The End of Summer Vacation, For Some Of Us That Is

This weekend being the last summer holiday, and the veritable end of summer, I get an email from Mom who takes the opportunity to rub it in and let it be known that she's on vacation every day.

Will and I decided to make a late afternoon trek to the California Science Center yesterday to use up a couple of VIP passes to the Body Worlds exhibit. Entering the Science Center we headed towards the winding line of ticket holders where a purple-shirted attendant checked our tickets and said "follow me". I didn't know what was happening at first but our VIP status tickets worked like magic. The velvet rope was swept aside for us alone and and we got to go right in.The exhibit is on two floors and as we left one exhibit hall and topped the escalator to the next to be confronted by another winding line of ticket holders, we walked right up to that rope and found a purple-shirted attendant and the magic worked, again we were ushered in. Score!

Unless you're a surgeon or something you've probably only seen text book diagrams or motion picture and television scenes of the body's internal organs and everything else that holds us together. So this was a weird look inside of me. Not only was every part opened up and sliced in pieces, it was positioned in extremely unusual ways. Definitely not your textbook diagram. Unfortunately no photos were allowed inside.
Afterwards we strolled through the Rose Gardens and then headed across town to R23 for Japanese dinner. This is the first time I've been to R23 and I was really looking forward to fulfilling a recent craving I've been having for soft shelled crab. In reading some of the customer reviews it appeared that the crab salad was a must, so I added that to the list to be ordered.
We arrived there plenty hungry and while Will ordered a Soporro beer our server was so helpful when I asked him to help me select a Saki. It came chilling in it's own glass carafe with a little ice chamber, it's taste on the sweeter side of the spectrum. Then we had just about the best crab salad ever. Plenty of crab and fresh greens and a light and fresh dressing with ginger in its ingredients. We also had soft shelled crab that was hot and crispy in its tempura batter with a smoky dipping sauce on the side. That was followed by a variety of sushi then shrimp tempura. For desert I had green tea ice cream.

Nice.