Blog/2024-11-10/A Stranger In The Night

We had quite a bit of fun this Saturday. We played an escape room at the Palace of Fine Arts, stuffed ourselves on a pizza tasting menu at Tony's, and then played some board games.

The Caltrain station, mostly normal, and the scene of the night's unexpected entertainment

The Attraction

The Attraction is one of the escape rooms at the Palace Games in the Palace of Fine Arts Event Centre. Escape rooms are this puzzle game where you are locked into a room by some contrivance and must solve a bunch of puzzles to escape the room. The Attraction is different from most escape rooms in that:

• it isn't timed, you have lots of time - we took 1h 38 min
• it's more of a story experience - like Omega Mart at Area 51 in Vegas

Honestly, the production value was really remarkable. It is somewhat built for adults who had experienced pop culture of the '90s and '00s which was enjoyable for us since that describes us. I won't spoil it for you, but it's got quite a high level of set design and quality, though if you're looking for a difficult puzzle you'll want to try the other rooms here.

In my opinion, Palace Games has the best escape rooms in the city, so you can't really go too wrong from here.

Pizza Tasting Menu at Tony's

Tony's Pizza Napoletana is frequently described as a touristy sort of place. There aren't any reservations and sometimes the wait can get up to 2 hours. Well, unless you reserve their 'tasting' menu. This is an amusingly impossible menu to finish. It's got 7 pizzas, 1 flatbread kind of thing, not to mention the appetizers and salad. There is no way you're finishing this unless you are some sort of farm hand stereotype who spent his whole day working with an empty stomach.

We went there because it's Shreyas's birthday, and because the pizza is good, but it is a little bit of a bit to actually go get 7 pizzas. There were a couple of flatbreads, some Neopolitan, and two deeper ones (which I didn't actually eat except for the top).

Surprisingly, the next day when I weighed myself, I was -1.1 lbs. God works in mysterious ways.

Night Time

Last night, Julie and I were walking back at about 1 AM from Shreyas's place after a few board games when we saw a lone fellow in a 49ers or Giants cap. It's city policy in San Francisco to avoid eye contact with random people standing at the train station at 1 AM, but I always like a story so I didn't do that. Predictably, the guy asked me if he could use my phone to call a ride back home.

This is the classic scam! You whip out your phone, he grabs it and makes a run for it. And strictly, with my wife standing there holding two pizza boxes, I should have said "No, sorry man" and walked on. That is the sensible thing to do at one in the morning. As it happens, though, I asked him where he lived and if I could just get him a car back.

Unbelievably, he gave me his address, I called an Uber, and the Uber driver took him exactly there and that was the end of it. The poor guy had probably actually lost his phone.

Julie and I have a protocol for how we deal with roadside incidents and whether we stop or just dial 911. But clearly we need a discreet one for whether it's acceptable to help someone on the street. There are a lot of crazy homeless folk here, and I think I've learned not to interact with them. But every so often, there's a normal person in an unfortunate situation and I can't help but be influenced by all the people who have helped me in the past.