The Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. Restaurant and Market is a chain of seafood restaurants inspired by the 1994 film Forrest Gump. It was launched in 1996 by Viacom Consumer Products (which also owns Paramount Pictures) and is the first theme restaurant inspired by a film.
I’ve never actually went to eat there but by taking a look at their menu, I think this would be heaven for Ine as she is a shrimp freak, she orders shrimp about 75 percent of the time when we visit a restaurant.
With nearly three-quarters the size of France, California accounts for nearly 90 percent of entire American wine production. The Californian wines entered the international stage at the 1976 Judgment of Paris wine competition when Californian wines beat out French wines in both red and white wine categories.
California has over 107 American Viticultural Areas (AVAs), including the well known Napa, Russian River Valley, Rutherford and Sonoma Valley AVAs and about 1200 wineries of which 400 are located north of San Francisco also known as the Wine Country. Therefore, you can find a lot of wine shops around San Francisco. One of those shops is called “Cellar 360” and is located at Ghirardelli Square, which also hosts an annual wine festival called “unCORKED!” in May.
The Boudin Bakery is a bakery situated in San Francisco, California known for its sourdough bread. It was established in 1849 by Isidore Boudin, son of a family of master bakers from Burgundy, France, by blending the sourdough prevalent among miners in the Gold Rush with French techniques. The bakery has locations on Fisherman’s Wharf near San Francisco Bay, Disney’s California Adventure Park, and 30 other cafés scattered throughout California.
Let’s do a small jump of about 4500 kilometers (2800 miles) form San Francisco to New York. While having to wait 12 hours for a connecting flight to Brussels, we decided to make a quick visit to the Big Apple.
I spotted this photographer while during our morning stroll in Central Park. I learned from Ron Niebrugge that the camera he is using is a 4×5 large format camera which apparently is still very popular with landscape photographers. It is not as impressive as the one he encountered during his photo shoots though, which you can see in this post on his blog.
An interesting fact about New York is that during the last glacier period (30.000 - 10.000 years ago), New York was fully covered by glaciers. The grooves left by these glaciers can be easily observed in the rocks still present at Central Park (as you can see in the picture). These glaciers also contributed to the current skyline of New York. Large amounts of soil, stone, and other debris were scraped up by the expanding glaciers were deposited where the ice front retreated. Therefore, buildings can be a lot higher on those places. This is why Manhattan has areas with very large skyscrapers and other spots with smaller buildings.
This picture of the bell of an SFFD fire truck was taken in one of the 48 fire stations the city has. The SFFD was formed in 1850 and the largest disaster in which the fire department was involved was the 1906 earthquake. The department found itself reduced to fighting the fires of the quake aftermath with axes and shovels, as most of the city’s water mains were broken.
A few weeks after the disaster, Chicago-based photographer George Lawrence saw an opportunity to capture a unique image of the sprawling ruins using his “captive airship,” a hand-built, 49-pound panoramic camera suspended from a series of kites. Lawrence’s foresight earned him a small fortune of $15,000 (more than $300,000 today) selling copies of his achievement. Click the picture to see the enormous detail of the image.
As far as technology goes, San Francisco is probably one of the cities with the most high tech companies in the world (Silicon valley is just a couple of miles away). Transportation wise, the city is still very old school. The cable cars are still operated in the traditional manner with manually operated cars. They are the only moving National Historic Landmarks in the United States and the oldest and largest such system in permanent operation. The picture below shows a still manually operated turntable, the cable car gets on the turntable and the operator rotates the turntable so it faces the new direction.
The modern version of the cable car system is called the People mover. You can find these transportation systems all over the world, for example Vancouver’s SkyTrain, Tomorrowland Transit Authority in Disneyworld, Las Vegas Monorail, …
Kris Taeleman | 
