In Praise of Armchair Travel

Next week at this time Pipi and I will be in Shanghai. In contrast to last year’s trip to Asia, where the week before departure saw me in a frenzy of emailing, gift buying, and dog-earing four separate guidebooks, this week I’m going to mostly be sitting on the couch watching soccer. Lots of soccer.

Our trip revolves around the women’s World Cup soccer tournament, so our homework is to watch as many games as possible. Remarkably, the entire tournament is going to be on ESPN.

Last night Pipi did something I’ve never known her to do before: She set an alarm to watch television. I got up, too, and I'm glad I did. The games are on in the evening in China, which is early morning here. We do have a DVR, but it has a somewhat limited capacity and more importantly, we have a deadline. There are several games on each day, so we have to get creative about watching them or we won’t see all the important first-round matches before we leave. Also, I’m hopeless about avoiding spoilers. Last night we watched a recording of Germany steamrollering Argentina. In the middle I tried to look up some information online about the German team, and managed to spoil the final score for myself. (I know it sounds dumb to take risks like that, but if you’d been watching you’d want to know how tall Kerstin Garefrekes is, too. [Answer: 6”1’.]) So I need to watch games in as close to real time as possible.

This morning there was a real nail-biter between the United States and North Korea, which we watched almost live. I’m endlessly fascinated by the DPRK. It’s such a weird country and I wonder what the women’s lives are like. I wonder what they think when they travel. In the case of this year’s world cup in China, they’re probably thinking something along the lines of, “Great, the one place they might let us go on our own. Why couldn’t Canada have hosted?” But still, Shanghai must be pretty mind-blowing after Pyongyang.

Oh, the game was good, too. It ended in a 2-2 tie. North Korea played ferociously. There’s no other word for it. They played like it was their last game ever; like they didn’t need to worry about having energy for more matches. They played like there was nothing else in their lives, which may be the case. Or maybe I’m being ignorant. For all I know, the North Korean women spend their weekends shopping for Gucci knockoffs and planning vacations in Thailand with their boyfriends. But I don’t think so. I got the impression I was getting a rare, if very controlled glimpse at a culture with a really different outlook on life.

It’s the next best thing to travel.

Isn’t it Ironic?

I just realized that Pipi and I are going to miss the premier of Survivor: China because we’re leaving on Sunday…for China.

Yes, we are huge Survivor fans, but I swear we didn’t plan this. Anyway, filming is long since over. So I promise you, we’re not really stalking the cast. (Or angling for a spot on the show. I’ve said it before; I wouldn’t last three days out there.)

More Fun Facts

Most lakes, even big ones, turn over their water fairly quickly. A drop of water landing in Lake Erie, for example, usually spends about two years there before finding its way out. (Don’t ask me how they know this.)

Lake Tahoe is different, though. For one thing, it’s extremely deep. Also, about 60 rivers feed into it, but only one leads out. For these reasons, water takes about 700 years to escape the lake.

Fun Fact

The water at the bottom of Lake Tahoe is a constant 39 degrees Fahrenheit. The lake never freezes, though, because convection keeps this cold but still not-quite-freezing water moving toward the surface all winter.

This fun fact comes courtesy of my procrastination instinct. I have an article due to Philippine Airlines in a few days, and I’m still at the fact-finding stage. Wish me luck.

Short Break

There’s no real news today, and Pipi’s getting off work early, so in that spirit, I’m taking the rest of the long weekend off. Have a great weekend, everybody!

And it Was Uphill Both Ways

Maybe you’re wondering what I did the first time I went to China, before the World Wide Web. The answer is I winged it, making reservations in person the day I arrived in a new city. This actually worked pretty well, and I never had to spend the night in a park or anything. (There were a few nights where I might have been warmer and more comfortable if I had). As well as it worked for me, however, I don’t wish this lifestyle on anyone I love, so I recommend it only for solo travelers.

I Knew I Was Forgetting Something

When I said yesterday that the China trip was just about set, I was leaving out one detail: We didn’t yet have hotel reservations.

We do now. I don’t know exactly why I procrastinated so badly on this. I think it was because I knew that making the reservations would be an adventure. I don’t feel confident enough with my Chinese to try making a reservation over the phone. (And at the price I’m willing to pay, you can forget about English.)

Not every Chinese hotel has online booking yet. Many have web sites, but few let you book directly. At best you can email a reservation request and wait for a reply in creative English.

That leaves Western chains and online travel sites as the best option. I ended up using both. In Shanghai, we’re staying at a Chinese hotel that is bookable through Hotels.com. In Hangzhou, we’re staying at a Best Western that was bookable through the Best Western site. It was fairly exhausting narrowing down all the options to get to this solution, but I’m happy with our rooms. And happier still to have this over with.

Special Delivery

Alert readers will remember that about two months ago, I attempted to buy World Cup soccer tickets over the Internet. It took five or six tries spread out over two days and two computers, a couple of trans-Pacific phone calls, a fax to Beijing, and a call from my bank’s fraud prevention department (right; they contacted me), but I’m happy to report that on Friday a DHL envelope arrived from China containing all the soccer tickets I was expecting.

In other news, I picked up our visas today at the Chinese consulate. The trip is just about all in place now. We have tickets to China, permission to enter the country, and tickets to all our matches.

I suppose I could have let a travel agent or a tour group operator take care of all this, but that wouldn’t have been sporting. Me with my limited Mandarin skills against a communist bureaucracy…now that’s an exciting matchup. Let’s hear it for independent travel!

Road Work

I’m a member of a writers’ group called Left Coast Writers. One of the perks of membership is that you can submit your writing to the group’s web site and if you’re lucky, they’ll post it online.

This week, I got lucky. A piece that has previously appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle just went up in the Road Work section of the Left Coast Writers site.

Actually, LCW accepted the essay first, but there were delays (circumstances beyond my control) getting it up online. But the piece is there now, and I’m grateful to LCW for believing in it before the Chronicle even did.

Do You Copy?

Sometimes my parents are big copycats. I moved to California, they moved to California. (It took them seven years, but I think that was just to make it look less obvious.) Then I started a blog, and look who’s blogging now: My father.

He’s using it to post articles about aviation. Some of the articles that will appear have been published already and some will be original. He’s hoping to compile them into a book one day.

When I was in college, my father suggested to me that I should pick elective courses based on the professor’s reputation, not the subject matter. He believed, and I think he’s right (he’s got some pretty good advice for a copycat), that a good teacher can make any subject interesting.

For an example of what I mean, I don’t need to go any further than my father’s latest blog entry. It’s on a navigation system that’s on the brink of extinction. Maybe that doesn’t sound like something that would grab you, but he called it “Breathing Life Back into Dead Reckoning.” Good, no? That made me want to read further, and I’m glad I did. You will be too. Please check it out!

Oh, I guess I ought to mention, since you’ve probably noticed, that yes, my father and I are both writers. He kind of thought of that one first, though. Like I said, he does have some really good ideas.

Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous

Tahoe can be expensive, but I’ve found a way around that: Sleep somewhere cheap and spend your days in places that look like a million bucks.

I spent both nights of my trip in motels. They were definitely bare-bones, especially the one in South Lake Tahoe, a family-owned, cash-only operation where not even shampoo was provided. But both were clean and quiet and provided a place to sleep for less than $100, which was all I wanted out of a solo trip. (The place in Tahoe City had free wi-fi and included continental breakfast--not bad.)

Both days I was in Tahoe I visited grand old houses that are open to the public. True, nobody let me take the boat out for a spin, but it was fun to pretend that I knew the kind of swells who had vacation homes like this. Pictured is the Thunderbird Lodge, near Incline Village, Nevada. This place was owned by a guy named George Whittell, Jr., who was basically useless while he was alive, having inherited so much money that he never had to work a day in his life. He spent his days collecting knickknacks, building a menagerie, and investigating mysteries such as the age-old question, “Can an elephant survive at an elevation of 6,200 feet?” (Sadly, the answer is no, but there was a lion named Bill who fared a lot better.)

After Whittell’s death, his land, which included virtually the whole Nevada shore, ended up in the hands of the state. Most of it is protected, and the eastern side of the lake is still undeveloped and beautiful. So by ostentatiously buying up more land than any one person needs, Whittell was actually doing more good than anyone could have envisioned.

And today you can hang out at his house and pretend you’ve been invited to a weekend at Jay Gatsby’s.

Toeing the Line

One other thing that’s interesting about the Cal-Neva Resort is that the California/Nevada state line runs right through the lodge. (Hence the name.) How often do you get to stand with one foot in the Silver State and one in the Golden State? Okay, it’s not exactly straddling the equator, but it’s still worth a photograph.

And I’m guessing the equator isn’t highlighted in gold and silver paint. (I’ll have to ask Pipi; she really did straddle the equator once, in Kenya.)

But Don’t Take Any Wooden Nickels

I didn’t do much after arriving at the lake the first evening. Just a disappointing dinner at a family restaurant where the surly teen-aged hostess (sometimes I hate summer) acted like one single grown-up can be safely ignored.

After breakfast the next morning I started driving around the lake. One of my first stops was at the Cal-Neva resort, in Crystal Bay, Nevada. This casino/hotel used to be owned by Frank Sinatra, and it still has a retro coolness to it without actually being stuck in the past. It looks sort of like the Ahwahnee Lodge would if the Jetsons did the decorating. There are all the usual casino favorites, like blackjack and craps, and of course, lots of slot machines.

Now, I know there’s no such thing as a professional slot player, and I know why: Because the house always wins. But I like slots. I can’t help it. I like pulling the lever. I like handling the coins. I like it when the one-armed bandit flashes and chirps at me like a pinball machine. I just like the whole sensory experience.

The Cal-Neva didn’t disappoint. I bought two rolls of nickels (that’s four dollars, folks) and made them last almost an hour at a particularly shiny machine.

At the end of the hour, I had exactly five cents out of my original $4 left. But the one nickel left was a buffalo nickel. I can only remember one other time that I’ve gotten a buffalo nickel in change, so this was quite an event for me.

If you can get yourself into this frame of mind, where you can lose 79 out of 80 coins and still feel like a winner, then you too can be a slot machine champion.

Later, when I visited some of the casinos at the more developed south end of the lake, I realized that I’d had a very unusual experience at the Cal-Neva. The slots in the south all seem to be virtual. You give the machine a bill or a credit card, and when you’re ready to cash out, it prints a ticket for you that you take to the cashier. You’ll never see a real coin. I understand that cashless machines are cleaner, safer, and more convenient, but they make me sad. Sad enough that the next time I’m in Stateline, I probably won’t even bother stopping.

In fact, you can bet on it.

Lake Tahoe

I’ve been neglecting my Lake Tahoe trip. Lake Tahoe is a place I have been to before, but it had been a while, and I wanted to refresh my memory. Plus it was fun to take a little trip in the middle of the week, even though I had to go by myself.

I spent two nights in the area, one in Tahoe City, and one in South Lake Tahoe. While I was there, I drove around the lake. The route around the lake is about 75 miles and can be driven in as little as two hours. But I managed to make it last two days, stopping several places and keeping the top down as much as possible. The drive around Lake Tahoe has been described as the most beautiful drive in America, and it just might be. While I was there, the weather was perfect and the crowds were thin. I’m not sure I’d recommend winging a trip to the lake to the extent I did (I didn’t know for sure each morning where I’d be staying that night) but it certainly worked for me. I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed myself so much in Tahoe.

Photos here.

Flirting or Mourning?

I mean, I know where the flowers came from, or at least I think I do: There is a tangle of rose bushes hanging over a wall just a few doors down from where I took the picture.

What I’m wondering is, what inspired someone to clip a few roses and leave them here? Right here, on a block that, thanks to an industrial bakery, smells like 20 cakes cooling at once. Here, a block away from a convenience store where a man is speaking to six cruisers’ worth of police officers. Here, a quarter of a mile east of a hovering helicopter. Here, where rolling carts filled with scrap metal of dubious provenance trundle by. Here, where I’ve found myself standing on a corner that smells like a birthday party but looks like a highway fatality shrine.

What Happened Here?

I found this still life at the corner of 32nd and Adeline, which is not the most uplifting corner of Oakland. (Although it’s not far from the robot I found the other day.)

C3PO

I like to listen to music while I walk. Lately, I’ve been going through all of our CDs systematically listening to each one.

Yesterday I found myself listening to an album of children’s music (I have no idea where we got it) while walking through a part of town that was more blighted than I expected. At first this seemed incongruous, listening to silly songs while muttering men with shopping carts full of cans rattled by.

Then I came upon this guy, a relic of my own childhood. He was standing outside a scrap metal yard on Peralta Street. (Which was where all the carts were headed.) Suddenly it all made a little more sense.

A Statistical Improbability

At the bookstore reading, someone told me that Best Women’s Travel Writing 2007 is doing quite well. This could just be a rumor, but I hear it has sold in the neighborhood of 50,000 copies, which is a lot for Travelers’ Tales.

I went to the Amazon site to try to confirm this. I was not successful, but I did discover one other interesting tidbit: Amazon, for some reason, always has a section on a book’s information page that lists “Statistically Improbable Phrases” contained within the book. For BWTW 2007, it lists exactly one:

Fire Chicken.

I’m not kidding. The only phrase used in the whole anthology so unusual as to have the word “Improbable” attached to it comes from my story. (It’s the literal translation of the Mandarin Chinese word for turkey.) This somehow strikes me as something to be proud of. Maybe it isn’t; I don’t really understand what it means, even after having read the explanation, but that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Better Reading Though Chemistry

I had my first bookstore reading last night and it went surprisingly well. I say I’m surprised because I am, as I have mentioned, a nervous performer. But I kept it together last night. Someone once told me that it’s physically impossible to have a panic reaction if you’re breathing regularly, so I spent all of yesterday trying to remain calm and breathe. That seemed to keep the nerves at bay.

Oh, and I was also on drugs. I popped a beta blocker late in the afternoon, and I think it helped. I didn’t do that embarrassing blushing thing I usually do when I realize a roomful of people is looking at me, and my heart didn’t pound like it usually does.

There were probably sixty people at the reading. I went first, and everyone agreed that my piece was a fun way to kick off the event. I know I had fun, anyway, and I never have enjoyed myself speaking before a crowd before. The audience seemed to enjoy it, too. They laughed at all the right things.

Oh, and people wanted me to sign their books! I’d never been asked for an autograph before. Very exciting!

Friday Fillip

Perhaps I’ve mentioned that I’m writing an article for an airline magazine right now. Perhaps not. In any case, I began my research by going to this airline’s office in San Francisco to pick up a copy of the magazine, since I’d never seen one.

I think they’re in the process of moving. At least I hope so. The place was a study in chaos, with boxes everywhere and people milling around as if, like me, they weren’t sure where to go. There were no labels or signs on any doors—it was impossible to tell where I even should start asking for a magazine. (It makes me wonder what it’s like to fly this airline, but I’m trying to push that idea out of my head.)

The funny thing was that the people who worked there seemed completely unfazed by the discord. They were friendly and untroubled. Surprisingly, there seemed to be some kind of event going on in the office, a big presentation or meeting. The fact that it looked like they were squatting in the building wasn’t going to stop them from having friends over. Dozens of chairs were set up in an otherwise completely bare room with papers all over the floor. No one seemed to mind.

Eventually someone found me and was very happy to let me have as many magazines as I wanted. I was pleasantly surprised to find that one of the issues available had as its cover story a piece by my friend John about Tokyo. I knew he’d had this assignment, but I hadn’t expected to see it with my own eyes. It’s a small travel-writing world.

Missed Post

Sorry I missed yesterday. I spent a lot of the day driving back from Lake Tahoe and didn’t get to it. I’m happy to be back at sea level. I’ll post more pictures soon.

Attempting to Be Cool

I am, of course, making a bigger deal out of this reading event than I need to. It’s hardly a book tour. All I have to do is read this one story. There are four other authors reading that evening, so it’s not like I have to carry the event.

I am, however, reading first. At least for now. So far the process of organizing this event has involved more e-mail than a congressional scandal. But for now we’ve sort of decided on alphabetical order, and that puts me first.

It also means that the middle three stories will all be about Italy, which seems to alarm at least one reader, and may cause another lineup change. I’m not too worried about that, though. If someone thought all the Italy stories could co-exist in one anthology, they ought to be able to stand side by side at a reading event. And I think I’d rather go first—I’ll only get more nervous sitting there listening to the others, and I like to be the one who sets the bar, not the one who lands with it in an ungainly heap on the crash mat.

Mongolia

The Dallas Morning News published my Mongolia overview article over the weekend. I’m very happy with it. I can tell parts were edited down, but it was a gentle trim with almost no re-writing. They kept my opening intact, which I’m particularly happy about.

They also made an online slideshow of some of John’s photographs. His Mongolia shots are among my favorites, so this pleases me, too. Here’s a link. Please be sure to check out the photos--there is a link inside a small box labeled “Also Online.”

Such a Lovely Audience

Do you ever talk to yourself when you’re home alone? Of course you do; everyone does. But is it a monologue? Does it ever go on for more than five minutes?

If so, then you know what my afternoon has been like. I’ve been practicing for a reading I’m doing at Book Passage in Corte Madera next Sunday. Practicing consists of standing in the middle of my living room and reading my story out loud to nobody. I’m not normally especially chatty, so hearing my own voice for eight minutes straight (which is an improvement over my initial speed-talking 7:30) takes some getting used to.

Which is exactly the idea, of course.

About the Carved Animals

I don’t actually know anything about the animals. There are a lot of them, but they don’t seem to be for sale. This may be a labor of love situation. I will try to find out more.

Never Smile at a Crocodile…

…Unless you’re walking along Grand Avenue in extreme West Oakland and you see this one. Then go ahead. It’s pretty charming.

Yesterday’s walk took me to a place where the sidewalk literally ends. It was an interesting part of the city, gritty and industrial, and not very residential. West of the Mandela Parkway, the streets are roughly paved, with no real curbs or sidewalks. The only vehicles were trucks delivering to and from the various warehouses in the area. Even on well-traveled (and well sealed) Grand Avenue, I was treated to the sight of a man in a suit vomiting on a street tree.

That sounds horrible, and it was, but it wasn’t all third-world squalor. Actually, this part of town doesn’t seem all that blighted. Just a little overlooked. There were surprising signs of life, such as cafes and taco trucks seemingly in the middle of nowhere. There were some new condo clusters stuccoed up in trendy Santa Fe burnt umber and ochre hues. People walked dogs. Pit bulls, mostly, but it was practically Mayberry compared to the images most people, myself included, usually think of when someone says “West Oakland.”

Fun Fact

The longest commercial flight you can take is the 18-and-one-half-hour Singapore Airlines flight between Los Angeles and Singapore.

The longest commercial jet flight ever was a test flight of an Airbus A340-500 aircraft. This flight took off from Hong Kong and landed in London—23 hours later. The flight could have been accomplished more quickly, but the pilots purposely took a longer route than necessary because the point of the flight was to prove that the plane could stay airborne that long.

I would not want to have had the middle seat.

International Woman of Mystery

I’m feeling very mysterious again. On Friday I wired money to China for the second time in my life. (The first time was to pay for trans-Siberian railroad tickets.) This second missive was a payment requested by the company from which I bought world cup soccer tickets. Apparently they mistakenly charged me a domestic delivery fee and needed me to send them a few extra RMB. That’s kind of annoying, especially since the wire transfer fee was almost as much as I owed them, but at least I know I’m not being ignored. I remain cautiously optimistic about getting my tickets before we leave for China.

(We’d better get them before departure, because the will call office is in Beijing, a city I don’t expect to visit.)

Where the Sidewalk Really Begins

This morning I finished my walking tour of the Adams Point neighborhood. I’ll miss that one, because it’s really nice. There are lots of magnificent old houses, and streets shaded by leafy trees that have been around long enough to grow impressive canopies.

I discovered one other thing about the area that’s old: the oldest piece of sidewalk I’ve seen yet. This one was dated 1907. I’m curious to see whether or not I ever find sidewalk that survived the 1906 earthquake.

Blog Now Appearing on the Olivia Web Site

Olivia is a company specializing in lesbian travel. They’ve been around a while. I think they’re celebrating their 35th year soon. In observance of this, they have recently redesigned their web site to include (among other things) blogs by various writers. They call them “Voices.” And guess who has voice number 13? Yes, me. The screening process wasn’t exactly grueling, but I’m proud of this nonetheless.

Nippon Currency Exchange

Traveling to exotic places is well and good, but sometimes the exotic comes to you.

Last night I had sushi in the Castro with my sister. We went to the so-called No-Name Sushi restaurant on Church Street, which turns out to have a name after all. Nippon something. I forget. It will always be No-Name Sushi to me.

It was great--probably the best sushi in the city for the price. Hilary, who knows her sushi better than I do, thought it was better than Blowfish, which is considerably more expensive.

Almost as exciting as the food for me was finding what I thought at first was a euro coin sitting on a windowsill. It wasn’t a euro, though; it was a Paraguayan 100 guarani piece dated 1990.

I wasn’t even sure I dared take it. (Did I expect an angry South American to come back looking for it? I’m not sure.) I felt like I ought to leave something in return, so I put a dime on the sill. I wanted to leave a quarter, but I didn’t have one on me and Hilary thought even the dime was probably overpaying. She’s right. I looked it up this morning and 100 Paraguayan guarinies is worth the tiniest bit less than two cents. With currency-exchange fees, I’d be lucky to get a penny for it. No matter. I left the restaurant feeling like I was the one who had gotten a tip.

Truckin’ to Truckee

There is some good news, though: My friend John, the photographer, had a commission to write an article on Lake Tahoe for Mabuhay magazine, which is the in-flight magazine of Philippine Airlines. He is swamped right now, and is trying to concentrate on photography rather that writing anyway, so he talked the editor into asking me to write the article.

This gig pays very little--almost not enough to justify the trip up there, but it’s a foot in the door with a brand-new editor, so I enthusiastically accepted. I’m planning on spending a couple of days at Lake Tahoe next week, driving around the lake until I find an exact angle to go with. Ideally I’ll come up with more than one, and I can sell the other article to another publication if it’s different enough.

If not, I think I can still make the article break even, and what more can you ask for?

An Eccentric Orbit

The moon takes 28 days to go around the earth. The earth revolves around the sun in 365 days. These things are comfortingly predictable. But other orbits are harder to plot. Comets, for example, take wildly different paths. Some zing around the sun every few years; some take eons to make their return. My understanding, though, is that all these trajectories still can be predicted, if you do the math. That’s because they rotate around bodies of known mass and substance.

No so objects that have been trapped by the black hole of editorial indifference. Most items that get sucked into this ominous void are never heard from again.

Every once in a while, stories thought lost do return. Whether they’re managing to break free of their orbits or getting sucked in and spat back out through a hole in the space/time continuum I can never tell, but every once in a while it does happen.

The previous record for re-entry was nine months. Today that record was shattered by a piece that had been in radio silence for over two years. A story about Milan that I sent to a newspaper on April 20, 2005 recently found its way back to my mailbox, a round-trip journey of nearly 3,500 miles.

There was no note attached, but I think it’s safe to assume that this is a rejection.

Flight Times

People keep asking me how long the flight is from here to China. From SFO to Shanghai it’s 12 hours and 35 minutes. The return trip is only (only!) 11 hours and seven minutes long.

I imagine they’ll show a movie or two.

The Ultimate Cheap Ticket

I’ve never been to Shanghai mid-summer. I have been in the late spring, and it was already very hot. By mid-July, it must be so hot that you can’t believe it’s cold anywhere on earth. I bet if you told the average person in Shanghai right now that there’s a place just six miles away where it’s 40 degrees below zero, they’d laugh.

That’s the only explanation I can think of for this guy.

I’m always surprised, too, when I’m on a flight that has screens displaying the airspeed and outside temperature. It’s amazing to me that you can fly through the tropics and at 35,000 feet, it’s way below zero. What’s even harder to believe, though, is that the word hasn’t gotten out in the stowaway community that wheel wells are cold and unpressurized. You’d think this would be common knowledge among people who need to know these things.

What makes this a little more sad and horrifying for me is the fact that the flight this guy stowed away on is exactly the one Pipi and I will be taking home from Shanghai. It’s sobering to know that this trip is one that people will literally die for.

Fun Fact

There are only 11 flights per week between the United States and China. That’s all of United Sates, and all of China. Doesn’t that seem like a small number? It does to me. I feel particularly lucky to have found non-stop flights on exactly the days we wanted them.

Done Deal

I just got our plane tickets to China, so we’re definitely doing this.

Here’s an interesting thing I noticed while shopping: I found that on the days I wanted to travel, I had a choice of two non-stop flights. One was on United, and the other on Air China. Two round-trip tickets on the United flight cost about $150 more than they would on Air China--strange, since they seemed like very similar itineraries.

When I looked more closely at the flight times, I realized that they were exactly the same. And the flight numbers were suspiciously similar. The outbound leg was United flight 857, for example; the Air China outbound flight was #8857. Finally I found a notation that explained that the Air China flight was operated by United. Tickets on the same plane were being sold at different prices, depending on how you wanted your ticket branded.

As I was making the Air China purchase, I did discover that the extra money might buy more than just a brand name, though. Travelocity wasn’t able to issue an e-ticket for the Air China flights, so we’re getting the old-fashioned paper kind. That’s a little bit embarrassing, like wearing a Walkman in an iPod world, but I can live with it.

The only real downside--and I didn’t realize this until I’d completed my purchase--is that they won’t assign us seats until we check in on the day of our flight. So I’m afraid we’ll get to the airport and find that all the United passengers have reserved the best seats.

But, having missed the last flight we tried to take, we’ve resolved to get to the airport as early as possible this time--days early, if necessary. So we’ll at least get the best of the worst.

And even if I do end up in a middle seat, I’ll be smug in the knowledge that that guy on the aisle next to me paid dearly for his legroom.

On Second Thought

Having looked at an atlas, I think I’m going to be strong and not submit to the temptation to make a 1,500-mile side trip. Guilin is just a bit too far--further than Beijing, in fact, and probably harder to get to.

We do have a week between our first soccer game and the next one, with nothing else set in stone on the agenda, so we could take some side trips. Just not that one. I’ll see what I can come up with to keep us out of trouble between games.

Well, Somebody’s Got to Not Do It

Who hasn’t been to Guilin? Can you all raise your hands if you haven’t been? Allrighty, then. It is just me.

My grandfather informs me that he and my grandmother went there once, and it really did look like the paintings, and the fishermen really do use cormorants for fishing.

Seriously reconsidering my multiple-city stance….

Women’s World Cup Soccer

Our excuse for going to China is that the Women’s World Cup soccer tournament is—finally—going to be there this year. China was supposed to host in 2003, but at the last minute SARS caused the World Cup to be moved to the United States. Ironically, Pipi and I didn’t see any of those games because the nearest ones were in Los Angeles, and at the time that seemed like a long way to go for soccer.

There are still parts of China I haven’t seen (I never did get to Guilin, for example), but we’ve discovered that multi-city trips are pretty exhausting, so we’re trying to stay in and around Shanghai. There is a first-round game there featuring the United States, so we’re sure to see our women at least once.

We’re also going to Guangzhou for a semi-final match. It’s not a long trip—about three hours by train—so I don’t think it’s too much. We’ll spend a night there. Guangzhou is another city I’ve never been to, so I’m looking forward to it in any case. In addition, there is a strong possibility that this semi-final game will be a match between China and the United States. Those are my two favorite teams. I hate to see one go home early, but at least I will have seen them both play.

The final game is being played in Shanghai. It’s a double-header, with the first game being a consolation match determining who gets third place. This means we get to see the top four teams that day, so there should be lots of good soccer. (I’m predicting a USA/Norway final; China/Germany consolation. You heard it here first.)

Train in Vain

No, seriously, buying a train ticket in China is harder than you might think. I know because I once spent three months there traveling by train. Well, more like two and a half months. Just before Thanksgiving, I was in Chongqing, a strange little city at the navigable end of the Yangtze River, and spent most of a day at the train station trying to buy a ticket to Guilin. Guilin is in southern China and is famous for its misty cliffs—if you’ve ever seen a Chinese landscape painting, you’ve seen Guilin.

I waited in several lines. A couple of times I got to the front of one, only to be told “mei you”—there aren’t any. I remember it taking about five hours to get someone to sell me a ticket to Guilin.

When I got on my train, the conductress in my car struck up a conversation with me. She was very sweet, and seemed to be charmed by my imperfect Mandarin. We made small talk for a while, and I felt the conversation was really flowing for a change—my Chinese must have been improving. “Where are you from?” she asked; “How long have you been here? Where are you going now?”

I told her Guilin and her face fell. She shook her head and turned my ticket over to show me. “No, you’re not,” she said sadly. Sure enough, the ticket said “Xian” on it.

To put this in geographic perspective, this is like getting on a train in Denver, thinking you’re going to New Orleans, but finding out hours later that you’re actually on your way to Chicago. I don’t know exactly how this happened. Probably the ticket salesperson panicked when she saw a foreigner, didn’t understand what I said, and was too embarrassed to ask me to clarify. Possibly Xian was the only destination sold at that window, so when I said I wanted a ticket, by golly, I got a ticket. At any rate, it was at that moment that I knew my adventure was more or less over. I knew I wouldn’t be extending my visa. It was time to go home. At the next major rail junction, I got off, bought (correctly) a ticket to Beijing, a city I’d gotten to know pretty well, and stayed in that area until it was time to fly home.

It doesn’t have to be that hard, of course, and didn’t even then. If I’d just stayed at a decent hotel instead of a bare-bones youth hostel, I could have had a concierge handle it. But decent hotels cost upwards of $20 per night then, and what backpacker has that kind of money? (Answer: Lots of them, including myself. But it’s easy to get caught up in the backpacking mania of doing everything on the cheap.)

Nowadays, I wouldn’t be surprised if it were possible to buy tickets over the Internet. But you can see why I might have some issues surrounding the situation. Please wish me luck as I attempt to climb back on that iron horse.

It’s said that a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. More and more, though, that first step takes me to my computer.

Pipi and I are in the process of planning our next big adventure, which is a trip to China in late September for the Women’s World Cup soccer tournament. Since soccer is the focus of the trip, I started by going to the Chinese version of Ticketmaster to buy tickets to the games we want to see in Shanghai and Hangzhou.

In summarizing the experience, let me just say that there aren’t many things scarier than making a purchase through a shaky Chinese web site. The transaction failed a couple of times, and every time I started over, the purchase page was subtly different, like one of those puzzles where you have to find the four things different between two very similar drawings. One time the navigation text would ask me what country I was from; the next time it didn’t care. Or the price to ship the tickets would have changed by a few yuan. (The Chinese really do like to bargain, I guess.) The whole process bogged down for quite a while because every time I tried to enter my name, I got an error message suggesting that I might have used "special characters"-- an odd complaint coming from a land with no alphabet. I had to call China twice (thank you, Skype), once to pre-order and once to vent about the special character problem, which turned out to be an Apple incompatibility issue.

I did discover one thing scarier than using a Chinese Web site, though, and that’s using a Chinese web site and getting a call from your bank’s fraud services department in the middle of the transaction.

It all turned out fine, though. It was more or less a coincidence. I apparently had made an unusual number (for me) of purchases for which you don’t need to sign your name or provide a PIN; minor purchases like concert tickets ordered over the phone, and songs from the itunes store. I hadn’t even realized I was establishing a pattern. But after that, multiple attempts to access the Chinese site was just too much weirdness for one week.

I think the story has a happy ending. I don’t have the soccer tickets in my hand yet, but I got a charmingly ungrammatical email from “Alice” saying my transaction went through and the tickets are on their way. I checked my bank account—no one has bought airline tickets to Hong Kong with my credit card. So far, so good.

Tune in next week when we attempt to use the information superhighway to purchase train tickets from Shanghai to Hangzhou.

Book Passage Reading August 12

During the spring, it looked like I might be participating in several bookstore readings. As it turns out, I’m only participating in one, but it’s a pretty big one. It’s at the Corte Madera Book Passage, my favorite Bay-Area bookstore. They’re having a reading event to help promote their annual travel writing conference. I have been to this conference twice and loved it, so I’m pleased to be a part of the event.

Five of us who contributed to Best Women’s Travel Writing 2007 are going to read our pieces. The essay I’m reading was originally written for the 2005 travel conference, so there’s a pleasing circularity there.

The reading starts at 7. Book Passage isn’t hard to find. Anyone interested in stopping by is encouraged to follow that whim!

Stockholm By the Bay?

No, it’s not Northern Europe. It’s downtown Oakland, as seen from a tiny street at the top of a hill in the Adam’s Point neighborhood. Something about the spire reminds me of Stockholm a little bit, though. I like this perspective.

Fear of Not Flying

I mentioned that there was a story to our having missed our flight out of Boston coming home from my reunion. I’m afraid that was a little bit of an empty promise. It’s not much of a story. Just a cautionary tale.

I remembered the flight as being at 5:30 pm. I realized around noon that I was off by 15 minutes—it was really at 5:15—but I didn’t worry. It seemed like it would be easy to make up the time, and how much difference could 15 minutes make anyway?

What followed was one of those anxiety-dream situations where nothing goes horribly wrong, but nothing goes really well, either. I just couldn’t get ahead of anything no matter how fast I worked. There was always one more thing to check online, one more lost belonging to track down, and one more errand to run before we could get out the door. I never did catch up, and ended up leaving the house about 15 minutes later than I wanted to, without having managed to check us in for our flight.

None of this should have been a big deal, because I can still get to get to the Mass Pike from Northampton in my sleep, and the airport is now very easy to find from I90. Traffic wasn’t bad. We lost a little time waiting for a shuttle at the car-rental drop-off point, but because neither of us had to check anything, I remained hopeful right until I tried to check in. By my watch I had a half hour before the flight departed, which I knew to be close, but the security line was short so it all ought to have worked.

Except that when United says they want you checked in 90 minutes early, they mean it. The kiosk told me it was too late to issue boarding passes.

It’s a very frustrating thing to be told you’ve missed a flight that you know is still sitting there at the gate. It’s depressing to know that a machine doesn’t believe that you are capable of hustling down an airport corridor. But that’s the way it works. And now I know.

The story has a mostly happy ending. After a few false starts, including a United customer service telephone agent who tried to charge us $900 to change our tickets, we talked to a real person at Logan. She got Pipi the last seat on a direct flight that got home earlier than our original itinerary at no extra charge. I ended up on a later flight to Chicago. Due to bad weather in the Mid-West, I caught up with our original ORD-SFO flight, which was very delayed. Someone who looked a lot like the actor Alan Cumming was in the boarding area, so I was able to while away the waiting time stalking him to determine if it were he. (It was.)

The only bad part was that I got home after 3am. But I learned a lesson about time management on the road, which, now that I’ve caught up on my sleep, I appreciate. (I’m also hoping this episode will put an end to a recurring dream I have about missing planes. Now that I know it’s not the end of the world, maybe my subconscious will stop tormenting me.)

Happy Fourth of July

Have a very happy Fourth, everybody! We don’t have any big plans, just eating hot dogs, watching fireworks from our kitchen window (we can see the Berkeley show pretty well) and enjoying the day off.

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.