Road Trip Day 20 - 2007-08-08

Check out the pictures I took today:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/10306971@N03/sets/72157601322651231/

Today I went to the UC Berkeley Botanical Gardens. I took a ton of pictures, so take a look! Most of it was outside with winding trails crisscrossing the whole area. It was subdivided into different regions like California, New World Desert, and so forth. I really liked how they had Strawberry Creek running through the whole area. There were lots of little waterfalls and a little Japanese water garden that they made. The pool of water was so clear that I thought it must have been a circulating pump system, but it was part of the creek. They did appear to have constructed pool, though.

I saw the much touted Corpse Flower, this giant tropical flower that blooms for a day once every three years and smells like a rotting corpse. Unfortunately, it had bloomed two days ago during the night, so nobody had seen it. They took photos that you can see here:

http://botanicalgarden.berkeley.edu/program/event_des/titan.html

After that, I met up with my friend from high school in Phoenix, Chris, at Triple Rock in Berkeley. It was cool catching up with him and such. After eating, he walked me around the Berkeley campus, which I hadn't seen much of before. He's going to be moving up to Seattle in the next week or so, so it's a good thing I caught him before he left! We hadn't seen each other in about 10 years.

Next I headed over to where Paul was having his softball game, though the game was just ending as I walked up. They thoroughly trounced their opponents with a score like 27-12 or something equally severe.

After dropping the softball stuff off at Paul's lab, we headed for some sushi at Kirala. The sushi was good, though not exceptional. I was not impressed with their selection of rolls and the service was a bit slow. I had some nice warmed sake which was tasty. I think my favorite item was the rainbow roll, though the spicy tuna roll with a tempura asparagus stalk running through the center was tasty too.

On our drive back to his apartment, I got a hankering for some ice cream, so we went by this gelato place. I got half blueberry and half dark chocolate, both of which were exceptional. I haven't had gelato since Fayetteville with Steph and needed another fix.

Paul and I then headed back to his place to play some Wii with his girlfriend and roommate.