a quick breakfast in again (because it was good), then we checked out and headed out to Balboa Park. (http://www.balboapark.org/maps/ .)

So first we went to the Natural History Museum and it was OK. Actually, I would never want to go there again, ….no I shouldn’t really say that. But it wasn’t as good as the one in Los Angeles. I tried to make it fun, but it wasn’t even that fun...but anyway… I wouldn’t EVER want to go there again.

And then we went to a part of Balboa Park called Pedestrian Mall. There’s no stores or anything. Just a walk way with more museums on it. We sat down on the lawn for awhile and chilled. It was OK, but we didn’t see anything interesting enough to go into, though. So we left that part of Balboa Park.

We then went to the Spanish Village. It looked very old, and there’s nothing exciting about it at all…..Walked on by…..

After we gave up on Balboa Park, we decided to go to Old Town. We were going to take a ghost tour (we paid for it) yesterday, but the tour got cancelled. So we decided to drop by the tour at 6:30 pm and see if we could get in today.

We got to the hotel where we were supposed to meet and when it got to be 6:15 we asked the hotel desk about the tour. They said the guy who ran the tour was not reliable and didn’t show up sometimes. We waited until 6:30 and he didn’t show up.

Now the most famous place on the ghost tour was a real haunted house – The Waley House. Check out their website for some of its history.

(http://www.whaleyhouse.org/)

Now THIS WAS EXCITING ! I started getting butterflies in my stomach as soon as we walked in the door. I got a lot of weird sensations when I was there. There were a few rooms that were a little more scary than the other ones and I just got like bad feelings in them.

There were these costumed people, docents, who worked there and gave tours and explained things to people. They were dressed in all black with veils. They were scary enough just by themselves.

We talked to one of them and asked her questions. She said the docents saw things all the time but were more scared by things that they heard rather than what they saw because they hear things more often or something like that .

She was all dressed in black and I felt like she was a LITTLE bit suspicious, well I don’t know... She probably does pick up things but I felt she was trying to be more scary than anything else…I don’t know…I don’t know…

Then later we saw this other docent. She was even more scary. She had a veil on in front of her face so you couldn’t even see her face….and she was all scary and when you’d try to take a picture of her she would walk away.

I guess she wanted to be scary and she didn’t want to be available or whatever. And then she started sitting on window sills and things and she scared someone when she moved.

Then there was this painting that’s in one of the bedrooms and it looked like the smile was moving like -- smile, not smile, smile, not smile, etc. Then a couple of the other rooms were really scary, and the dining room was really scary….got weird feelings in there.

The courtroom wasn’t really scary…to me. And the upper rooms I felt were more scary than the bottom rooms. They just had this scary feeling on the top floor. I felt like some presence in certain spots.

Then we went outside to where the garden was and it was a little bit scary there. There was a gazebo and that was a little scary. I didn’t wait there too long when we were taking a picture. Something was weird about the seats.

So then we left, but we wanted to go to the old grave yard down the street before we ended our ghostly tour. We entered the wrong way and had to jump over a wall. So we did. That area, where it was really dark, was pretty scary, but the rest wasn’t so bad. Some parts were scary and had a weird feeling, but some were not. So we just walked through and looked around and took pictures. Mostly the graves were from the 1800’s.

So then we ended the ghostly part of our Old Town visit and checked out some shops. More like a tourist section than Gaslamp Quarter, so we didn’t buy anything but dinner at the Creole Café (http://www.neworleanscreolecafe.com ) This was located on the Waley House grounds (which made going to the restroom a little scary) but even though I LOVE gumbo, the food wasn’t that great. Just OK.

In summary, I really like San Diego. I liked Gaslamp Quarter a lot. I think I would like going out there with my friends. I loved the dancing and the restaurants and the cute bike riders. There was a lot of cute guys there, I guess cause there was a military base or whatever. But there were cute guys that didn’t only have short hair.

I wouldn’t mind coming back and doing some of the things we didn’t get to do this time. Like Sea World and the Wild Animal Park. Yeah, I like San Diego a lot. I didn’t like Old Town as much as Gaslamp, but it’s OK and the Waley House was really exciting. and I loved the skate thing that we saw. That was awesome

I told my dad I wanted to visit more haunted places and he said “Cool.” So I guess we will be doing more of that. I really liked staying at the hotel. And the people at the Hyatt were really, really nice. The staff gave us good directions and it was the best service we had at any of the hotels.

I liked San Diego. Not enough to move there, but I wouldn’t mind going on vacation here with my friends or whatever. It was fun. Not as laid back as the other places we’ve been, but sometimes you don’t want to be laid back. Know what I mean?