Day two in San Mateo

Lisa cooked a big breakfast this morning to provide us with fuel for exploring San Francisco! We headed out the door in the late morning and headed first to Half Moon Bay. We stopped at a few vistas and were in awe of the amazing waves! Their size doesn't really come out in these photos but the waves were huge!

Next we headed straight into San Francisco! We visited the Golden Gate bridge and biked across it, which apparently is a popular thing to do since there were a lot of other people doing it too!

I really wanted to eat Chinese food in Chinatown, so we found a little place and ordered dim sum (even though it was the a weekday afternoon). One of the things we got were supposed to be pork and shrimp dumplings... but the meat definitely was not pork. It was delicious, though!

We parked at Fort Mason and biked down to the Fisherman's Wharf. We stopped in the original Ghirardelli building and got free samples of chocolate... twice! Pier 39 was super touristy... lots of uninteresting stores; I'm not sure why we went there! We saw some street performers and I thought it was pretty neat...

Josh was looking for the sea lions and there were "Follow Salty the Sea Lion" signs that took us the really long way around the pier, around a carousel and through all of the touristy areas, such as a magnet store and a left-hand only store.

We finally made it to the sea lions! They were pretty cute but the sunset was nicer.

We got back to Lisa and Joe's house right around dinnertime. They had made lasagna and salad for dinner, and we ate with the whole family. That's definitely my favorite part of Couch Surfing with families... meeting the parents and the kids is always a lot of fun.

Soleil has a pet snake and she asked us if we wanted to see it eat dinner. We said okay so she pulled a tiny mouse out of the freezer and dropped it in a cup of hot water to defrost. What?!

She said that the snake couldn't eat frozen mice... it was just a tiny snake but it devoured that mouse. After the feeding, Lisa told us more about how they home school Kaizen and Soleil. She said that each child takes 7 to 10 classes per semester, and the classes range from regular gymnastics or karate classes to classes that she organizes. Lisa started homeschooling five years ago and started a group for homeschooling families; the group has grown to include over 100 families and she hires professors and experts in different fields to create custom classes and lectures for the kids. Kaizen also takes online classes depending on what he's interested in. It sounds awesome!

Josh's high for the day was biking over the Golden Gate Bridge, and my high was dinner with our host family. Josh and I shared the same low... we were both disappointed at Pier 39. Josh's "ho" was seeing the sea lions play on the floating docks; they would kick each other off and try to claim an entire section for themselves. My "ho" was discussing homeschooling with Lisa and mentioning Greg and Diana, the family in Newport Beach, who don't school their kids at all. Lisa was like, "Oh yes, they unschool." Apparently "unschooling" is a movement that is growing in popularity, but it sounds more like a risky experiment!