How Attending A San Francisco Seminar Exposed Us To Potentially Deadly Air-Born Bacteria
My story begins on Saturday, January 20, 2007, when I went to a weekend seminar in San Francisco with my husband, Dale.
Instead of driving we took BART, the Bay Area Rapid Transit train (the trains are like the NY and Philadelphia subway trains, but the Bay Area trains don’t just go underground — they go under the San Francisco Bay between Oakland and San Francisco). It takes about 50 minutes each way from Walnut Creek to San Francisco and when we boarded there were only seats available that faced backward both days (on Sunday, January 21st, we were lucky to get seats at all as the 32nd Winter Fancy Food Show began that day at the Mosconi Center).
When we arrived in San Francisco we walked seven blocks to the Hilton Hotel on Kearney Street where the seminar was held. The weather was just right for walking. The tall buildings we walked between as we made our way through the Financial District to Chinatown (the Hilton Hotel faces the famous Chinatown Park) created a wind tunnel that kept us cool as we walked.
The seminar was held in a room too small for the number of people who attended. However, everyone cooperated and squeezed together and absorbed lots of great ideas (as well as lots of germs).
The people we met and spent time with on breaks and at lunch came from all over the world: Singapore, Australia, England, New York, Los Angeles, and other cities in the US.
On the way home on Saturday evening we decided to eat in San Francisco as the seminar didn't end until 7 pm. We walked with a friend to the food court in the San Francisco Shopping Center (a few blocks up Market Street from where we disembarked from BART that morning) and where there is another stop for BART. Our friend, Joe, was excited to introduce us to the food court in the shopping center as he had been there for lunch several times since it opened in September 2006.
Joe knows how much I like health food stores and eagerly showed us around in a 30,000-square-foot Bristol Farms market in the lower level food “emporium,” which is what the food court is called in the Bristol Farms brochures. In the brochure we learned that the store is Bristol Farms' first in Northern California, and the hope is that it will succeed as well as Whole Foods has in New York's Time Warner Center. It probably is succeeding if the dozens of people we encountered in the store were each buying something.
Joe thought it was great that he got to show us the food emporium, because it is the largest food court in the US. It is located underground near the lower levels of Nordstrom and Bloomingdale’s Department Stores. We bought our food after standing in a Disneyland-like line and sat down among literally hundreds of people, all of whom were eating and shopping well after eight pm as if it were noon. We were feeling tired after getting up at 5 am so, after eating, we got on the BART train for Walnut Creek and were home asleep by 10 pm.
Back at the seminar, at lunchtime on Sunday, January 21st, we walked across the street, on the left side of the hotel, to Louie’s California Chinese Restaurant on Washington Street. Louie’s is a famous, two-floor, narrow, crowded, and very loud restaurant where, after waiting in a line of people that went out the door (the line goes half way down the block on weekdays), we enjoyed the most delicious Chinese food I’ve ever tasted.
When the seminar ended on Sunday at 5 pm we were happy to go straight to BART and home where we cooked our evening meal ourselves and went to sleep early again.
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Three Days After The Start of the Seminar Dale Started Sneezing
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