Swords. That’s how many I got while we were in San Francisco. I suppose by saying it that way, it sounds worse than it actually was.

Chinatown was only 2 blocks away from our hotel so we took one day to venture down there. It was my wife, mom, dad, brother and I. We started out together, but we quickly split apart. It’s the classic women shop versus men browse. And the 3 men were browsing pretty quickly. So we took off and walked up the street. Another thing that we discovered is that there are about half a dozen different kinds of shops in Chinatown. One shop being a t-shirt clothing shop. Another being a jewelry shop. Eating places, camera shops and bazaars (not sure if that’s the correct word) were the dominant one’s.

I used to read a lot of Samurai and Japanese stuff and I’ve always wanted a sword…or two. So I saw a bunch of them while we went browsing, and the price was right, but I just wasn’t sure that I needed them. It wasn’t like I was going to be transported back to the 1800’s and I’d be fighting along side Tom Cruise and killing other Samurais (actually in my case I’d be hunting Tom Cruise).

On the first day I did end up buying some freshwater pearls for the wife. I didn’t think about it until after I’d bought them, but in most of these shops you can barter with the owners. So keep that in mind when you get to Chinatown.

A couple of days later the wife wanted to go down to Chinatown and eat some authentic food. We ended up eating in Chinatown. It wasn’t authentic in anyway shape or form. I could get the same type of food from our Chinese food places in Iowa. Anyhow the wife wanted to pick up some other things while we were down there. And we stopped into one of the shops that had the swords. I mentioned to the wife that I was thinking about getting them, but probably wouldn’t. She said that I should…so I did. I’ve now got 3 swords sitting about my desk. Just in case Tom Cruise comes to my door I can grab one really quickly and put him out of his misery!