'The American Dream is a nightmare.'

Today was the day we decided to sort our lives out and figure out how much we owed one another before we went any further. It turned out I owed Kitty 64 quid in case you were wondering.

Apart from our epic financial meeting, we did nothing of interest all day, apart from a quick trip down to Forever21 to buy some shoes.

Since it was a Friday night, we had decided that we were finally going to check out some San Francisco nightlife. In preparation for this, we made a protein feast with Jeff which included two whole chickens, bacon and Italian sausages as well as a bean soup and roast potatoes, and ate more of it than he thought was imaginable!

Once we had made ourselves look slightly presentable, Jeff and Angelo kindly drove us over to the Mission. It was a really foggy night, the first real fog we've seen the whole time we've been here and at night it made everywhere seem almost eerie.

The Mission as an area is full of restaurants and bars, most places being a strange combination of the two. We wandered around for a good half an hour or more just assessing the situation. We obviously knew it was a whole different scene to going out in England, and we even dressed down for the occasion (although we still looked ridiculously dressed up compared to the Americans). The bar situation was just odd though; there were a lot of tiny bars, with people crammed in, where you wouldn't be able to hear yourself speak, that's if you could even fit inside the bar at all! Eventually after wandering around for what seemed like forever, we queued to get into a bar called Elbo Room, which looked like it might have literal elbow room
inside. The queue was also a good sign.

Aside from being the dingy lighting inside, it was quite cool. The music wasn't bad and there were places to sit and stand around, and even space to move! We got a drink called a Pomegranate Lemonade, which was. basically 90% vodka, 5% pomegranate and 5% lemonade and snuck our way onto a table which was in a corner quite near the door. This was to prove an excellent move. As the table was made to seat four people, there were two seats visibly spare, and so over the next couple of hours we played host to numerous table guests in an on going game of musical chairs/speed dating.

First up was a nice guy called Gerard who was originally from France. He was very interested in our travels and seemed to be a genuinely nice guy. However, he had a strange Argentinian friend, who Kitty had the pleasure of sitting next to. Once he found out we were British he declared he didn't like the English and mumbled something about the Falklands. Luckily we were completely oblivious to this, and have since looked up the events of the Falklands War!

We were relieved once they left to find their friends, but we were not alone for long. Two beautiful boys both wearing matching checked shirts appeared from literally nowhere and plonked themselves down in the spare seats, greeting us in a very obvious Irish accent. They weren't expecting us to be English! After looking a bit bewildered and confirming the strangeness of nights out in the USA compared to home, they were off again, standard Irish whirlwind behaviour! This short exchange encouraged us to stay and buy another drink in the hope of more similar encounters!

Whilst Kitty went off to get more drinks I held the fort and was promptly joined by a creepy guy who turned out to be English, from Woolwich no less, and who had no sense of English charm whatsoever! Eventually he left, just as Kitty returned with more pomegranate lemonades.

For the final leg of the evening we were joined by a local guy called Mahmoud, who thoroughly loved that we were English, thought that everything we said and that what we were wearing was cute. He was full
of excellent banter like saying Kitty looked like the naughty one of the two of us and calling her Lucifer for the rest of the evening and that I looked like the angelic one so I became Angel. He also compared the three of us to Two and a Half Men, making it instead Two Brits and a Frisco. He was also very impressed to hear about our blog and we didn't lie when we told him he would be a feature of tonights events!! At some
point we were also joined by one of his friends, who called himself Ninja...

At about quarter to two in the morning, they turned the lights on in the bar and started chucking people out. Our two new friends kindly walked us to where we needed to get the bus to and we made our way back to Hellhouse through the fog.

When we got in, we found Jeff had put a big bag of crisps on the stairs up to the penthouse which we greatly appreciated!! It was whilst sat on the floor munching these that Kitty randomly came out with the statement 'The American Dream is a nightmare.' Needless to say, it had us both in stitches and is possibly the quote of the entire trip!