Taste of Lexus & SF Greek Food Festival

On Saturday I went up to Alameda Point to mooch off the free food from the annual "Taste of Lexus" event - Lexus's annual event where they let select invitees test drive their new cars, and compare them against the competition. Apparently last year there were too many moochers, leading to long lines and waits for test drives, so this year, I didn't even get on the list! Fortunately my friend Tim put me on his guest list, so I got to go anyway.

The clear hype was around hybrids (specifically the GS450h) and their as-yet-unreleased LS460, the "self parking" car. Joke is with the speed it does this, someone would probably have snuck in behind you and stolen your spot. It's not fully automated, the car does the S curve back in, but the driver still has to step on the brakes, turn the wheel and pull forward. It's kinda scary thinking about the cars that can drive themselves & park themselves. Pretty soon, you'll step in and only be able to tell the car where you want to go. How it gets there, and how fast it goes there, is going to be entirely pre-programmed. Awesome. I hate it.

This year, the event was still packed full of moochers. In the 4 hours or so I was there, I got to test drive two cars - a GS300 and a BMW 750i, and I didn't get any crabcakes! We had to queue up for entry, for orientation, for food, for test-drives, and (get this!) even to exit! One interesting observation though - this event is almost 99% asian in the population makeup. Not that I'm racist or anything, but it sure seems like nothing brings out the asian masses like free food... The crowd would mob any server coming out with a tray, until they discovered the tray didn't have crabcakes, then they went back to pretending to look at the cars. When crabcakes did come out - they were gone in under 2 minutes! (so I'm told by someone who witnessed the feeding frenzy)

On Sunday, I joined my old roommate Shance & his girlfriend Michelle to check out the San Francisco Greek Food Festival. Besides the usual Gyros, we had souvlaki and dolmades (rice dumplings wrapped in grape leaves). But by far my favorite were the greek doughnuts - Loukoumades - covered with honey and cinnamon, and topped with cinnamon. We had about 2 dozen for dessert, and I got another dozen for Sarah to try.

Sarah's flight back was delayed rather substantially, so instead of heading to the airport around 10pm, I ended up there at 2 in the morning... Monday was a definitely a hard start.