Painstaking Research

My friend John, the photographer, was in town for most of the month of June. This was fun because we hadn’t seen each other since the end of our trip last summer. His main rationale for coming was to take some Photoshop classes. One other goal, though, was to produce a joint-venture article or two, much like the Mission District article we sold to Malaysian Airlines’ in-flight magazine last year. We thought about doing one on markets, but neither of us found our way to very many.

This was because we were so busy researching an article on San Francisco cafes. It’s a tough job, but someone has to do it. As you can see from this photo, it was actually so tough that we had to recruit a friend to help us. (We didn’t ask her to wear the Mrs. Madrigal hat, but she couldn’t have been more appropriately dressed if she had bongos and a goatee.)

We ran into an old roommate of mine at a café in North Beach. (This is coincidentally the neighborhood we lived in back in the day.) I had the embarrassing task of explaining that I was not really sitting in the sun drinking coffee at 4pm on a weekday; I was actually doing research. Like I said, tough job. (I even had to eat a cannoli, because it’s the house specialty.)

The Toothpaste Terrorist

You know how when you fly, you’re supposed to put all your toiletries in a little baggie? And how you’re not supposed to have more than four ounces of liquid or gel with you? And how you always think, “They can’t be serious?”

They are.

On the way to New Hampshire, I smuggled my five-ounce tube of toothpaste through security in a carry-on bag. But on the way home, going through Logan, I managed to get myself searched. I had missed my flight (yes, there’s a story there), so I was probably a little more nervous and shifty than usual at security. I also inadvertently put my computer on top of other belongings going through the X-ray machine, which apparently shows you to be not just a laptop newbie, but also a latent Al-Qaeda sympathizer.

They took my carry-ons and went behind a glass partition, where I could see a TSA lady pawing through my dirty clothes and turning my computer on and off. But it was my toiletry bag that attracted the most attention. I had obeyed the letter of the law by putting my gels and liquids in a baggie, but I hadn’t taken the baggie out and shown it to the security people. All this upset them enough, but what really sent them to DEFCON-3 was my over-sized toothpaste. I was given the choice of mailing the toothpaste home, throwing it away, or checking it. (For a second I thought the TSA lady was suggesting putting a little luggage tag on it and putting it on the plane like that.) Because I was in a hurry and flying standby, I surrendered the tube.

I wanted to stick around to see the bomb squad detonate my Colgate, but I had to hustle to my gate so I don’t know what happened to it.

A few days later, I saw the infamous sippy-cup video, and realized that I’d missed a chance to make a satisfying (and messy) scene. I’d probably still be in Boston if I’d done that, though, so I guess meek submission was the right action. Still, it’s hard to see how forbidding large quantities of toothpaste helps the struggle against those who hate our freedom and sparkling white teeth. Will we one day look back on the days when you could board an aircraft carrying a bottle of shampoo the way I marvel that there was once a time when you could fly without passing through a metal detector? Do the new rules make sense or is this just another example of the frightening power of the four-ounce plastic tube industry? Only time will tell. I do know one thing for sure, though:

I’m very happy I’ve been hoarding tiny hotel soaps and shampoos all these years.

Doing the Math

Airfare from SFO to Boston: $400 per person.

Rental car for the drive from Boston to Hanover: $21 per day.

New Dartmouth sweatshirt: $45.95.

Reconnecting with people who knew you when you were still in your teens: Priceless.

A Few of My Favorite Things

My very favorite thing, of course, was catching up with old friends. As I said, several were there, none of whom I see as often as I’d like. It was great to see who everyone has become, get to know spouses better, and meet children.

I also enjoyed visiting with my grunge-era, early-twenties self. I’ve read travelogues about returning to a place the writer knew at a much different life stage, and I imagined I’d learn a lot about how far I’d come by comparing my modern self to my collegiate self. And I did, but honestly, I also enjoyed the illusion that I still was my collegiate self. Scurrying across the green, bumping into friends at the Hop, hanging out with old roommates at ’tails…all these things were once so commonplace that it was possible to pretend that they still happened every day.

I’m not saying it’s healthy to live in the past, but I do think it’s a nice place to visit.

Other favorite moments:

• Swimming in the river. I never do this at home. We don’t have any major rivers in the East Bay, and it just doesn’t get that hot here anyway.
  
  
• Summer cloudburst. I was hoping for a full-blown thunderstorm, but even just a nice, warm summer rain was a good thing.
  
  
• Eating an EBA’s chicken sandwich at midnight. It wasn’t the size of my face the way I remember (I guess nothing’s ever as big as it seemed when you were young), but it was just as good.
  
  
• Rodent watch: Pipi and I took a walk by my old dorm, and Pipi swears she saw a beaver in the cemetery that’s next to it. There is a little brook running through there, so I’m inclined to believe her.
  
  
• Bumping into one of my freshman-year roommates at lunch at the Bema. She remembered that the last time we saw each other was at a class gathering--also at the Bema--the day before we graduated. So here’s what I’m wondering: Does she think I’ve been up there all this time?
  

Dartmouth Undying

Reunion was a blast. I went knowing that at least one close friend would be attending, and was pleasantly surprised to find that two others decided to come at the last minute as well. I slept very little that weekend cramming in a lot of catching up.

Some things had changed in Hanover. I was shocked to find a Gap and a Dunkin’ Donuts on Main Street—I had understood that franchises in general and fast-food in particular were forbidden downtown, but I guess the place has loosened up slightly. A lot of the landmark buildings at the north end of campus have been torn down and replaced with new ones. I’m not usually one to embrace change, but I have to admit that these renovations are for the better. I won’t miss Kiewit, a squat, one-story concrete bunker of a computer center that supposedly could be retracted into the ground during a nuclear attack, or whatever that ugly tiled building was that we called “The Shower Tower.” (It really did look like a four-story public restroom.)

It was novel to exchange cell phone numbers with classmates—I didn’t know anyone with a mobile phone in college—and fun to meet spouses and kids. Dave and I joked that we wondered who all these middle-aged people were hanging around our class tent, but in fact, no one really looked shockingly different. (Dave himself may have spent the last 15 years in a hyperbaric chamber.) And Dartmouth hasn’t changed too dramatically, either. The major buildings are still there, my old house is the same as it ever was, and the Green looks just as it has since approximately the time of the American Revolution. At least one of my friends discovered that he can still open his mailbox at the Hop. Change comes very slowly to Hanover.

Don We Now Our Gay Apparel

I apologize for falling down on the job of blogging. It’s been a little crazy and something had to give.

First there was my trip to New Hampshire, which I promise I will post photos of soon. I got back much later than expected from that trip and I feel like I’m still catching up on lost sleep.

Then there was Pride. Gay Pride in San Francisco is a whole season, not unlike Christmas. Both the holidays and Pride involve lots of color, lots of socializing, numerous houseguests, and far too much eating and drinking. The only real difference is that you might get a sunburn at Pride. Aside from that, these two festive occasions are more similar than most people like to admit.

Highlights of Pride in San Francisco include a two-week-long gay and lesbian film festival and a women’s march through the Castro. The culmination is always a parade down Market Street, which every year gets bigger and bigger. I’ve never been able to make it through the whole parade as a spectator; it’s just too tiring. This year there were 197 contingents. I think I saw about 130 before I had to sit down in the shade somewhere.

For the past couple of years Pipi and I have watched the parade on TV, but this year I went with my sister. It’s not really her scene (frankly, I don’t think she even likes Christmas as much as I do), but we both had a really good time. It’s always fun to see a familiar thing through new eyes. Living in the Bay Area you can almost get used to the idea of men in dresses, women in motorcycle gangs, and pit bulls in tutus being walked by people wearing studded collars. So it’s good to be reminded that the things we take for granted here really are unusual, and need to be appreciated. Or at least respected. I personally don't totally understand, for example, why anyone would wear women's clothing when he doesn’t have to, because I sure don't, but I love that this fashion choice makes sense to some people. It’s this kind of thinking outside the size-12 box that makes the Bay Area great.

This Just In

Pipi and I are back from New Hampshire. There will be more on that later. The short version: It was great! It was a beautiful June weekend and I had the chance to catch up with several friends I hadn’t seen in a long time.

Before I get into that, though, I wanted to report that the Dallas Morning News is running my Mongolia article in August. I’ll let you know, and post a link, as soon as I know exactly when it’s running.

Last-Minute Planning

My weekend trip to New Hampshire is coming together. Flights were reserved a while ago. I got a hotel room in Boston (actually, just outside) and a rental car. We’re set for accommodations on campus. We can stay in Northampton Sunday night and drive to Boston Monday afternoon since our flight is late in the day.

That’s everything important. Still, it’s amazing how many little things there are to remember to do before you’re really free to go somewhere. I never get used to this, although to be fair, I think there are more and more little hurdles these days.

Here is a partial list (I say “partial” because I’m sure I’m forgetting something) of things I have to remember to do before I leave Thursday morning:

• Get directions from the rental-car place to the hotel.
  
• Get directions from the hotel to downtown Boston, where I have a couple of meetings Friday morning.
  
• Get directions to…virtually every destination in New England, including: downtown Boston to Interstate 89, Dartmouth to the Ben & Jerry’s factory in Vermont, Burlington to Northampton, and the Mass Pike to the car-rental return place. The Mapquest phenomenon is something I never used to have to deal with. And many normal people still don’t, but I was blessed with what my friend Sarah calls an “exciting sense of direction.” This is what most people call “not being able to find your way out of a paper bag.” So before I go anywhere, I spend a long session on a map site. It certainly beats the days of gas-station maps.
  
• Reconfirm with my cat-sitter (Thanks, sis!)
  
• Clean the cat box. I know someone is coming to clean the box for me, but I like to pretend that I’m cleaner than I am for the people I ask to clean up after me. Sort of like brushing my teeth before going to the dentist.
  
• Laundry.
  
• Stop the newspaper.
  
• Charge up all my toys: cell phone, laptop, ipod, camera.
  
• Lose 10 pounds. (This is a college reunion I’m going to, after all.)
  

Fun Fact

Lam-Toro is the name of an African King. It’s also the name of a 1992 album by Baaba Maal, one of the most popular musicians in Senegal.

Exploring the World One Entrée at a Time

Recently while walking in Oakland’s Uptown neighborhood, I found a West African restaurant on Telegraph Avenue called Lam-Toro. I didn’t have any idea what West African cuisine would be like, so I made a point of going as soon as possible.

Yesterday I went at lunchtime. Because of an evening class, I eat both lunch and dinner early on Wednesdays, so I got there at 11:45. The door was unlocked, but the waiter told me it would actually be another half hour until they were open.

A word about this waiter: If I were opening an African restaurant, and I were looking for ways to make it seem authentically African, I would pay whatever it took to hire this guy. He was a strikingly handsome man, tall, dark, and chiseled. He looked like Seal with better skin. He was wearing a long, colorful shirt that went to his knees and he had a great accent. (I’m not sure exactly what kind of accent it was. He spoke fluent English with me, high-school textbook French with a patron at the next table, and something I didn’t recognize with the other people who worked there.)

It turns out the restaurant is brand new, having only opened a few days before. In addition, someone in the family that owns the restaurant had had a car accident that morning, so they’d all been very late getting to work.

The result was the longest lunch I think I’ve ever had in the United States, and certainly my longest solo lunch ever. I waited over an hour for my food. I had time to write a text message (which takes me forever; I’m too old for IM fluency) to Pipi saying that I thought I might actually be a hostage.

If this were the perfect travelogue, lunch, when it finally came, would have been the best thing ever. I wouldn’t say that was exactly the case--the dish was a little greasy and over-salted. But I would still say it was worth the wait just because I finally had an idea of what West African cuisine is like.

The menu indicated that Lam-Toro is specifically a Senegalese restaurant. About half the dishes had French names. There was a lot of chicken on the menu, and also a lot of lamb. Most of the meat was served with either rice or couscous. There was a dish called fou-fou, which I’ve always wanted to try, but it was a Thursday special, and I was there Wednesday.

Unfortunately, at lunchtime you don’t get much of a choice of what to order. Much of the menu is only served at dinner, so there were really only two daily specials available to me. I had lamb chops with rice, the other choice being a fish stew. The chops were roasted with a lot of spices, and served with a sauce that was oily and full of onion. I liked it but it occurs to me that this place might be best for single people. Six hours and two brushings later I still had bad breath. The rice was delicious. It was salty and buttery, and had chunks of hard-boiled egg in it.

The beverage selection was a little exotic. Some kind of a ginger drink was available, but I chose to try bissap, which was described as a hibiscus juice. It tasted like a drink called Jamaica that I’ve had at Mexican restaurants, except that the Senegalese version has muddled mint in it, and it’s sweeter. (I overheard someone say that Senegal has the largest per-capita sugar consumption rate in Africa, but I have no idea if this is really true.)

The long and the short of it is that I’m glad I’ve had a taste of Senegalese cuisine. I would do it again, but I would go at dinnertime and have a snack first. I’d also wait a few weeks until the service issues settle down.

But I may need more of that rice very soon. I wonder if there’s another West African restaurant in Oakland?

Make Way for Goslings

For old times’ sake, I took a walk around Lake Merritt recently. This used to be my regular exercise before I started my Oakland exploration project.

While walking, I realized it’s gosling season. The baby geese are back in force around the lake. Normally, the Canada geese that live around Lake Merritt are kind of a nuisance. They’re noisy and messy, doing more to keep visitors off the grass than any warning sign ever could. But they do make charming little families. You’ll see an adult goose swimming, followed by a clutch of fuzzy yellow goslings in a line, with the other goose parent bringing up the rear to make sure no one gets lost. Even though these little fuzzballs grow up to be part of the overpopulation problem, they certainly are cute when they’re small.

Napa Outlets

Oh, one more fun thing about Napa: It has great outlet stores. I don’t consider myself a big shopper, but these stores are good for people who don’t think they’re into shopping. The selection skews toward practical, unpretentious brands, like J. Crew, Jockey, and Banana Republic. It’s easy to tell yourself you’re not shopping; you’re buying, because it’s all stuff you really need, like workout clothes and underwear, not $400 shoes or handbags that will be in Fashion Police in a few weeks.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Public Eavesdropping

“I just wanted to see some f---ing whales!”
-One wildlife lover to another at the Martinez Marina and Yacht club, Memorial Day, 2007.

Maybe you’d heard: There were some lost whales in the bay recently. They got as far as Sacramento, where they stayed for so long everyone began to wonder if they’d ever find their way to Alaska. By the weekend Pipi and I were in Napa, they had finally started heading toward the sea, and were splashing around Suisun Bay near the city of Martinez.

On the way back from the wine country, Pipi and I made a detour to the Martinez Yacht Club and Marina, which we’d seen on TV. There was a pretty good-sized crowd there—I guess we weren’t the only ones who’d seen the live broadcast from there that morning.

We could see helicopters hovering several miles away, so I think the whales were close, but we never did spot them. I don’t think they actually swam by the marina until the next day, so I’m glad Pipi and I didn’t stay until we got sunburned (or profane.)

We did see something else interesting in Martinez, a city I had never visited but which is quickly becoming the safari capital of the Bay Area. A family of beavers has made itself at home near the Amtrak station, and is not showing any signs of leaving. They have built a dam across what used to be tiny trickle of a creek downtown. It is now a 10-foot-deep stream.

We didn’t actually see the beavers, either. We did get a good look at the dam, though. That’s not something I see every day. These animals may have had the time for a mid-day nap during our visit, but they clearly were busy little beavers at some point.

Napa B&B

Pipi and I, anticipating that we might not want to drive all the way back to Oakland after a big dinner with wine, stayed at a Bed & Breakfast in the town of Napa, just north of the town center. It was called the Hillview Country Inn and it was everything I hoped it would be. The inn was once a mansion built by a doctor in 1900. There really was a little cat (two, actually, although we only saw one, and that one only briefly). Our room was exactly the kind of room you picture when you imagine a B&B. Every room had a theme; ours was the Rose Room. Lots of pictures of roses, and dried roses wrapped around the drapery hardware. The room had its own bath, which was nice. I’ll eat breakfast with strangers if I have to, but I really hate brushing my teeth with them.

There was a big common area with a small bar—guests are encouraged to help themselves to wine, beer, home-made apricot brandy, and after-dinner liquor. There were two huge jars of cookies on the coffee table, and everywhere I looked, a candy jar. “We like to keep folks happy here,” Al Hasenpusch, the innkeeper’s husband, told me.

Breakfast was a force to be reckoned with. There was sausage and egg, and grapefruit. This of course, would have been enough, but the centerpiece was what innkeeper Susie Hasenpusch called “24-hour French toast.” As best I can recall, bread was soaked overnight in a mixture of egg, milk, butter, cinnamon, corn syrup, and I think something else bad for you. Then it was baked like an upside-down cake.

I know what you’re thinking: You’re saying to yourself, “That sounds edible, but really, couldn't Susie have found a way to add some richness and sweetness? Susie is way ahead of you. Each chunk was served with a dollop of cherry pie filling on top.

It was amazing. Breakfast was served at 8:30 am. We all joked about skipping lunch, but for the first time in recent memory, I actually did. With just a few snacks, I made it all the way through to dinner.

(Pipi, who found a plastic bread-bag clip in her breakfast, wasn't quite as impressed with the experience as I was, but even she had to admit it beat the Motel 6.)

The Uncritical Critic

I understand that the above wasn’t really a restaurant review. More like a restaurant fawning. And no, they didn’t put me up to it. I just really like food and find it hard to think or write critically about it.

I have the same issue with travel writing--I like most places, and the few destinations I haven’t cared for particularly I have at least found interesting anthropologically. I would never want to be responsible for giving a city a star rating, or writing about how a new museum is superficially entertaining, but derivative and decorated in last year’s colors.

Luckily, nobody expects travel writers to make value judgments about how good or bad a place is. Everyone likes a good travel disaster story, but nobody wants you to end it by concluding that it happened because the country is a half-baked mess that should be avoided at all costs. (Even if the disaster involved food poisoning.) It’s an interesting distinction between travel writing and food writing, two disciplines that otherwise have a lot of overlap.

So I went to Napa and I ate well and I didn’t spend a second worrying about whether or not there was any possible way the meal could have been better or more stylish. And in writing, I didn’t worry too much about whether or not anyone else would agree with me. I’ll let you all draw your own conclusions about whether or not Terra sounds good.

(But oh, my God, just go because now that I’ve thought about it, no, there isn’t any way dinner could have been better.)

Terra, St. Helena

Terra turned out to be fantastic. Our innkeepers were impressed, calling Terra one of the best restaurants in the Napa Valley. I don’t know the scene well, but I don’t doubt the claim. The food was that good.

We had a little trouble finding it at first. St. Helena isn’t big; we found the street easily, and we knew the enormous Italianate stone edifice just had to be it. But there was no sign. We drove past it once and finally parked and investigated on foot. Persistence paid off. A notice printed on an 8x10 sheet of paper told us we were in the right place.

In the lobby we were pleasantly surprised by artwork that was modern, but ever so slightly naughty. That suggested that Terra is a place that doesn’t take itself too seriously, and I think that’s the case. The main dining room was a little more sober, dark, with stone walls.

The food is described as Italian and French, but I thought there was an Asian influence as well. This could have been a weird or pretentious combination in lesser hands, but it worked here. I had a lobster/vegetable soup, sort of like minestrone with shellfish. My main course was cod, which I really only ordered for the shrimp dumplings it came with. (And because I was trying not to have cheese at all three courses--cheese dependence is a little bit of a problem with me.)

I’m glad I did. The fish was unbelievably good, maybe the best ever. (In Taiwan I once had a whole small fish steamed with garlic and ginger that was a challenger, but I had to pick it out of a tank myself. The knowledge that I had just played the angel of death gave the fish a guilty aftertaste.)

My cod was broiled in sake, and glazed with a slightly sweet, tangy sauce, like teriyaki. The dumplings were small, boiled, and delicious. The cheese plate afterward was to die for. Everyone else seemed happy with his or her dinner, too. My father was torn between spaghetti with tripe and veal cheeks with sweetbreads--a dilemma possibly only he could have—so there really was something for everyone on the menu. (He went with tripe) Hilary had lamb, and Pipi and my mother both had pork, which was amazingly tender and flavorful. Hilary taught us that you can almost always get ice cream at a restaurant if you ask nicely enough, even if it isn’t on the menu, which was valuable information.

Verdict: 10 thumbs up. (Well, there were five of us.)

Hillview Country Inn

For one dark moment, Pipi and I actually considered the Euro Spa again, reasoning that our expectations would be so low that we couldn’t possibly be disappointed. But it didn’t come to that. I found a room at a bed and breakfast in Napa that turned out to be quite reasonably priced.

I know not everyone likes B&Bs. There’s a very funny scene in the movie Flirting with Disaster where Ben Stiller’s wife tries to talk him into staying in one. He doesn’t want to do it; he says he hates them because, “The lady’s always boring, and there’s always some stupid cat you have to pretend to like.” His wife promises it won’t be like that, but of course, in the very next scene, he’s trying to check in while surreptitiously shooing a tabby away and ignoring the proprietress’ droning about the pre-Civil War history of the area.

I don’t mind at all. I do like cats, of course, and I’m a secret History Channel junkie. And there’s nothing not to like about free breakfast, so I’m extremely happy.

A big thank you to Pipi’s co-worker, Julie, for pointing us in this direction. None of the web sites I was looking at included B&Bs. Her suggestion that we look into the Beazley House B&B landed me at this site, which includes several wine country inns.

I’ll give the cat a little belly rub for you.

Recalculating

Earlier I said that my next trip would be New Hampshire in June. Actually, a quick trip to Napa has come up. Pipi and I are meeting my parents and sister for dinner in St. Helena. We’re going to Terra, a place I’ve never been to.

Dinner is late, though, so we’ll spend the night. I am pleasantly surprised to find that it’s not that hard to get an affordable hotel room in Santa Rosa for Memorial Day weekend. I’m surprised because years ago, Pipi and I tried to plan a last-minute getaway to Calistoga for Memorial Day. The only room we could find was at a place called the Euro Spa, which we dubbed the “Euro Trash Spa.” It was clearly a re-purposed motel. The hot springs were just an aboveground Jacuzzi, and the on-staff masseuse lived in a trailer park.

The trick, I understand now, is to book a room in Santa Rosa, which for some reason has a lot of hotels for business travelers, and they tend to be empty on weekends. So that’s what we’re doing. It looks like it’s possible to stay for under $100, believe it or not.

Coming soon: review of Terra.

New Reading Date

It looks like I’m going to be taking part in two readings for Best Women’s Travel Writing 2007. One is at Book Passage in August. The other one, which is just coming together, is at the Alexander Book Company in San Francisco (on Second Street, near Market). I don’t know when, exactly, but I think it’s sometime in June. I will, of course, keep you all posted when the details get worked out.

Spontaneous Recognition

My father called today to say that his trainer at the gym had seen my article—apparently he’s a loyal “My Word” reader—and put the names together. This is the first instance of what my Dad calls “spontaneous recognition” of this piece.

In other words, this is the first evidence I have that someone I didn’t specifically force to read the piece did so anyway.

Chronicle Article is Published

I had an article in the San Francisco Chronicle this past week. It appeared in the “My Word” section of the Sunday paper—that’s the last page of the Sunday magazine. It’s also online. If you missed it in real time, you can see it by clicking here.

I already got one e-mail from an acquaintance who’d seen it. I’m excited--this is possibly the biggest exposure I’ve gotten yet.

Next on the Itinerary

Two people happened to ask me today where in the world we’re headed next. The answer is: Hanover, New Hampshire. Pipi and I are going there in June for my college reunion. My 15th!

If a Shrub Falls in the Forest….

During the winter I wrote about an incident where one of my neighbors killed himself on a day when hardly anyone was around. When something like this happens, it reminds me of the koan about whether or not a tree makes a sound if no one hears it fall.

Just call me an amplifier.

Today’s event wasn’t tragic at all, just silly.

Until yesterday there was a sad strip of shrubbery between my building and the one next door. Someone over-pruned it a few years ago, and since then, there has been very little green to the bushes, just dead twigs and gnarled roots. Sometimes garbage would accumulate in the branches. Last week, a black baseball cap appeared perched on top of the bushes, and I didn’t know what to do about it. It was a perfectly good hat that must have come off someone’s head, so I didn’t want to throw it away, but it looked ridiculous sitting there.

Yesterday a crew of guys with a big truck took care of the problem for me. They began sawing the bushes apart and clearing them out.

That part seemed to go well. Today has been a little weirder. They got the easy parts taken away, but late this morning, they had to remove the trunks and roots. This seemed to be too much for their tools, so they tied a rope to one trunk, and the other end to their truck. It took several accelerations, but finally the trunk exploded out of the ground like a loose tooth tied to a slamming door.

This worked so well they tried it with bigger sections of root, and persisted even through breaking a taillight and getting the rope wrapped around a wheel. Just a moment ago, though, I heard glass break and now they’re hacking the roots out of the ground with a pickaxe.

Soon they will have it all out, and will have swept up all the dirt and stray branch clippings. The neighbors will come home and notice the empty space between buildings, but they will have no idea how exactly it happened, and how it happily distracted me from work for about an hour.

And how lucky they are that their car windows are okay.

An Interesting Find Close to Home

There are a lot of interesting things in and around Golden Gate Park. There are a couple of windmills, for one thing. And a herd of buffalo, and a very surreal museum coated in copper that’s going to slowly turn green. Oh, and a giant purple head. (Seriously, it’s like Easter Island on acid; it’s one of the scariest pieces of public art I’ve ever seen.)

Now there’s something else interesting just outside of the park, at Ocean Beach. It’s the bow of a shipwreck that poked itself up out of the sand last week.

It admittedly doesn’t make the most amazing photograph--although I’d like to say for the record that some pretentious guy with a tripod was hogging all the good angles while I was there today. But it’s pretty interesting nonetheless.

The story is that in 1878 a clipper ship called the King Phillip was anchored in open water not too far from shore. The weather was very rough and the anchor came loose, causing the ship to founder on the beach.

Nobody died in the wreck. There’s no treasure, either--the ship was leaving San Francisco empty, which is probably lucky because when full it usually carried guano to be used as fertilizer. (Well, at least looting wasn’t a problem.)

I don’t know why, but apparently the wreck was sold, stripped of its metal fittings, and then allowed to just sit there getting buried with sand and beach detritus. This section of beach does seem to attract a lot of stuff --walking south along the water, I got the sense I was getting close when I noticed an unusual amount of driftwood and garbage in the cove.

It’s said that the remains of the ship get uncovered every twenty years, but I’m not sure that’s true. I do know that the last time it was sighted was in 1983 after a very stormy winter. I don’t know if other apparitions are recorded.

I like that people seem to leave the wreckage alone, content to let it be a time capsule for the next generation. So if you go, please be gentle. Here’s a hint: It’s at the southern end of Ocean Beach, near Noriega Avenue. You can only see it at low tide. Do yourself a favor, and don’t park by the Beach Chalet like I did. It’s a long walk.

Reality Check

Today I took a walk in a part of town that was rougher than I expected. To play it safe, I probably won’t be going back there by myself—I’d hate to have a relapse of my ridiculous paranoia.

I was exploring a part of Oakland that’s a little further northwest than I’ve been before. It’s another neighborhood with some nice houses in disrepair, but the houses aren’t as nice as some I’ve seen, and by disrepair I don’t mean that the owner waited an extra summer to paint—I mean that they’re abandoned and slumping to one side. The grandest house of all I saw had all its windows broken and was up on a jack, waiting to be moved to a different part of town.

I walked for about a half an hour past liquor stores, storefront churches, graffiti, guys with shopping carts, and, most ominously, a couple of clusters of young men in parkas standing around doing nothing except looking like they were looking out for something. (Probably just their ride to band practice, but I couldn’t help imagining it was drug-related.)

Toward the end of the walk I found myself walking behind three people who all looked like they’d just stepped out of church—in 1965. The woman was wearing, I swear, a pillbox hat and a long blue cloth coat. The two men were also wearing long coats, Malcolm X-style fedoras, and bowties. They turned around when they heard me coming up behind them. For some reason, I thought of the scenes in the show Weeds where Halia’s Black Muslim boyfriend treats Mary Louise Parker so coldly. Great, I thought, they’re going to harangue me for being the white devil.

“Excuse me, Ma’am,” one of the men said, “May I give you something?”

I said, “Yes,” but thought, “Please not a diatribe, I have enough liberal guilt going on today.”

He handed me what turned out to be a Jehovah’s Witnesses pamphlet called “Will This World Survive?” (Bad news: no. Good news: The actual planet won’t be destroyed, just life as we know it.)

I thanked him weakly, more for not yelling at me than for giving me the flyer. “Can I ask you a favor?” he said.

Uh, oh. Shakedown. I nodded warily.

“Will you please have yourself a wonderful day?” he said.

And I did, to the extent that my smarting guilt over the whole situation allowed.

Why Me?

I’m not exactly sure why this person contacted me, of all Gekko members. So that’s a good question. But it’s partly explained by the fact that editorial is very new to the site, so writers have to register in the same way as photographers. I’m working on updating my profile so that it’s clear I’m a writer, but I guess those changes haven’t gone through yet.

It Works!

I’ve signed up for sites sort of like Gekko before, where you can post content and hope someone buys it, but I’ve never had any luck with them. I haven’t sold anything through Gekko yet, either (it’s only been a few days!), but I did have an interesting experience this morning.

I found a message in my email box from another Gekko member asking if I happened to have any photos of indigenous Australians doing photogenic things. Apparently the writer wanted to contact me on behalf of a book publisher who needed these shots, and was hoping I could sell him some.

I wasn’t able to help much beyond recommending that he contact my photographer friend John (who probably doesn’t have any pictures like this either). Still, it’s good to know that this site, billed as a networking site, really does seem to be just that.

Gekko Images

Here’s an interesting web site that my photographer friend John found: It’s called Gekko Images. It started out as a stock photography site, but recently they’ve branched out into carrying editorial as well. The really interesting thing about the site is that it matches up writers and photographers who wouldn’t otherwise necessarily know each other.

The way it works is that I can post a story, and then browse the Gekko inventory to find photos that I think go with it. I attach them to my story and indicate the price at which I’d like to sell the piece. Meanwhile, the photographer has also attached a price to his or her images. If we’re lucky, an editor browsing the site will see my story and the pretty pictures and buy the whole package. Gekko takes care of paying both the photographer and me.

This is an ideal situation, and it’s a long way from happening. The text feature is still experimental. I have been able to upload articles, but I don’t think they’re visible to the public yet. Still, it’s a great idea and when it’s up and running, it will be a good way for authors and photographers to help each other.

Clarification

I hope I didn’t sound too negative yesterday. I actually have a higher tolerance for ruts then most people, and anyway, a rut with an 80s soundtrack can’t be all that bad.

I really do like working at home. People ask me all the time whether or not I do, and my standard response is, “Of course. It’s my home. There would be something wrong if I didn’t like it.” It’s just sometimes a surreal existence, that’s all. Which is another thing I don’t mind as much as some people would. Its beats working.

Groundhog Day

Working at home can be like this, I guess: Recently my sister, who is in cooking school, announced that she needed to practice making a few dishes, and since our parents were out of town, Pipi and I ended up being the guinea pigs. (By which I mean we ate so much all we could do afterward was loll around and make happy little squeaking noises.)

Dinner was amazing enough, and then for dessert Hilary served profiteroles with caramel sauce made from scratch. Somehow Pipi and I ended up with the leftover sauce, which we put to creative use over the next few days. We found that it was surprisingly good over some strawberries that we happened to have around.

After this discovery, I went and got more strawberries at Farmer Joe’s, because we had a lot of caramel left. It was a good grocery store run; the aisles weren’t too crowded, and Blondie’s “The Tide is High” was playing in the background. It was followed by “Don’t Dream it’s Over,” another great 80s song, and I remember rolling down the aisle humming and thinking I’d come at just the right time.

Two days later, we were out of strawberries again. So I headed over to Farmer Joe’s for some more. As I cruised the produce area, I heard “The Tide is High” playing, and I suddenly realized that I could predict the future--I knew exactly what song was going to come next. Sure enough, it was Crowded House.

I feel like I’m in a little bit of a rut. Working at home can be like this, I guess.

A-List Editor

I got an unexpected treat from the editor of the San Francisco Chronicle Sunday Magazine. I’ve known for a while that she was going to publish one of my pieces on May 20. We went back and forth on a few edits in a process that turned out to be very pleasant--she’s an easy editor to work with.

I figured that was the end of it, but recently she got in touch with me to show me what the piece would look like with the edits we talked about. She specifically asked me to let her know if there was anything I didn’t like—a nearly unprecedented editorial request. (I tried really hard to find something, but couldn’t.)

Something You Don’t See Every Day

This isn’t west Oakland; this is central Oakland, on the north side of Lake Merritt. This picture shows something I think I’ve only seen one other time in my life (in Barcelona): A cathedral under construction.

It’s not every day you see a cathedral being built, so I’m fascinated by this process. Especially interesting is the fact that they seem to be building the roof first. Seems unconventional, but like I said, I’ve only seen one other incomplete cathedral, so it’s not for me to say what’s normal and what isn’t.

I’m trying not to be upset that this building seems to be coming along faster than the new Trader Joe’s we’ve been promised in my own neighborhood, but I read somewhere that patience is a virtue, so I’m trying to remain calm.

And Another Thing

Here’s another nice thing I saw recently. Someone planted rose bushes in such a way that they have climbed up and obscured an ugly fence in front of a salvage yard full of old buses. This goes on for almost a whole block. The fence smells really sweet now, too.

More West Oakland Treasures

West Oakland seems to be a neighborhood that has suffered terribly from the construction of the freeway system. 980 really cut a swathe through a formerly cohesive neighborhood. On the east side of it you have downtown Oakland, with Starbucks and skyscrapers, and on the other you have cute little houses like these. It’s a jarring change, and I doubt it looked like this before the freeway was there.

Not every home in West Oakland looks like these do, of course. Some are bigger, and some are falling apart. Some are brand-new condos. Some are high-rise apartment buildings. Many, though, are a lot like this: evidence of the day when the neighborhood was full of middle-class families, many African American, doing well for themselves. With the cost of homes going up all over, it will never quite be like this again, so it’s interesting to get a glimpse of what the streets must have looked like in the 1940s, when times were good.

One thing I do want to stress: I don’t mean to make it sound like gentrification is an unmitigated disaster for West Oakland. For one thing, it’s barely begun. For another, rising home prices mean that some families can finally think about making a profit from properties they’ve owned for years, but couldn’t give away until now. I really think the freeway did the place a much bigger disservice, cutting it off from downtown and creating an instant wrong-side-of-the-tracks situation.

And Now for Something Completely Different

I certainly didn’t expect to include a photo of this in my West Oakland collection: This is a shot of a section of freeway that recently collapsed in this part of town.

Perhaps you’ve heard of this incident—I think it was national news. It’s certainly big here. A truck full of gasoline exploded on a freeway connector at exactly the point where it passes under another freeway, and the fireball melted the roadway above it. Now you can’t drive either road.

This was a fairly shocking event for me because I have driven many times on that exact piece of asphalt you can see drooping down. It used to connect the Bay Bridge to interstate 580, which is the freeway I normally take home from San Francisco. Of course I’m not alone in this situation; tens of thousands of cars pass that way every day.

Many people are saying it’s lucky that this accident didn’t happen mid-day when more people might have been hurt. Others are saying that if it had happened mid-day, all those cars would have made it impossible for the truck to go fast enough to lose control. I’m not sure who’s right; I’m just saying.

The remarkable thing is that no one was killed. No one besides the driver was even injured, and he’s getting out of the hospital soon.

Nobody knows yet how long it will take to repair the roads. Weeks, at least. We’re all going to get to know West Oakland a little bit better, because it’s now necessary to exit the freeway and drive surface streets almost as soon as you get off the Bay Bridge. Traffic will definitely be slow for quite some time. And not just because a couple of major roads are out of commission. Also because people seem to be rubbernecking. I took this photo from another freeway, Interstate 80 heading east, toward Berkeley. It was early afternoon on the day of the accident. Traffic was light, but at the accident site, the flow slowed down enough that I could take a photo out the car window.

Why did I have my camera in the car? I admit it; I was gawking too. I hadn’t intended to slow down enough to take a photo, I had intended to drive to IKEA, where I had heard there was a good view from the parking lot. But traffic did come to a near stop here, so I snapped away.

So Dream Big

Then there’s this optimistic missive, painted on the wall of a real estate office right across the street from yesterday’s church. Food for thought.

Oakland Series

In my continuing quest to explore parts of my city that I don’t know, I’ve been walking around West Oakland. This neighborhood has a reputation for being not so nice, but I’m really enjoying my travels. (I also haven’t been to the heart of it yet. I think it gets worse, but I’m not going there just now.)

Sure, there are some boarded up buildings. And old men in ratty coats drinking out of paper bags. But there are also gardens, and new condo developments, and friendly cats prowling their yards, same as in any neighborhood.

There is also some really great architecture. Being close to the Bay, West Oakland must once have been a very desirable location, and clearly people have been living here for a long time. (Long by California standards, anyway.) There are a lot of Victorians, and Edwardian mini-mansions. There are also a lot of very pleasant single-family homes built around the time of WWII, when a lot of residents had good work at the shipyards. I saw one of these houses selling for $449,000, suggesting that the area is on its way up.

Here’s a photo of an architectural gem I didn’t know about. It’s the St. John Missionary Baptist Church, on Market Street. It looks like Mission Dolores, but I’m sure it’s not actually that old. Still, it was an unexpected splash of color in a neighborhood that isn’t always that cheerful.

Tough Act to Follow

I mentioned before that I suffer a little bit from stage fright. I realize that’s a silly reason not to do something, and so I’m not going to let it stop me.

Here’s an even sillier reason to be nervous: This story I will be reading was written for an essay contest at the Book Passage Travel Writers and Photographers Conference. It had the good fortune of winning the grand prize there. There are two aspects to the prize. The most major one is that you get a substantial financial credit with an airline ticket consolidator; I used mine to get me to and from Asia last summer.

The other part of the prize is that the winning story gets read out loud at the closing ceremony. Traditionally the winner does not read it. Instead, Don George, the conference chairman, does it.

If you’ve ever seen Don read, you know that he’s a big man with a big, booming voice. It was pretty surreal hearing my story, which had been knocking around in my head for more than 10 years, make its public debut in baritone.

But it did and now I’ve somehow got to top that act. Plus, since his version is the original, it’s now as if I’m a cover artist on my own piece. Oh, and one reading is actually at Book Passage, the bookstore that hosted the conference. There's a nice full-circle quality to that situation, but it's a little daunting, too.

I Did It

I volunteered to read at a couple of events in the Bay Area promoting The Best Women’s Travel Writing 2007. One is in August (Sunday,
August 12 at 7 pm) at Book Passage in Corte Madera. The reading is meant to promote the Book Passage Travel Writers and Photographers Conference that will be starting a few days later. The piece I’m reading was originally written for that conference in 2005, so I like the circularity of that.

The other reading event isn’t as firm yet. It will be at Alexander Books on Second Street in San Francisco. It’s supposed to be a lunchtime reading sometime in June. Of course you’ll get plenty of notice once it’s scheduled for certain.

Thick Envelope

I got a thick envelope in the mail today from the San Francisco Chronicle. Back in the day, that meant good news from the college of your choice, so I was hopeful. I thought for a moment my submission saturation campaign had paid off. But no such luck. It was just a renewal form for my newspaper subscription. Drat.

Practicing

I’ve been practicing reading my work aloud, which feels pretty strange but is a good thing to get used to. It takes seven and one-half minutes to get through my turkey story. (That’s at a public reading cadence. Left to my own devices, it would take more like 90 seconds. But I’m trying to make this intelligible.)

It’s a strange thing to go over something I’ve written so obsessively. I hope I don’t get sick of the piece.

To Read or Not to Read?

That’s not really a question. Of course I’m going to read. It’s just that the idea scares me.

You know how some writers are real hams? Dave Barry comes to mind. I saw him read once, and he clearly likes the spotlight. He even gives commencement addresses. Daniel Handler seems to be another who puts on a good show at readings. Someone recently told me that Barbara Kingsolver is very funny in person, as well. All these authors seem like the kind of person for whom the isolation is the hardest part of being a writer.

Then there are those who really don’t mind spending hours at a time in front of their computers not talking to anyone.

I’m not exactly Emily Dickenson or anything like that, but I am much closer to the latter model. I hate the part in meetings where you have to go around the room and introduce yourself. Toasts frighten me. Oral reports depress me. Once someone asked me to say grace and I refused. Not on any religious grounds. I just choked.

This comes up because apparently one of the other women whose story is in Best Women’s Travel Writing 2007 is organizing a reading in Napa. I don’t know if it’s going to happen or not, but the publisher has put all of us local authors in touch with each other, so it may.

And this is a good thing. I can do it. I gave a reading at a wedding once, so I know I’ll get through it. Part of me is actually excited.

Just nervous.

Did I Say Stop Typing?

Teacake, too, likes to keep an eye on me. If I turn around in my chair, this is what I often see.

Oh, How Long Have You Been There?

When I first started working at home, I wondered how this would effect the cats. This may sound silly, and it mostly is, but I wondered if they would start taking me for granted if I hardly ever left the house.

I needn’t have worried. If anything, they’re more clingy than before. They spend most of the day sleeping on the bed behind my chair, where I can’t see them but they can keep an eye on me.

Then yesterday, Tommy decided that wasn’t close enough, and decided to crawl under my desk and sit at my feet like a devoted puppy. It was a little weird, but sweet. I didn’t even seem him sneak in there. I only realized he was there when I dropped a shoe on him and he made a sort of a snuffling noise to make me feel guilty.

Today he’s regained a little of his cat-like aloofness, but not much. He got as far away as the living room for a little bit, but then it was back to the bed.

Percentage of Americans With Passports

I’ve often heard it said that only about twenty percent of Americans have passports. I can never remember the number exactly, so today I tried to look it up. As it turns out there’s actually very little consensus as to how many of us have passports. I saw estimates ranging from eight to 34 percent. Apparently the fact that they’re good for as many as 10 years (but in some cases only five) makes it hard to track how many valid passports are out there, attached to living people.

I’m not much closer to having the answer, but I think we can safely say the 20% figure is if not a myth, still not much more than a guess.

I Guess They Mean it This Time

I haven’t been following the news about new passport regulations very closely because I already have one and I’ve always been more than happy to use it. (I admit it: I love passport stamps.) I understand that until recently, it was possible to use a notarized birth certificate for travel to Canada and Mexico, but a passport always seemed so much easier.

It sounds like they’re serious now about requiring air travelers to carry passports for trips between the U.S. and Canada/Mexico. I’ve been hearing buzz about how this is going to cause a big backup at passport processing agencies, and I’ve been wondering if this could be true.

I still don’t know for sure, but I did notice something interesting a few days ago. I happened to be in a neighborhood in San Francisco where I used to work, and I saw a group of people standing in line outside an office building in a place where I’d never noticed people queuing before. The office turned out to be the San Francisco Passport Agency, a bureau normally so un-trafficked that until then I hadn’t realized it was there. This suggests to me that more people than usual have been applying for passports.

This should make Mexican, Caribbean, and Canadian tourism authorities happy—I’d been hearing they were worried that American visitors would stay away because we’re too lazy or too cheap to apply for passports. But apparently, if it’s a nice enough day, we will stand in line for quite some time to get one.

Not Strictly Related, But….

… Not everyone knows this: The Thursday after Easter, they practically give away Peeps. Twelve cents a box at Walgreens.

And they’re not even stale.

Anything’s Possible

Here’s yet another apocryphal story: A rookie football player scores his first touchdown, and in his zeal to impress his coach with his passion for the game, makes a complete fool of himself dancing like a dork on the field. When he gets back to the bench, he expects praise, but all the coach says is, “Son, next time you’re in the end zone, try to act like you’ve been there before.”

I’m feeling a little like that football player lately, except it’s not an act with me. I’m genuinely having trouble acting cool. I finally found a copy of The Best Womens’ Travel Writing 2007. It’s the first anthology I’ve ever appeared in, and I’m just pleased as punch.

Yesterday I went to my favorite bookstore, Book Passage, in Corte Madera to pick up a copy I’d reserved. “Best Women’s Travel Writing, eh?” the man at the counter said to me as he handed me the book off the hold shelf. I was dying for him to ask why I wanted this title badly enough to special order it, but he didn’t. So I took my self-satisfaction outside. (First, though, I bought a cookie at the in-store café and was so excited I walked away and left it there.)

I sat down on a short stone pillar outside. I happened to be wearing a t-shirt I’d gotten from a charity I volunteered with at Christmas. On the front it said: “Anything is Possible.” A man walked by as I was flipping through the book (I’m on page 288) and said to me, “Cool shirt.” I thanked him, not really knowing what else to say. “It’s true, too, you know,” he replied, “Anything is possible.”

It made me happy to hear those words coming from him. I don’t know the guy personally, but I’ve seen him around before. He works at the REI next door to the bookstore. Aside from that, the only other thing I know about him is that he has a prosthetic leg, which doesn’t seem to slow him down a bit. (Well, maybe it does, but I hate to think how exuberantly energetic his pace would be with two good legs.)

Again not knowing how to respond, I heard myself blurt, “Well, I like to think that’s true.” And watching this man stride around like a titanium leg wasn’t any impediment at all, and seeing this book in my hands that had the words “Nicole” and “Best” together on the same page, I realized that at that moment, I actually believed what I’d just said.


(I almost left out the most important part of that story: The cookie was still there on the counter when I went back for it.)

Separated at Birth?

Have you ever been one place and suddenly thought you were someplace else for a second? Something about the way a road curves, or the light falls will occasionally make me think so much of someplace else that I get disoriented.

No, it’s just me? Oh dear. Well, anyway, one of those things happened to me in Southern California over the weekend. I was on the street pictured in yesterday’s post, looking at the hills in the photo. I think they are in Pacific Palisades. The hills could be further north than that—I’m not sure, but it doesn’t really matter. The important thing is that I’m certain they aren’t in northern China, but just for a second, I thought I was. Something about the hazy light, and the green, jagged peaks made me expect to see the Great Wall snaking along the ridgeline. I had one of those “whoa” moments. Then I felt my car keys in my pocket, and Pipi said something, and I saw the Italianate mansions along the street, and I was back in California.

Everyone I mentioned my moment to that day thought I was a little nuts. I won’t directly dispute that, but I do submit the above photo as evidence that like a stopped clock, I am sometimes right.

Today’s photo was taken last summer at the Simatai section of the Great Wall, a few hours outside of Beijing. I’m glad I dug it up. It’s not the greatest photo of the Wall ever taken, but I can see what threw me. The hazy light, the muted greenery, the intimidating stone architecture…it’s all there in both photos. (Which comes as a great relief to me—even I was starting to wonder how I got China on the brain.)

Gloomy Day in Los Angeles

Pipi assures me this kind of weather is not too unusual for Los Angeles, but this was the first overcast day I had ever seen there. (I saw it rain once, but sustained gloom was new to me.)

It didn’t matter, though. We weren’t there to sunbathe, so we had a nice visit. We spent most of Saturday with Pipi’s family. It’s not really important exactly where they live. Let’s just say that if you were playing Frisbee, an errant throw could end up on the Pacific Coast Highway. But it would be in transit for quite a while.

Saturday evening, we headed to Redondo Beach, where a friend of mine from high school now lives. Sunday morning she and her husband showed us the town, which they describe as a little more family oriented than say, Manhattan Beach or Hermosa Beach. I hadn’t realized the beaches all had such a sense of place, but my friend says that she knows people who grew up in L.A. and still don’t know their Beaches. That made me feel better. I actually feel as though I know a local secret now.

In case you were wondering (I was): Yes, there is a beach at Redondo Beach. A nice one. We walked along it for a while and watched surfers and volleyball players. It wasn’t sunset, but it still seemed as quintessentially a Southern Californian scene as it could be without roller skates or a yoga mat.

Fun Fact

I had always assumed that Australia and North America were antipodal. Growing up, I thought that if I dug a hole straight through the center of the earth, I would come out in Australia. But it turns out that I’m wrong. Weather I started my hole in Massachusetts or California, I still would come out in the Indian Ocean, west of Australia.

I know this because of a few of fun tools I found online. The first one will tell you the latitude and longitude of your exact address. I discovered that I live at latitude 37.801647 north and 122.240237 west longitude.

The second tool is an antipode calculator. Plug in your hometown coordinates, and it will tell you the coordinates of the farthest place on the globe from where you live—your antipode. In my case, that’s 37.801647 S and 57.759763 E. If you want to know where in the world that is, go to this third tool, type in the new coordinates (western and southern latitudes are negative), and it will show you your antipode's location on a map.

It took me a while to figure out where in the world my antipode is, because Mapquest showed nothing but water until I zoomed way out. It turned out to be at the tip of a trench in the Indian Ocean, closer to South Africa than Australia.

Sorry, short post today. I have to go start filling in that big disappointing hole in my back yard.

Top Ten From Down Under

I stand corrected: There’s a chorus of “hey hey heys” at the end of “Sly.” I think that counts as nonsense. So “Sly” has three of the four possible great-song elements. No wonder I like it.

I didn’t mean to start another music post, though. I wanted to write about something else I’ve always admired about Australia: their movies. You almost can’t go wrong. I saw one once (Oscar and Lucinda) that was kind of boring, but I’ve liked every other Australian film that I can remember seeing. Here are some favorites, in rough chronological order.

• Picnic at Hanging Rock
  
• My Brilliant Career
  
• Gallipoli
  
• Starstruck
  
• The Year of Living Dangerously
  
• Rikky and Pete
  
• The Sum of Us
  
• The Adventures of Priscilla: Queen of the Desert
  
• Moulin Rouge
  
• Rabbit-Proof Fence
  

Where Women Glow and Men Chunder

Is it wrong to plan a trip around music? Probably not—I’m sure there are worse reasons to travel. It may, however, be wrong to base your entire concept of a nation’s identity on its pop music.

But I have. I’ve been obsessed with Australia ever since Men at Work introduced me to “The Land Down Under” when I was in junior high school. Then there was Crowded house, INXS, ACDC (initials were big in the 80s, weren’t they?), Midnight Oil, and a long string of other Aussies culminating in Xavier Rudd and the Waifs. I even like Olivia Newton John, just because she has that great accent.

Lately I’ve been taken with a song I keep hearing on KFOG. They’re not good with group names on that station, but I finally listened long enough to discover that it’s a song called “Sly,” by the Cat Empire. They’re from Melbourne. I don’t know much about them, but I know that the song has two of the four elements that to me, ensure musical perfection: It’s catchy, and the band looks like it’s having a lot of fun doing what it does. (The other two essential elements are a lapse into “Sha la las” or other nonsense lyrics, and exotic place names. A song can still be really good with less than the full complement, though.)

All this is a long way of saying that Australia just bumped up several more places on my list of countries I really want to visit. As I’ve said before, I really do want to visit all of them, but realistically, there are some I want to see more than others, and Australia is definitely top five. I don’t know when it will happen, but someday I will get there.

And I’m bringing a tape recorder with me.

Next on the Itinerary

Southeast Asia? Antarctica? The Riviera? Nope. Next weekend Pipi and I are going to Los Angeles. We’re going to have a Passover Seder at her parents’ house, and we’re going to stay with a high school friend of mine. It will be Easter Sunday, so I’m not sure what we’ll do. Maybe an arboretum. I’ll let you know what we come up with.

Business as Usual

Meanwhile, life goes on. Via magazine rejected my Trans-Siberian railroad pitch, saying it’s too far afield for them. I’m not too surprised—it was always a stretch. They’ve run articles about Cuba and New Zealand before, so I was hopeful, but really, it doesn’t make too much sense for the magazine of the Western States’ auto club to print an article about Siberia. So I’ll try somewhere else. There’s got to be someone who wants an article about what even the Via editor described as “One heck of a ride.”

Devine Secrets of the Ink-Stained Sisterhood

Barbara Kingsolver and I are practically sisters now. Not blood sisters, of course. More like ink sisters. Sisters who have never met. Sisters who can’t pick each other out of a lineup. Sisters who aren’t necessarily mutually aware that the other exists.

So maybe we’re not so much sisters. But today I did happen to see my name on the same web page as hers. This tickled me deeply because she’s one of my favorite authors. I read and re-read The Bean Trees compulsively when I, like the heroine of that book, was in my early 20s and new to the West.

The web page that includes both of us is part of the Travelers’ Tales web site. It’s promoting the book The Best Women’s Travel Writing 2007, which, as it turns out, we both appear in. I feel like it’s a huge honor for me to see my name just a few signatures removed from the author of The Poisonwood Bible.

I’m not sure how Barbara feels about it though. I guess I’ll have to ask her at the next family reunion.

Viva Andorra

Also, Andorra has the longest life expectancy of any country in the world: 83.51 years. It just moved up several notches on the list of countries I’d like to visit. (It was always on the list; they all are. It was just a matter of rank.)

Fun Fact

The capital of Andorra is Andorra la Vella. Who knew it even had a capital? I thought it was one of those city/state deals, like Monaco. Oh, and the official language is Catalan. Didn’t know that, either.

This Site Rocks

Here’s another outlet I’ve found for some of my articles: See The Globe.com. It’s an excellent Web site, and I’d have said so even before the webmaster agreed to let me post some content in the Travel Reviews section. You can book travel, although not directly—enter information in the search box, and the site asks you which big-name sites (Travelocity, Expedia, etc.) you want it to search for you. Then it goes to those sites.

What See The Globe does best is content. I can’t tell you how validating it is to see a travel site with so much content. (“Content” is, of course, dot-com talk for “stuff people wrote.”) There are articles, and restaurant reviews, and a blog. There are guidebook reviews, and places where site users can post their own reviews. (They can rate the articles, too. So far no one’s commented on mine—these would be my first reviews so the idea is scary!)

Oh, and this is very cool. I am surprised more sites haven’t copied this. It’s an interactive map called “Where in the world is…?” It’s a world map with an alphabetical list of countries next to it. Click on a country name, and the map zooms into that country. Ever wondered where exactly Andorra is? Now you can find out. Clicking on a country also brings up a lot of information like the population, and the capital city. There are links to whatever other information the site has about that place.

What I really love about the site is that it assumes that visitors come to it with a sense of curiosity. Most other travel sites, including one that employed me for many years, seemed to assume that users already knew where they wanted to go, and didn’t offer them much other information to browse and daydream about. Although to their credit, market research showed that their assumption was correct. People don’t go to Travelocity wondering where to go. They go there looking for the lowest fare for the trip to Las Vegas they’ve already planned. I understand that, but it always made me sad. Kudos to See The Globe for keeping the wanderlust dream alive.

You Break It, You Bought It

I’ve signed up with a web site called iTravelSyndicate.com. It’s a site where, for a small subscription fee, you can post travel stories that you want to re-sell to new editors at a bargain rate. I once heard the site described by another travel writer as the best $39 he ever spent.

I haven’t exactly been having that kind of luck with it. Actually, I haven’t sold anything on it yet. But I am getting some nibbles. There’s a statistics page that tells me people are clicking on the articles. They just aren’t buying.

You know who you are. If you’ve been browsing—thank you very much for stopping by. I appreciate your taking the time. I’m honestly flattered that you seem to be coming back once, maybe even twice to give my pieces another look.

But how about making a freelancer a very happy person? Just go ahead and make the purchase. It’s for a good cause (I assure you). And it’s a good price. Where else are you going to find a certified pre-owned article about Shakespeare’s Verona, Thanksgiving in China, or how to arrange a gay wedding abroad? Please; you won’t regret it. Operators are standing by.

Do I Feed Him?

Well, that’s a tough question but the answer is no. There are a couple of reasons why. The first is that once you start, you really can’t stop. Feeding him would effectively mean that I have a third pet, which would be a violation of our rental agreement.

In addition, adopting Smudge would bring the household cat count to three, while the human population remains steady at two. Exceeding a 1:1 human to cat ratio is a dangerous business. I know households that have accomplished this without devolving into crazy cat lady status, but it’s the exception rather than the rule.

Maybe it sounds mean, but it’s a real worry. I have a lot of time on my hands, and could easily keep an eye on a neighborhood stray. Maybe two. Maybe even three, if they all tended to stick together. But the last thing I need is a herd of strays gobbling up the bits of my time that haven’t already been consumed by compulsive newspaper reading (you can learn a lot about the human condition by reading the classifieds), Youtube surfing (two words: fish heads), and game playing (one more time and I’ll get the center peg for sure).

Smudge

This guy isn’t my kitty in any sense, but I am starting to feel a little possessive of him. I’ve been seeing him around the neighborhood for a couple of years, all skittish and thin, and I always thought he was a feral cat. But one day he decided he trusted me, and now he’ll often come to me and let me pet him. Now I think maybe he’s abandoned.

I see him behind my building a lot, but more and more he’s spending mornings like this, curled up on a padded chest we have on our fire escape. For some reason, it’s always mornings, and rarely afternoons, even though afternoon is the only time this spot gets direct sun. Another strange thing: He usually bolts when I open the fire escape door. He doesn’t seem to recognize me as the nice lady who pets him on the sidewalk. On the fire escape, I’m suddenly the angel of death hell-bent on possessing him.

His (sometimes) friendliness leads me to believe he once had a home, but whatever name he may have had is lost now. So I call him Smudge. He’s not the prettiest kitty on the block, but he may be the toughest, so he’s got that going for him.

Bringing New Meaning to the Term “Cat Box”

Tommy is also doing well. He’s about 10. (We’re not good about his birthday, but he never appreciates the cards anyway.) Even at his age, he has not yet lost his kitten-like ability to get himself into trouble that he can’t necessarily get out of.

This story has a happy ending, though: To everyone’s surprise, including his own, I think, Tommy was able to jump out of the box by himself.

Separated at Birth?

Some of you have been wondering about the health and well-being of my cats. This would definitely fall under the “not strictly related” category, but who am I to deny my public?

Teacake (nine years old; thought to be a Maine Coon/Pineapple mix), is doing just fine. Not going hungry or anything. He would like to remind you that the camera adds 10 ounces.

Not Strictly Related, But….

…My sister’s here! She’s going to cooking school in San Francisco for the next six months and living at our parents’ place there. Today we had lunch together and walked around the Mission District. We started at La Taqueria, at 25th and Mission, saw some murals, and then walked up to 18th St., where some gelato may have been tasted at Bi-Rite Creamery. The brown butter pecan ice cream might be amazing.

The only sad note: Valencia St. Books seems to have closed. They had a great cat who lived there named Grumblebunny, which is one of the all-time great cat names. I really wanted to introduce my sister to Grumble, but I guess we’ll have to figure out where she moved to.

Now With 10% Less Mutton

I couldn’t find a statistic on how many Americans visited Mongolia in 2006, the year I went. So I am not able to feel as proud of myself as I was hoping. I did discover that in 2005, a total of 338,000 people visited the country, and that tourism is increasing by about 15% every year. I don’t know if that’s enough to label the place “up-and-coming,” but it does suggest the marketing department is doing some good. (Apparently the old slogan, “Like China, with vodka” tested well with Russians but still didn’t work out as well as they’d hoped.)

I pitched the idea of an article on Mongolia to an editor at Korean Air’s in-flight magazine. He said maybe. According to him, if they do decide to run a Mongolia story, John and I are in the running. The editor has worked with John before and likes his photography work, so I’m lucky that way.

Fun Fact

According to a New York Times archive article that my friend John just dug up and sent to me, in 1991 only 282 Americans visited Mongolia.

Old Town Oakland Find

Pipi and I had almost forgotten how much we liked a restaurant we’d been to once before: Tamarindo, in the Old Town neighborhood of Oakland. This is a neighborhood, which, as you might guess, has lots of nice Victorian buildings. Developers seem to have found it, which is good, in this case, because there wasn’t much going on before—it was mostly boarded up like too much of the downtown still is. So I don’t regard Old Town as some kind of heavy-handed gentrification project. (I’m not saying that never happens in Oakland; I just don’t think that’s what’s going on here.)

The restaurant bills itself as an “Antojeria,” which is translated from Spanish to mean “place of little cravings.” They usually serve a few special entrees each night, but most of the menu is small plates. I guess you could call it Mexican tapas.

Pipi and I went again last Saturday night and it was as good if not better than the first time. We had crispy little shrimp tacos, a beef torta, and plantains. For dessert, there was a dulce de leche crepe. I had sparkling pomegranate juice to drink. (Mexican restaurants always seem to have interesting drinks, so I usually try something I’m not positive I’m going to like. I almost always do.)

Here’s a link to the menu so you can see what I’m talking about.

Not Strictly Related, But….

…Boy, it sure was dark this morning when I woke up.

The time change brings out the curmudgeon in some of my family members. I don’t personally mind so much the change in the spring. I really like it when it stays light late.

No, what makes me cranky is changing the clocks. My computer was smart enough to see this coming, and so was my cable TV box. Every other time-telling device in the house acted like it’s from Arizona and had no idea what was going on. Pipi and I spent a lot of Sunday morning changing a grand total of five watches, two wall clocks, two alarm clocks, the VCR, the microwave, and toaster-oven clocks; the kitchen radio clock; the thermostat; one desk-top clock; two car radios; and--this is a new one for us—the telephone time display. (Luckily, if you change one phone, it gets the word out to the other extensions.)

The worst part is that I fear some of these time pieces are going to jump themselves forward an hour in April when they’re used to changing, and we’ll have to repeat the whole room-to-room assault.

The Tao of Dumplings

I was going to call this post “Spreading the Gospel of Dumplings,” but that seemed culturally inappropriate on several levels.

A few days ago Pipi and I went to Crown Wok, the new Chinese place I found with Shanghai dumplings. They were good! Maybe not quite as good as at the Oakland restaurant called Shanghai, but still, a middling Shanghai dumpling is worth driving downtown for.

Maybe you’re wondering what a Shanghai dumpling is. I know I’ve described them before; they’re small steamed dumplings that somehow have broth sealed inside. (Here’s a link to a photo: http://twoseasmedia.com/images/allblogs/2006/ShanghaiCafe_soupdumplings_1.jpg) I’ve also heard them called “soup dumplings.” In Mandarin, their name is “xiao long bao:” “little dragon dumplings.” That might be the only Chinese you really need to know in China. (Most other things you can mime, point to, or explain in rudimentary English.) They’re everywhere in Shanghai. They’re usually served as an appetizer, but I often said I could eat a whole pile of them for dinner. And several times I ended up wishing I had because what came next usually couldn’t compare. It’s like starting with dessert first. You just don’t want the salad after that.

(A small disappointment regarding Crown Wok: When I went there today, they didn’t have bubble tea as advertised. I feel a little misled, but there are so many places to find it in nearby Chinatown that I got over it quickly.)

More Oakland Surprises

Today I walked through Old Town and came out on the other side of it. My gut feeling is that this is where West Oakland begins. There, around Interstate 980, it starts to feel a little run-down, and you start to see projects. It’s the kind of Oakland neighborhood with really nice Victorian houses that are completely falling apart.

I wasn’t really in the ’hood; it felt safe. It was just interesting to see the transition.

I found two things there that took me by surprise a little bit. Maybe surprise isn’t the word—it’s certainly not surprising to find either one in Oakland. I guess I’m just a little embarrassed to find that there are points of interest in parts of town I’d at least subconsciously dismissed as having nothing for me.

The first surprising thing was a museum of African American history. I have to admit, I didn’t realize Oakland had one. But we do. It was closed when I went by, but I will definitely check it out soon.

The other nice surprise was discovering that there was a Unitarian church with a rainbow sticker across its sign. I wondered for a moment if they knew what it meant, but then I noticed that right below it, it said “EVERYONE welcome.” There was also a quote from the Taoist Chuang Tsu, something about how everything you need to know can be found in a drop of water. I thought about that all the way up to Broadway. I was really thirsty when I got there. But I liked Oakland even more.

Why I Love Oakland

On yesterday’s downtown walk, I discovered one short block—Tenth Street between Clay and Washington—that has three restaurants on it. One is Chinese, one is Thai, and the other is Vietnamese. I know I’ve been on this block before because I remember going to the Vietnamese restaurant, Le Cheval. It’s very good. I never noticed the other two restaurants, though. They may be new. I will certainly try the Chinese one very soon, because in addition to being yet another place where you can get bubble tea, it also has my favorite Chinese treat of all: Shanghai dumplings. I must have written about these before, but I feel I can’t work hard enough to get the word out. They’re little steamed dumplings filled with shrimp and pork. What makes them special is partly the sauce, a tangy, gingery soy sauce and vinegar mix. It’s also the fact that the dumplings somehow are steamed with a thick, rich broth inside. I don’t know how they do that. Ancient Chinese secret, I guess.

But to get back to what made me remember how much I love Oakland, it goes beyond the fact that in this city you can find three different types of Asian food on the same side of one short street.

What really did it for me is the fact that while I was standing in front of the Chinese restaurant reading the menu, I could hear, coming from somewhere (I never did discover where) the sound of bagpipes. That kind of thing, cultural diversity raised to a surreal art form, just made me fall in love with Oakland all over again.

All We Are Saying

I’ve been in touch with the editor of the Chronicle Sunday Magazine, and my article is a go. On May 20, it’s going to appear in the “My Word” section, which is the next-to-last page of the magazine where there’s always a freelance-written essay.

It was a good editorial experience. The editor had two concerns, which she allowed me the chance to fix up. I appreciate that she didn’t just toss it on the reject pile for the sin of not being perfect. I wish we hadn’t lost the last line of the piece, but I can live without it, and following through with the other suggestion definitely made the essay stronger. I wish all editors were this willing to give a piece a chance.

Revised Score

Upon further review, I realize the Solas awards weren’t a complete shutout. I won an honorable mention for my coin collecting piece, the one the Christian Science Monitor published.

We Now Return to Our Regularly Scheduled Life

Well, the Solas awards were a shutout. Readers of yesterday’s blog will probably guess that I’m disappointed, but it’s all good. For one thing, I honestly am glad to get to delete a bookmark. It’s bad enough how many times in a normal day I click over to E! Online and SF Gate. I wasn’t looking for any more sites to obsessively monitor.

The other good thing is that I got a very nice and encouraging e-mail from the Executive Editor of Travelers’ Tales, who happened to read my blog (didn’t see that coming) and was, I think, a little concerned for my mental health. I’ll tell you what I told him, which is that I may have been exaggerating my compulsive nature a tiny bit. Okay, I admit, I really did check the Travelers’ Tales site first thing. Maybe more than once. But I also went for a walk, cleaned up the kitchen, updated my profile on some networking sites, and even did a little writing. I didn’t strictly speaking, actually put my whole life on hold waiting for a web site to refresh.

To put it in perspective, I’m actually a lot more upset by the fact that my second-favorite Bay-Area radio station switched overnight to a Toby Keith-style, Southern Comfort-swilling, Chevy-driving, boot-scootin’, slap-your-Mama country format. That, my friends, is disappointing.

The Suspense is Killing Me

Several months ago I submitted a few articles to a writing contest called the Solas Awards. It’s sponsored by Travelers’ Tales, a publishing company that specializes in compilations of travel writing. There are 21 categories open to submission, each with gold, silver, and bronze awards, so that seemed auspicious. More categories means more opportunities to win, right?

For months there has been a little note on the Travelers’ Tales web site saying that Solas Awards winners will be announced “by March 1, 2007.” All this week I’ve been compulsively checking back to the site. Today’s’ the big day, so I checked in first thing this morning. Now there’s a note saying that winners will be posted “sometime Thursday, March 1, 2007.” (That doesn’t seem to be grammatically the same as “by March 1, 2007,” but I quibble.)

You can imagine how my morning has gone so far. Boot up computer, check Travelers' Tales site. Make coffee, check Travelers' Tales site. Eat cereal, check Travelers' Tales site. Bookmark Travelers' Tales site, check Travelers' Tales site. Repeat.

It’s silly, I know. Even though it’s the inaugural year of the competition, I’m sure they’re inundated with submissions and there’s no real reason to think I could have won something. My behavior makes about as much sense as someone compulsively pulling a slot-machine handle, saying each time, “This is the big one, I can feel it.” In fact, these behaviors are probably not unrelated. So there’s a sense in which I am secretly enjoying this torture. But I really do want it to be over so I can get my life back.

(And by “get my life back,” I of course mean that I want to return to punctuating my day by obsessively checking my regular fleet of time-wasting web sites. Enough with Travelers’ Tales.)