Chinatown, Shakespeare and pyramids all in one day...

    So last week-end was another great week-end of adventures... It started off with a little trip to Chinatown for the Autumn Moon Festival celebrations. The whole streets were packed, it was a really great atmosphere! My favourite thing about the festival though was that a lot of the stalls were advertising in Chinese and offered no english translation, so you got a real feeling that this was a festival for the locals and not for tourists.

They had loads of stalls selling all these beautiful orchids.

They were also selling these great carnivorous pitcher plants. Would have loved to buy one of those!

These girls were just the cutest and they were concentrating so hard on playing their instruments. 

They were really good musicians too.

This girl is dressed in her school's traditional uniform. Nice, hey?

A street performer balancing a crystal ball....

The fallen dragons after the parade

This band was playing traditional music, it was really beautiful and their instruments were so unusual...

This was a great contortionist's show.

Meet Chinatown's Elvis... He was so hilarious and my favourite Elvis impersonator to date!

And the local dance school show

Weird and wonderful fruit on sale on the street.

People testing massage chairs on the street.

Just down the road from Chinatown, I found Larry Flynt's Hustler Club... :-)

And just round the corner is my favourite building in San Francisco, the Transamerica Pyramid Building. 

And for the cherry on the cake, my friend Rosie and I got to treat ourselves to a little Shakespeare in the Park that evening. This is part of a yearly event where the Presidio Park puts on one of Shakespeare's plays every week-end for free throughout September. This year, the play was Cymbelline, I'd never seen it before so it was a real treat.

Rosie in her brand new panda hat :-)

I was really impressed by the costumes and the set. The costumes had a very cool steam punk style and the set was simple but very effective. It was hilarious to hear Shakespeare with an american accent and of of course, with this being an american production, they just couldn't help themselves and to make it into a musical with random bits of singing in between acts! The funniest bit though came when in one of the scenes, the villain has introduced himself into the young princess' bedroom while she sleeps and take a look at her naked body... Just as the guy was about to lift up her nightgown, a women from the audience shouted "Hey!"