Showing posts with label The Japanese Tea Garden. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Japanese Tea Garden. Show all posts

Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Summer Vacation, From LA to San Francisco Part Two

San Francisco Day Three: Golden Gate Park
Day three was spent at Golden Gate Park, home of the California Academy of Sciences (pictured here), the Japanese Tea Garden, and the San Francisco Art Museum, among other things.  The Academy of Sciences was our first stop.

It has a giant glass dome with a rainforest inside!  If you look close, you can see some butterflies flying around.

They had lots of animals in the rainforest exhibit.  I liked the colors on this snake.

This guy was just huge.  He's getting ready to shed his skin.  You can tell because his eye is grey, that means the scales are coming loose (they have scales over there eyes in lue of eye lids).
I'm pretty sure this is the biggest toad I've ever seen.  Unfortunately, his scale is hard to tell from the photo.
I liked the look of this little gecko's eyes.  Those guys can stick to anything!
The brown gecko's friend, who was much brighter. 
After we toured the rainforest, we went down to the aquarium part.  Since it was quite dark, I wasn't able to get many good pictures.  But here's one of me and a coral reef!
These jellies were completely clear, so they had colored lights shining on them.  It was so cool!
More jellies!

This is a cowfish.  His scales are completely fused into a box so that only his mouth, eyes and fins can move.

I never could get this one into focus, but it was so colorful I just had to add him in here.  The chubby purple guy is a sea slug.
Just a couple of electric eels, ya know, hanging out.  

This is the roof of the Science Academy!  It's a 'green roof'.  They say that it saves them a lot on heating/cooling costs, and it looks pretty neat.  This was last of the decent/interesting pictures from the Science Academy.

Next, we headed over to the Japanese Tea Gardens.  They were so amazing, I took almost 100 pictures in there.  This is the entrance gate.  Most of these pictures are just gorgeous, so I'll let them do the talking.







This has to be the coolest bridge I've ever walked on.



We ended our trip to the Tea Garden by actually getting some sencha tea and dango with sweet soy sauce.  It was amazingly delicious.   The rest of the day was spent trying to decide where to go for dinner, and then hitting the hay early for the 6.5 hour drive back to LA.

Our last picture in San Francisco... We drove down the curvy part of Lombard Street!