I Left My Heart(burn) in San Francisco, Part I

It all began on Friday with a seemingly innocuous lunch with T's cousin and his fiance, whose wedding, incidentally, we will be attending in Hawaii only three weeks before our own. We met at City View on Commercial Street in Chinatown, just a couple of streets up from my building. All four of us, it turns out, work within blocks of one another. The financial markets were closed for the day, so the restaurant had no trouble seating us within minutes of arrival. It also meant that as soon as we were seated, the carts of dimsum came swarming to our table like moths to a flame. Plates of steamed shrimp dumplings flew off the carts faster than I could say "aiyah". In between bites of tender potstickers, we learned that T's cousin, in his offtime, sang for a well-regarded local acappella troupe, The Richter Scales, and that his fiance, in her offtime, had been learning the traditional Hawaiian hula dance. Very fun and interesting couple, and given the volume of dimsum consumed, our newest partners in crime.