Fun Fact

The Mall of the Emirates in Dubai has a Borders, a Virgin Megastore, a movie theater, and Starbucks. Oh, and a ski area. There is a man-made hill with actual snow and a 200-foot vertical drop in the middle of the mall. Strange place. If homosexuality weren’t punishable by death in the United Arab Emirates, I might just go see it for myself.

I Got the Gig

I’ve been asked to write 20 destination blurbs for the Perfect Escapes web site. This is a lot like work I used to do at Travelocity, only aimed at a readership with a lot of disposable income.

I kind of thought this would be a piece of cake until I started trying to write one on San Francisco. I’m so overwhelmed daydreaming about what I would do in the Bay Area if I had an expense account that I have hardly typed a word all afternoon. Maybe I should start with an easy one, like Dubai.

Busy for a Change

I’m working on two paying gigs this week, which is unusual for me. I’m editing, and I’m also writing a few destination descriptions on spec for a luxury travel company based in San Francisco. I have my friend Randy, a former Travelocity co-worker, to thank for that. Ideally, the two trial pieces I’m writing will lead to a request to do more. I’m hopeful. It would be nice to have something steady to count on for a little bit.

My First Fan

On Friday night I went to a reading at Book Passage, my favorite Bay-Area bookstore. It was a promotional event for Best Women’s Travel Writing 2008. I was in the 2007 edition, and at this reading, someone actually recognized me from the year before, remembering correctly that I had read a story about China. This struck me as pretty remarkable. There are lots of writers whose work I enjoy but whom I probably could not pick out of a lineup.

Spoke too Soon

I may be happily wrong about the supposedly abandoned train engine I saw last week. The Oakland Terminal Railway is still a going concern, operating on about 10 miles of track in West Oakland. It’s a switching line, owned jointly by Union Pacific and the Santa Fe Railroad. The headquarters are right on Engineer Street. So this little engine may still find work now and then.

Published

This is a pleasant surprise: Several months ago, I had an essay accepted by the San Francisco Chronicle Sunday Magazine. I had thought it would appear next Sunday, but it actually ran yesterday.

(Pipi saw it first and showed the page to me, and my first thought was “Oh, no, someone stole my title!”)

The Little Engine That Couldn’t

Some days it’s hard to think of a title for my blog entry. Other days, the title’s easy, but I don’t really know where to go from there.

This is one of those days.

I took this picture on scenic (not really) Engineer Street, which goes past the wastewater treatment plant. This sad little engine appears to have found its final depot here, hard by an Army Reserve center and a giant empty lot. I don’t think the tracks in this area are even functional anymore. The Army base region is criss-crossed with them, and Amtrak still goes through West Oakland on its way to Jack London Square and Emeryville, but I think this particular engine has whistled its last. I hope I’m wrong, though. What’s more lonely than a train without a destination?

Where the Names Have No Streets

The Oakland Army Base doesn’t have enough abandoned buildings left that you could call it a ghost town. But here’s one thing it does have: ghost streets.

I don’t know how long it’s been since A Street was a real thoroughfare, and I can only guess where it originally went. There’s a freeway on top of it now.

Slow Cooking, Fast Editing

I’ve got my editing cap on this week. I’m working on another cookbook. This one’s slightly shorter than the last one, so I shouldn’t be as crazed getting it done. Still, I might be a bit brief this week.

Over It

A few months ago, I wrote a post enthusing about a site called WAYN.com.

But I’m over it.

I still like some of the widgets, like the one that keeps track of how much of the world you’ve visited. And I like the idea of being able to communicate with travelers all over the globe. But the reality is starting to get really annoying. I’m getting several emails a week like this one:

HI MY NAME IS BEN,TO BE HONEST WITH YOU AM MUCH IN LOVE WITH YOUR PROFILE......SO I WAS THINKING IF YOU COULD GIVE ME THE PRIVILEAGE TO HAVE AN ONLINE CHAT WITH A GOOD LOOKING ANGEL LIKE YOU, AS TO KNOW YOU BETTER,

WE DO NOT MEET AN ANGEL IN OUR EVERY DAY LIFE SO NOW THAT I MET YOU, I WOULDN'T LET YOU GO TILL YOU BLESS ME WITH YOU BEAUTY

HOPE TO HEAR FROM YOU SOON ANGEL.

Ben is from Morocco, so I don’t hold the broken English against him. And I know he isn’t really angry, so I’ll let the caps slide. But…angel? Come on. Read the profile, people.

Monterey Guidebook Photo

Schmap wanted my Monterey photo, too. That makes two guidebooks in about a week that I’ve been published in. Life is strange sometimes.

Glad That’s Over With

West Oakland has a bad rap. Part of this stems from the very real crime problem in this part of town, and while I’ve never felt unsafe during daylight hours, people are right to be a little wary.

The other, far more unfair impression that a lot of people have of West Oakland is that it reeks. This is because if you drive over the Bay Bridge, on your way to IKEA, say, or Berkeley, as soon as you arrive in the East Bay you drive right past a sewage treatment plant.

This is not the nicest welcome the city could provide. It’s especially unfortunate because as I think I’ve said before, West Oakland has several large bakeries and a lot of that side of town actually smells really great.

Still, there’s no denying that the wastewater plant stinks. I knew I would have to deal with it someday, and today was the day. I was pleasantly surprised to find that it really only smelled bad on one side of the plant. The other sides were perfectly pleasant, but walking there felt pretty desolate. The plant is on a patch of land that is just north of West Grand Avenue, on the very last street you can turn on before getting on the freeway. Miss the turn and you’re going to San Francisco.

There were plant employees around, and a lot of cars coming and going, but oddly enough, very few other people were out strolling around the sewage treatment plant today. Even though it was a beautiful spring-like day.

There was one other person of leisure out. He pulled his car over to the wrong side of the road, parked, and started rummaging through his trunk. I was afraid he might drag out a corpse or something, but instead, he pulled out an ancient golf driver--I think it really was made of wood—and headed toward a large empty lot near some railroad tracks. There’s more than enough empty space to do a little driving practice. He didn’t have any golf balls, though. I think he may have been planning on hitting rocks from around the tracks. It’s the kind of no-man’s land where you can do weird things like that and nobody minds, or even notices.

It wasn’t a bad walk, but I’m glad it’s over with. My next neighborhood is going to have to smell better.

Schmap Again

Schmap has come knocking again! Now they’re considering a Monterey photo that I took. This photo, too, was originally taken for a Philippine Airlines in-flight magazine article. As with the Tahoe photo, it isn’t the most impressive one I took that day, but they must have a need for a photograph of this particular hotel.

The photo hasn’t made the final cut yet. I’ll know in a few days if they want it for sure or not.

Not a Paid Gig

No, Schmap isn’t paying. But given the fact that I never thought the Tahoe photos would see the light of day beyond Flickr, I don’t mind.

Rare Photo Credit

Here’s a curiosity: A photograph of mine is being used in an online guidebook.

This is a photo of Vikingsholm Castle that I originally took for an article about Lake Tahoe that I wrote for an in-flight magazine. I was slightly disappointed that the magazine didn’t use any of my Tahoe photos, but I understood. I’ve never pretended to be a professional photographer, and it’s rare for a magazine to accept photos and text from the same person anyway.

So I was pleasantly surprised to find that the online guidebook company Schmap wanted to use one of my Tahoe images. The really surprising thing was that they found me. I had posted a number of Tahoe photos on the Flickr web site, and someone at Schmap noticed them.

I took a lot of photos that day that I think were better than the one they’re using, but this one must have filled a hole in the guide. The carving in the picture is not an easy thing to photograph because it’s in a dark room and you’re not allowed to use a flash or a tripod. I waited for everyone else on the tour to get out of the way, braced the camera against a banister, and hoped for the best with a 15th of a second shutter speed. Maybe no one else on Flickr had that kind of patience.

Bataan Afternoon Stroll

Lately I’ve been walking in a place I’m not entirely certain I’m supposed to be in: the old Oakland Army Base.

This area hasn’t been a working Army base since 1999. When it was open, it was a military cargo terminal. Now it seems to be devoted to civilian cargo. There’s not much to it anymore, just some warehouses and a lot of truck traffic. There are some no trespassing signs, but I think they date from the army base days. The few remaining roads seem to be open to the public; it’s just that not many people take advantage of this fact.

There are people around, but they’re working, not walking. Truckers come and go constantly, and customs officials cruise around a lot. There are several taco trucks in the area, a drug-testing facility, a container business, and one lone convenience store that feels like the packie at the end of the world.

My most recent Oakland map lists several streets on the base that don’t seem to exist anymore. In particular, there is an enormous empty lot at the southern end of the base that is supposed to be crisscrossed with streets, but they’ve disappeared completely. At least one other road is behind a gate labeled private property. All this makes walking every street a little bit of an adventure, and I’m not sure how to proceed.

The streets that do exist have great names, like Africa Street, Tulagi, Petroleum Street, and Bataan Avenue. Overall, this part of town couldn’t feel more different from the rest of West Oakland, where most of the streets are named after trees.

Not Strictly Related, But….

…Eclipses are pretty cool.

I got a good view of yesterday’s lunar eclipse when I was driving from Oakland to San Francisco for a class. Unfortunately, by the time I got to San Francisco the sky had become overcast and the eclipse was hard to see. (And even harder to photograph.)

The accompanying photo is more impressive if you keep in mind that the moon was full last night. I took this picture through the fog about half way toward totality.

Change of Plans

Actually, we did not end up at Tamarindo. They don’t take reservations, and by the time we got there, we were told the wait would be more than an hour. We’re glad to see a downtown Oakland restaurant become that popular, but we decided to go elsewhere. We ended up at Breads of India for an excellent dinner, marred only by my learning that chicken tikka masala is not an authentically Indian dish—it’s a colonial English invention. This was disappointing news, but it didn’t stop me from having it anyway.

Indian food might seem like a strange choice for Valentine’s Day, especially this Valentine’s Day, but I’m happy to report that no violence broke out.

Happy Valentine’s Day

Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone. I hope you all have a nice day, no matter who you are—or aren’t—spending it with.

Pipi and I are going to a Mexican restaurant in downtown Oakland called Tamarindo. It’s fancier than it sounds. They serve Mexican small plates. I’ve liked everything I’ve ever had there, but what I remember most is the dulce de leche crepe for dessert. It’s indecently good.

The Park at the End of the World

Last week I walked so far west in Oakland that I passed a customs station. And then I walked a little further.

I didn’t really get to another country, of course. I was just following Seventh Street to its very end at the Port of Oakland.

Seventh Street here is very industrial. At its western end it dead-ends at loading docks open only to trucks. But it also skirts my very favorite park in Oakland, Middle Harbor Shoreline Park. Middle Harbor is a very new, very green little park that feels like it’s smack in the middle of an industrial wasteland. On one side it’s surrounded by water and on two sides it’s flanked by enormous cranes. You can see container ships up close, and you get an interesting view of the Bay Bridge, which isn’t the Bay’s prettiest, but in context, it is nice to look at in a WPA, “lets-get-it-done” American kind of way. The view of the Bay itself is beautiful.

To get to the park you have to follow Seventh Street under interstate 880, which always used to feel like Oakland’s western border to me. Then you pass between a former army base and a huge rail yard. If you’re on foot, 18-wheelers pass you every minute, but you’ll hardly see any passenger vehicles. You’ll probably be the only pedestrian, although recently I did see a group of about spry 25 senior citizens dressed in floppy hats and nylon pants leaving the park at a serious hiking pace. I can’t imagine where they were going, but they probably wondered what I was up to, too.

My Mind Plays Tricks on Me

Normally I think I have a pretty good memory. This isn’t surprising. I come from a line of people with super-human powers of recall. Last year, for example, I overheard my parents reminiscing about what exactly they’d once been served for dinner at a friend’s house. They talked about it as if it had happened a few months before, but actually, this dinner party took place before I was born.

Another example: This past Christmas, my grandmother gave my father a picture of himself taken when my father was about three years old. Even my dad wasn’t sure where it was shot, but my grandmother remembered not only the location (suburban Virginia), but also what my father was looking at when the picture was snapped (a toy boat in the water).

So it always comes as a shock to me when I discover that I’ve remembered something wrong. A few days ago I realized that I’d done it again. Last week I blogged about my memories of the living room of an apartment in France I’d stayed in one summer. I clearly remembered a light gray carpet. But a photo I have shows that the carpet isn’t gray at all.

It’s a minor detail, of course, an insignificant part of a place I was a long time ago. What bothers me is the fact that I was so sure I did know. I had what seemed like a crystal-clear memory of the room, but it turns out I made some of it up. That’s a little alarming.

How often does this happen? It’s hard to know. My friend Sarah remembers a time when we were in China together and I did bicycle tricks for an appreciative audience of gawking locals, reasoning that they were going to stare anyway, so I might as well give them something to look at.

I remember the bike sideshow, too, but in my memory, Sarah’s the one doing tricks.

I’m of two minds about this. On the one hand, I would be disturbed to discover that I’d made up not just an image, but also an entire scene and sold myself on it. On the other hand, I love Sarah’s version, because it makes me sound so much more hammy and brave than I really am.

There are no photographs from that day (although the locals may still be talking about it), so we’ll never know who’s the brave one and who’s the imaginative one.

I guess that’s why writers keep notebooks.

Tea Time

My tea came. I’ve got tea as far as I can see. Thé for days. The Internet really is an amazing thing.

Hyper Chouette (Very Cool)

As cool as French kids may have thought I was, I thought they were 10 times cooler.

For one thing, they spoke French effortlessly. I arrived having studied the language for several years, and I certainly got better as the summer went on. But it was obvious early on that my accent, grammar, and textbook-prim vocabulary were always going to set me apart. Marks of fluency like the subjunctive and verlan, the rapid-fire deliberate inversion of syllables popular with teenagers, would remain beyond me.

French kids also got to do things American kids didn’t, at least not at that age. Some of them smoked openly. I didn’t want to join them, but I was secretly impressed by their fearless adoption of an activity that in my town was restricted to the darkest corners of doughnut shops and video arcades. French teenagers could also legally drink, but bafflingly, didn’t. They in fact seemed to think that being visibly drunk was a little déclassé. Kids who could reject as uncool something that was considered the holy grail of teen experience where I came from were obviously operating on an entirely different and unattainable plane of cool.

I did arrive in France holding what I believed to be one very cool card—I had a driver’s license. The French can’t take their driving test until 18, or at least that was the rule then, and apparently everyone fails the first few times anyway. So hardly anyone I met could legally drive a car. But since no grown-up was going to let me drive his or hers, and because many French teens zipped around on impossibly cool scooters anyway, no one was too impressed.

What I found most intoxicating about French youth was the degree of autonomy they seemed to be granted. The family I stayed with had a daughter my age named Manu. The two of us were chaperoned on a trip to Paris, but towards the end of the summer, the two of us were put on a train by ourselves and sent off to the Riviera, where we stayed in someone’s temporarily unoccupied apartment with two family friends who were not much older than we were. Predictably, the only one of us who got in any kind of trouble was me; I thought I was too cool for sunscreen the first day at the beach and peeled like a reptile for the rest of the week.

After the Riviera, Manu and I somehow made our way to the city of Toulouse, where we stayed with her aunt and cousins. I honestly don’t remember how we got there. Looking at a map, I can see that the distance between the towns is about 200 miles, and it surprises me a little bit now that as 16-year-olds we were trusted to make this journey. We must have taken a train but how did we get to the station? How did we find out what time the train left?

I don’t remember how we did it, but we did. The fact that I don’t remember the details suggests that the trip, as remarkable as it was for me, must have been uneventful. Though I can see that it might not have been the best idea in practice to let my teenaged self loose in Europe with a rail pass, it obviously worked out. And I’m glad. This was the first time I really traveled in any way that could be described as independent, and I must have taken to it. I’m really glad nothing went wrong, or who knows what I’d be doing now. Working at a golf club, maybe. That’s what I did the next summer, but for some reason, that experience didn’t seem to resonate with me quite so strongly.

The Good Old Acid-Washed Days

1987 was a really long time ago. We wore our pants high and our bangs low. Pop music jangled, telephones made real ringing noises, and no one had ever heard of the World Wide Web. (Or digital cameras, as you may have guessed.)

One other difference was that European people liked us. At least in my experience, the French did. French teenagers thought I was cool simply by virtue of being from the country that brought them MTV and Don Johnson. Adults seemed happy enough to have us around, too. I think they found the United States a little amateurish in everything from our embarrassing willingness to eat with our hands to our weirdly colorless politicians, but they appreciated the fact that the United States was willing to stand up for smaller countries, and that we too thought the English could be a little silly.

I don’t mean to imply that they hate us now in France. I don’t think they’re renaming their food or anything like that. (“Would you like Swiss Cheese or Freedom Cheese on your sandwich, Madame?”) But I think that on both sides of the Atlantic, we’ve all lost our wide-eyed appreciation for each other. I guess it’s inevitable that international relations, like all relationships, will change and mature. But I miss the salade days when we were all a little easier on each other.

I really hope my tea comes soon.

In Search of Lost Tea

The Internet is a remarkable thing. You can do research, keep in touch with people thousands of miles away, watch music clips, see videos of cats doing funny things, and of course, buy things.

Recently, it occurred to me that the Internet might be able to reconnect me with a particular kind of tea that liked one summer when I lived with a French family. You can probably get a similar blend in the United States, but only this one brand has the Proustian effect I’m looking for. (It’s a word; I looked it up.) Only this one makes me, for a moment, 16 years old, sitting on a cool gray living room carpet, wearing chinos with the cuffs folded and rolled up short, watching reruns of Miami Vice absurdly dubbed into French.

Now I have a batch of French tea winging its way to my doorstep, thanks to the Internet. They tried to drop it off yesterday, but we were out. The UPS guy left a delivery attempt notice, and noted that the sender was “France,” as if the country itself had sent me a package. Which is kind of what it feels like. I should be home all evening, and I can’t wait until they deliver my little box of Savoie, circa 1987.

Sweet West Oakland

There’s a new restaurant in West Oakland called the Brown Sugar Kitchen, and it’s fantastic. It’s on the Mandela Parkway, in a neighborhood the owner calls “Sweet West Oakland.” I don’t know the origin of the name, but it makes literal sense to me. West Oakland has a number of bakeries and a lot of it really does smell really sweet. This place is no exception. They serve cinnamon rolls that look amazing. The gumbo was great, and so was the macaroni and cheese. I didn’t get to try nearly everything I wanted to, so I’ll have to go back soon. I hope the restaurant does well. It’s kind of out of the way, but it was pretty crowded the day I was there, so clearly people are hearing about it.

Back on Track

It’s sunny this morning! I can finally get some vitamin D.

Later I’m going for a real walk, but just now I warmed up with a stroll to the mailbox. Whenever I have something to mail (today it was the rent check) I like to walk to a particular mailbox that is a fairly long but flat walk from my apartment.

Using my pedometer, I found that the far mailbox is a 3,133-step, 1.38-mile roundtrip. That’s a good start, but I don’t know how anyone gets to 10,000 steps on a regular basis.

The Rainiest Place In the World

The rainiest place in the world, in terms of the number of rainy days per year, is Mount Wai-'ale'ale on the island of Kauai, Hawaii. They get 350 days of rain annually.

So I guess I shouldn’t be complaining about 11 straight days of rain here in the Bay Area, but in fact, this news actually upsets me a little bit.

Normally at this time of year, I remind myself that at least it isn’t snowing or freezing cold, and that kind of perspective helps. But now I realize that I could be experiencing 11 straight days of warm, Hawaiian rain. But I’m not.

We don’t get Hawaiian rain around here. We get numbing, seeping, soaking, SAD-inducing, turn-your-umbrella-around, no-hope-of-going-for-a-walk San Francisco rain. And I’m over it. The snowpack is above average. The hills are green. (I know because I saw them through a break in the clouds yesterday.) We don’t need any more rain this week. I don’t need any more rain. I need my shoes to dry out. Please, make it stop!

Just in the Nick of Time

I finished my editing project. I wasn’t sure I would get it done for a minute there, but I got it to FedEx on time.

We now return to my regularly scheduled life.

More Procrastination

This is really addictive: It’s a game called Virtual Pilot, which seems to be a part of the Lufthansa Web site.

In this game, you are shown a European city name, and a map of Europe. You have a limited amount of time to click on that city’s location on the map. While you’re thinking, a little airplane icon is hurtling across the sky, and I’m afraid to see what happens if no selection is made before time runs out.

As a result, I’ve been making a lot of panicky choices. It’s probably best I never got into aviation. I’m discovering that, among other things, I have no concept of Italian airport locations, and that’s a country I’ve actually flown into. And I was about 1,000 miles off on the location of the Faro airport. For some reason I thought the name sounded Scandinavian; it’s in Portugal. I did hit Warsaw and Hamburg right on the nose, though, in spite of never having been to either place.

I doubt that flying for Lufthansa is really like this—at least I hope it isn’t. (“Wait, no, that’s Marseilles. Land! Schnell!”) But it’s a fun game, and like I said, addictive. I’m clicking back there right now.

Procrastination Ploys

Just this morning, when I was supposed to be editing a chapter on casseroles, I was thinking about the Red Room writers’ site. I was thinking about how the site connects authors, but I realized I wasn’t sure how that actually was done.

Suddenly, it seemed imperative that I look into it, but I stifled that urge, recognizing it as a ploy by my id to try to get me to procrastinate. (I didn’t dust all the photographs in the house, riffle through my penny jar, or go shopping for that new set of bookends it wanted me to find, either.)

Oddly enough, though, someone else contacted me today. It was more or less spam, but it was promoting a decent cause—rebuilding the New Orleans public library system—so I didn’t mind. I’m glad to know this feature works.

And if this editing project goes on much longer, I’m sure I’ll figure it out.

Ghost of Christmas Past

I think I mentioned that they do Christmas in a big way at Philippine Airlines. Today it was Christmas all over again. I got a fat international envelope in the mail, and inside was the Christmas issue of Philippine Airlines’ magazine.

They sent it to me because I had an article (on Lake Tahoe) in that issue. I’d seen it already, having picked up a copy at the San Francisco office, but it’s always good to have another one. You can’t have too many clips.

What made me merrier still was the check that came along with it. That’s always a nice thing to unwrap! Mabuhay is new to me, so I didn’t know how long they take to pay. I invoiced in December, which isn’t bad at all.

Rain, Rain, Go Away

Still raining. It’s just as well, though, since I have a paying gig right now--a nice change of pace. I’m editing a cookbook. Editing is kind of a moonlighting thing for me, but it feels more like a day job because it pays more reliably than freelance writing. I am on a deadline, though, so I can’t take the time for a stroll as easily as I normally do.

Clarifying

I didn’t mean that I thought I might get mugged at the port! If I really thought that might happen, I wouldn’t go there. I was talking about trying some other neighborhood. But as it happens, I didn’t get out today anyway. Maybe tomorrow, if the rain holds off.

A Journey of 10,000 Steps

I’ve been using another gift a lot. I got a high-class pedometer for Christmas, which is really coming in handy on my walks. It keeps track of the number of steps I take per day, as well as the distance walked. It seems to be really accurate, unlike others I’ve had that register steps every time they move or get bumped. Once I drove somewhere using an old one, and when I got to where I was going, I discovered that the pedometer had registered 300 additional steps along the way. This one doesn’t do that.

I’m learning a lot with my new toy. One thing I’m learning is that it’s really hard to get to the magic 10,000-step level. I came close the day I walked around the Port of Oakland. In a little over an hour I covered 3.76 miles in 8,526 steps.

I know, I know: That’s not a very brisk pace, and yes, I do take little steps. It’s not a race, it’s fresh air and exercise. I hope to get out more this week, but the weather is supposed to be awful.

(I read somewhere that it’s good to walk in rough neighborhoods in bad weather, because fewer people are hanging around looking for trouble. But I can’t think of anything worse than getting mugged in the rain, so I think I’ll stay in.)

Friday Surprise

Sometimes I write something and I send to a dozen places and I never hear a word from any of them. Or I do, but it’s all rejection. Sometimes I flog a piece around the globe until I’m tired of it, and a little embarrassed for myself. My Thanksgiving turkey story is an example of this. It did end up being published a few places, but with the marketing effort I gave it, I expected to see it on magazine covers, billboards, milk cartons, and maybe on leaflets dumped out of airplanes over major cities.

And then once in a while there is a day like today: This afternoon I discovered that I’d been included in a book with almost no effort on my part. (Not for writing, though; this was a collection of photographs.)

About two years ago, I emailed a photograph of a silly sign I’d seen in Alameda, CA to Signspotting, a weekly column that usually features an unintentionally funny road sign. I forgot about my submission until about a year later, when I received a check from them out of the blue, and saw my photo in the newspaper the following Sunday.

I figured that was the end of the pleasant Signspotting surprises, but today I received a book from them in the mail that I hadn’t ordered. It turned out to be a complimentary copy of the latest Signspotting anthology. They were sending it to me because my Laundromat photo was on page 96.

So now I’m an even bigger fan of Signspotting than I was before. And I’m enjoying the book, too. There’s a lot of very funny stuff in it. So thank you to the Signspotting folks for a late stocking stuffer!

Article Photos

No, they’re not my photos, or John’s, unfortunately. I think they’re just stock and/or promotional photos. I never even visited the hotel pictured on page two—but now I wish I had! That’s quite an atrium.

Shanghai Zen and Now

I finally made it back to the Philippine Airlines office. It wasn’t at all crowded this time and I had no problem picking up a copy of the latest issue. It has my (short) Shanghai article in it, right next to an article about Beijing by my friend John. It’s a small writing world!

Red Room Page Done

I’m an author now, at least as far as the Red Room site is concerned. I’ll probably tweak this page some tomorrow, but it’s live now.

My Red Room Page

Coming up with an author page is more work than I expected. It’s a little sparse still. I’ll be working on it over the weekend. I wanted to show you how it's coming along, but it's not showing up live on the site yet. Maybe Monday.

In the Club

I met Amy Tan once, and I suspect we both regret it.

I was in college, and had the opportunity to meet Amy Tan and several other authors I admire at a reception after a charity event. I gathered up the courage to approach her as the reception was winding down. She already had her coat on and purse in hand.

“Amy Tan,” I said, realizing as the words came out of my mouth that I had no idea what to say next. She looked up, and I stared at her like the proverbial deer. “Uh, I loved The Joy Luck Club,” I finally blurted. Internally, I was smacking myself on the forehead like Chris Farley’s talk-show host character (“Idiot! I knew I’d screw up!”) and it just didn’t get any less awkward. We stared at each other for what seemed like an hour. Seeing that I was hopelessly tongue-tied, she politely explained that she was on her way out the door and excused herself. As she hurried away, I realized that I could never, ever again speak to someone I admired.

(I’ve broken my own rule a few times, but only under very controlled circumstances: I stammered a few words to the Indigo Girls at a record-signing event once, and a few months ago I imposed myself on two professional soccer players I met on an airplane. In both cases, though, I had a crush of people behind me that I could count on to literally move me forward if necessary.)

I mention this because I am about to have the opportunity to again rub elbows with Amy Tan. This time it’s in cyberspace. She’s one of the authors included in the Red Room site I mentioned yesterday, and, as of this afternoon, so am I.

I haven’t set up my page yet, but I’ll let you know as soon as I do. I’m very excited about one feature of the site in particular, which, if I've understood correctly, allows you to connect to other writers in the way that MySpace and LinkedIn connect friends. I will let you know if I find the courage to ask any other of the authors to do this.

Let’s hope Amy Tan doesn’t remember that we’ve already met.

Red Room

I spoke too soon. I went to the Philippine Airlines office this morning to pick up the latest copy of their in-flight magazine, which should include an article I wrote about Shanghai. But the place was mobbed, so I decided to come back another day. I will post the article when I get a hold of it, but not today.

Instead I want to show you something else I discovered. It’s a site called Red Room, which bills itself as a social networking site for authors--sort of like MySpace with better grammar. It says they’re open to writers both known and unknown, but I’m a little intimidated by the fact that you have to apply. This makes it seem a little more like a sorority with fewer parties. But I applied anyway. They asked me what I write, where I’ve been published, and whether I think Paul Theroux or Tom Wolfe is cuter.

Okay, not really. I just get catty when I’m nervous. I’ll know within a week whether or not I’m one of the cool kids.

Playing With My New Toys

I got something for Christmas that I’m enjoying a lot—a scanner. At first I wanted this so I could make back-ups of old photographs. But I realized a new use for it: I can scan and upload articles, too.

Scanning was easy. My HTML is pretty rudimentary, so uploading was more problematic, but I got it to work—here’s my most recent Philippine Airlines magazine article.

I realize it’s a little shaky. I’ve got another article to upload tomorrow, and I think I can do a better job. Still, I’m pleased with my experiment in web design. (Won’t quit the day job, though.)

Back From Hiatus

Some years it’s hard for me to let go of the holidays. This year for some reason I found it particularly hard to come back from my break. (Wait, doesn’t anyone want to listen to my Christmas mix again?) But I finally have to admit that it’s 2008 and it’s time to get back to blogging.

So let me wish you all a belated happy 2008. You’ve probably all been living in the new year for a week or so now, but it’s kind of new to me. So far, so good!

Funny How Things Work Out

Yesterday I thought I had two problems. And I did. But it turned out I also had some solutions, and didn’t even know it.

My first problem was that I was out of milk, so I had to find something other than my usual cereal and coffee for breakfast. The other was that I had a toy I’d meant to donate to a charity for Christmas, but it was getting late in the season, and many charity drives were already closed.

As a solution to my first problem, the breakfast issue, I decided to go to a little place I’d noticed near the West Oakland BART station called The Lord Provides Village Café. That looked like a good place to get coffee and maybe something to eat.

Everything about the place turned out to be surprising.

The coffee, astoundingly, was free. (Donuts: 75 cents.) But what really surprised me was that the business turned out to be more of an urban general store than a cafe. There are coolers of soda and juice, but no booze. There is frozen food, and a microwave to heat it up with. You can buy clothes, toys, and household goods, too. It’s not quite a coffee house, but it certainly isn’t a liquor store, either.

I saw the low, sometimes non-existent prices, and saw how local kids seemed to be encouraged to hang out. I heard the Christmas carols being played, and noted the store’s religious name, and it occurred to me that the face was more or less a community center with a charitable bent. Suddenly I realized I might have a solution to not just my dairy dilemma, but my toy troubles, too.

I asked the man working at the counter if they were having a toy drive. He said it was over, but that he would ask Hendrick if they needed any more.

Hendrick DeBoer, the owner, turned out to be a warm, wiry little guy with a beard and glasses who, oddly enough, looks just like Santa Claus on Atkins. He said he could always use toys. So I bought some milk and went home and got mine. Hendrick was happy to have it, and wished me a very merry Christmas.

Then I took my walk, finishing off the last few blocks of West Oakland on the near side of Interstate 880 that I hadn’t yet explored. I’m a little sad to be done with the neighborhood. It felt like saying goodbye, and it seemed right to be leaving a gift, however small.

The gift I picked will probably strike Hendrick as strange. It’s a mechanical toy I had as a child and remember liking a lot. It’s possible that not every kid would appreciate it, though the fact that they’re still making this gizmo 25 years later is a sign that maybe there are always more geeky children coming along. I certainly hope an appropriately eccentric kid is found and that his or her Christmas is a little bit merrier. If I could pass just a tiny bit of my childhood Christmas on to some other kid, that would feel good.

I hope that all of you who are celebrating Christmas have a very merry one. I hope there’s good food and good company, and I hope you get to give yourself a little bit of a break from work. I plan to take a little bit of a break myself, so I may not post much next week. Enjoy the holiday—and have a very happy new year!

More Geography Fun

If you think “more geography fun” sounds oxymoronic, then you might want to skip today’s entry. But if you can imagine geography being fun, then click here for the Google map online quiz. It will show a world map and ask you to drag a marker to show where various international cities are. It will then tell you how far off you were. It’s hard! My first task was to find not just Turkmenistan, but a city within Turkmenistan. I didn’t even realize there was such a country—it’s not part of China now? (Maybe I'm thinking of Turkistan.) So I didn’t do so well on that one. But I keep compulsively trying. Procrastination fun for all.

Hints

Abu Dhabi is not a country, and yes, you have heard of the nation named after a precious metal. It will come to you. (Especially if you’ve ever studied a romance language.)

Geography Quiz

Every year around Christmas time, the San Francisco Chronicle travel section runs a geography quiz, and every year I am embarrassed to find how little I know. Although, to be fair, the questions are pretty hard, and they don’t test the kinds of things you learned in school. Knowing your state capitals will not help you here. But it’s pretty fun and I bet you’ll learn something.

You can take the quiz here.

Answers are here.

The Dynamic Duo

Another pleasant surprise: The article right next to mine in Mabuhay is by my friend, the photographer John Lander. Small world!

Airline Office Update

In completely unrelated news, I am now able to report that the airline office I visited several months ago, the one that was in such disarray that I wasn’t sure I wanted to fly the airline, was in fact in the process of moving. That’s why things were so chaotic. The new office is lovely and very tidy, and gives me full confidence in the safety of the skies over…the place they fly to.

I Heart the Philippines

Today I stopped by the Philippine Airlines office in San Francisco to pick up a copy of the December Mabuhay magazine. I’m so glad I did. For one thing, the article I was expecting to find was indeed there—my first for Mabuhay.

And the people were so nice. The whole office was decorated for Christmas—not the holidays; Christmas. (The Philippines are about 85% Catholic.) The lady I talked to was so excited to meet a writer; she introduced me all around, showed my article to a bunch of people, and gave me not just a magazine but also a calendar. And while we were talking, another woman came by with a big tray of cookies and offered me some. The first lady told me to come back any time, and after that reception, I think I’ll stop by tomorrow, too.

More Fun Than Losing 10 Pounds

An editor at Philippine Airlines emailed me today to ask if I happened to have any stories ready to go on Sydney or Melbourne. Unfortunately, I’ve never been to Australia. I’ve always wanted to go—I never really got over that whole Men at Work/Crocodile Dundee craze from the early eighties. But I’ve never made it happen. Maybe this is the year. It is a far more appealing idea than anyother New Year’s resolutions I’ve contemplated.

Bono is African

Walking through a part of West Oakland near the BART station that I just learned is called The Bottoms, I found a great place on Pine Street. It’s called the Black Dot café, which is part of a larger group called the Black Dot Artist’s Collective.

The Black Dot is a brand new café, so new there’s no food yet, although they do serve tea and coffee. There’s art on the walls, and a larger studio/gallery space upstairs. One of the artists who shows in the space happened to be there, and he gave me a gallery tour.

I confess that I don’t remember his name. He told me, but it was hard for me to pronounce and I lost it on the way home. I liked his art, though. He often includes the outline of the continent of Africa in his work. Sometimes he makes the shape of Africa out of repeated smaller images, like soccer balls in a piece dedicated to Pele, or drums in a work inspired by a Congolese drummer.

One other piece that I liked contained the phrase “Bono is African.” Bono in this case refers to the lead singer of U2, who is, of course, Irish, but because he has done so much work for African debt relief and AIDS funding, the artist feels that in his (Bono’s) heart, he must be African.

I love the idea that someone could become an honorary citizen of a whole continent. I’m not expecting it to happen to me, but it’s something to aspire to.

Stargazing

Quite a while ago now, I blogged about Oakland celebrity sightings. Among my favorites were Bonnie Raitt and a member of the band Green Day. A surprising number of interesting people pass through my city and it always makes me proud that I’ve seen more famous people in Oakland than in San Francisco.

Recently I added another celebrity to my list. I’ve been told that the actor Delroy Lindo, who is British by birth, lives in Oakland. A few weeks ago I finally saw him, strolling through Glenview (that’s near me!) with a cup of coffee. People were leaving him alone, so I did too. He seemed to be a pretty regular guy, albeit with a nicer car than most of us.

(You’d know him if you saw him. He’s a character actor, and he has a holiday movie out this year, called This Christmas.

Putting the “on” Back in “Mormon”

Here’s something I meant to show you a few days ago. This is Oakland’s highest-wattage holiday display by far. It’s at a Mormon temple. This temple, which is high up on a hillside, can normally be seen for miles. During the holidays, I would not be surprised if it were visible from space.

As strange and frightening as the place is—the trees are lit but the grounds are dark; there are no visible doorways into the temple; and disembodied choral voices follow you everywhere—I still like to take people from out of town here if they visit in December. A Mormon temple at Christmas is just not something you see every day.

Wish I Hadn’t Thought of This

Earlier this week I was walking in a part of west Oakland that has several new condominium complexes in development. One in particular that I noticed is being built on what seems to have been most recently a huge empty lot. Suddenly a new cluster of buildings has popped up, and with it, several brand new streets.

This raises a whole new concern for me. How do I deal with new streets? These don’t actually exist yet; the signs are up, but they aren’t paved and are in any case behind fences so I can’t get to them. Do I have to come back later? Do I have to continually monitor the whole city for new construction projects? I haven’t decided yet and it gives me a headache to think about it.

When?

The article will appear in the My Word section of the Chronicle Sunday Magazine on March 16, 2008. The piece is being held that long because the editor thought it would go well in the annual travel issue, appearing on that date. I love that idea, so I don’t mind waiting!

Which Article?

It’s an essay about encountering beggars in Asia. I’ve always been troubled by the needy I meet traveling, and this essay is about one meeting that went particularly awkwardly in Ulan Bataar. It’s a little lighter than my last Chronicle piece—which isn’t saying much, I realize. I can’t say too much about it, but I can at least promise that no one dies.

Change of Plans

Today I was going to eat lunch at a West Oakland restaurant I just discovered, and then blog more about public holiday displays. Fortunately for you, I checked my email just before lunch and got the news that I have sold an article to the San Francisco Chronicle Sunday Magazine.

The article is mostly about Mongolia, so I decided a trip to my favorite Oakland Mongolian eatery was in order. It’s actually Oakland’s only Mongolian eatery, and it’s primarily a pizza place, but I’m sure that if Oakland had more restaurants like this, it would still be among my favorites.

The pizza menu is professionally printed in English, but the Mongolian specialties are listed on a whiteboard, handwritten in Mongolian script. I like to pretend that that makes the meat dumplings a secret. (I delude myself this way with In-n-Out Burger’s secret menu, too.)

The dumplings are called “buuz,” they’re greasy, and they’re pretty yummy. Imagine a steamed pot-sticker with less ginger and garlic, and more onion, and that’s more or less it. They hit the spot.

Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas

The buildings in downtown Oakland have their decorative roof lighting up, which adds a little something to long winter nights, even in a place like the Bay Area, which doesn’t get very cold.

My favorite urban Christmas decoration of all is the little tree on the roof of the apartment building on the far right. That building isn’t really downtown at all--it’s an illusion that the structure is a part of the main skyline--but I love that it’s trying so hard to fit in. Something about that tree way off to the side of things perfectly captures the Charlie Brown-like (Charlie Brownian?) mix of hope and melancholy that can permeate the holidays.

Basking in Reflected Glory

Yesterday I mentioned that I had been hoping to score toward the more adventurous end of the scale on the travel personality web site I’d discovered.

I didn’t get my wish, but at least someone in my family is representing: My grandmother scored a full point (on a scale of one to six) ahead of me.

This might sound like a joke, but I assure you, it isn’t. My grandparents have lived and traveled all over the world, and they aren’t afraid to take a cargo ship or a military transport plane if that’s what they have to do to get there. So my hat’s off to the real adventure travelers in the family.

Travel Personality Test

Pipi found an interesting web site recently. The site tests your travel style. The author’s somewhat confusing scale rates travelers along an “Authentic-Venturer” continuum. People on the “Authentic” end of the scale like things to be predictable and comfortable. They go to well-known tourist locations and stay in name-brand hotels because they know what they’re going to get there. They like group tours, tend to go to the same places over and over, and typically don’t wander too far from home.

People at the extreme “Venturer” end of the scale are adventure travelers, people who seek out undiscovered locations and would rather camp or stay in an independent inn or hotel because they find known quantities boring. They would rather die than be constrained by a group tour. They aren’t necessarily into high-adrenaline activities, but that does seem to go with the territory.

I was sort of hoping to score in the extreme adventure range, but I wasn’t too surprised to find that I’m a garden variety Centric Venturer—that is, somewhat adventurous, but not very. This makes sense. I will travel independently to places that most people tour, like China. But I also did once travel with an organized group (to Cuba) and I don’t regret it. I look for hotel names I recognize when I travel abroad, and I definitely don’t bungee jump.

Luckily for me, Pipi is also a Centric Venturer. That doesn’t surprise me, either, but it’s good to get reassurance that we have the same travel style.

Here’s where you can take the quiz yourself. (Click on the Plog Travel Personality Quiz link.)

Food for Thought

You are no safer than your most careless act

--Spotted on a sign in the parking lot of a sheet metal factory in West Oakland.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Pipi and I will be spending the day with my parents in San Francisco. I hope everyone out there has a very happy Thanksgiving!

Doing Good by Doing Well

Bill Gates won’t give you five dollars for every email you forward. You can’t get good luck by passing on a chain email. But you really can do a good deed by clicking on this web site.

Freerice is the most excellent time-waster ever, and it appears to be completely on the up-and-up. I checked it with Snopes, the urban-myth debunking site.

Here’s how it works: You go to the site, and answer multiple-choice questions that test your vocabulary. For every question you get right, 10 grains of rice are donated to the UN World Food Program. (The rice is paid for by advertisers.)

The questions start out pretty easy, but get harder. After a few questions, you will be assigned a vocabulary level, and you jump one level every time you answer three in a row correctly. You drop back a level every time you get one wrong. The site says there are 50 levels, but that it’s rare for anyone to get past the 47th. So far I haven’t done it either, but it isn’t for lack of trying.

I urge everyone to check it out. You get to put that SAT prep to work. The hungry get fed. Procrastination is accomplished. Everyone wins.

The City of Living Dangerously

What do Michigan and the San Francisco Bay Area have in common? They each contain two of the nation’s ten most dangerous cities, according to CQ Press.

Michigan gets the most dangerous city, Detroit; and #3, Flint. The Bay area gets Richmond at #9, and Oakland, coming in as the fourth most dangerous city in America.

This is discouraging, of course. For one thing, it means there’s no end in sight to the stupid comments and questions people in other parts of the country offer when I tell them where I live. (Dumbest to date, asked of Pipi and me in Memphis: “So, y’all must be the only white people there?” There’s no answer to that.)

I get a little tired of defending Oakland, a city that has a very real crime problem but which isn’t the war zone with a football team that most of America seems to think it is. So thanks a lot, CQ Press. I’m curious to see where your hometown (Lawrence, Kansas) comes in on the list.

Way into WAYN

I just spent most of my afternoon uploading travel photos to WAYN. Boy is that site addictive!

I also spent part of the afternoon deleting obscene emails that came through the site, so it’s definitely not perfect. Pretty good, though.

WAYN

I’ve discovered an interesting site recently. It’s called WAYN, which stands for “Where Are You Now.” It’s mostly a social networking site like MySpace or Linkedin, but its focus is travel. You can keep track of past trips and show where you plan to go next. You can also keep people abreast of where you happen to be at that very moment.

One feature of the site is that it keeps a running total of what percentage of the world you’ve seen. Unfortunately, it’s not based on landmass but simply on the number of countries you’ve visited.

I say “unfortunately,” because the way they calculate it, spending three months traveling all over an enormous country like China boosts my percentage by exactly the same amount as having once touched down on the island of Anguilla when I was 12. And naturally, being compulsive, I am interested in boosting my percentage. I’m currently at 10%. That’s not bad, but you’re probably not going to be surprised to hear that it’s my dream to hit 100%.

Hangzhou Hogs

I think I may have mentioned that I didn’t like Hangzhou, China all that much. I found it oppressively hot and as a tourist attraction, a little underwhelming. Our team got beaten badly in a soccer game we saw played there, and to top it all off, I dropped my camera in a lake. Not that that’s Hangzhou’s fault, it just didn’t help matters any.

Over the weekend, however, I noticed a blurb in the travel section that made me understand that our experience there could have been far worse. How, you ask? Three words: ravenous feral pigs. (Please note that this would also make an excellent band name.)

Apparently enormous and famished wild boars have been ransacking buildings all over town, and one even tried to ram a taxicab, making me feel much better about the times we had trouble hailing one. The problem has gotten so bad that officials are considering allowing hunting. “We will try to drive them away, but shooting will be allowed if necessary," one spokesman said.

So on top of the already documented hazards of sightseeing in Hangzhou—heatstroke, aggressive drivers, and dining dysphoria, you can now add boar goring and stray bullets. We will not be returning any time soon.

Pilgrimage

My walk today took me past Lonely Planet’s North American headquarters. It’s right next to the railroad tracks, which seems somehow appropriate for a travel publishing company. I’m glad to finally know exactly where the office is.

It turns out to be very close to a brewery I didn’t know about (the Linden Street Brewery). You learn something new every day!

EFI

There’s a charming phrase I learned reading an article about people who bicycle across the country. Some riders, or at least the group I read about, were constantly vigilant to make sure that on their journey they covered “EFI”—let’s say it stands for “Every Fabulous Inch.” In other words, they wanted to be able to say they’d covered literally the entire length of the country. If they stopped in a particular place one day, and then got a ride to a hotel or campground, they had to start the next days’ ride at exactly the point where they had left the road the night before. If a portion was washed out or closed for whatever reason and they had to portage around it, this was cause for great consternation. I think, though, that they decided that riding every inch of available road counted—they didn’t have to penalize themselves for impassible stretches.

So I’ve been asking myself lately how strict I need to be with myself. Somewhat to my surprise, the answer has been, “Not too strict.”

I’m surprising myself because I know I do tend slightly toward the compulsive—it’s not enough to collect pennies, for example; I have to have one from every year. And every mint. I can get rid of duplicates—I’m not a hoarder—but I do want that sense of completion and order.

So far, I lead a mostly normal life thanks to low-volume collections. But I know I have it in me to take things too far, so I’m happy to report that I’ve been coming up with some pretty reasonable rules for myself. I don’t have to walk every literal inch, for example. I know I mentioned that I felt like I had to go down even short dead-end streets, but I don’t have to compulsively walk to the very end and squish my toes against the fence or whatever it is at the very end of the pavement.

I don’t have to walk on both sides of the street except in special cases like the Mandela Parkway, which is a road divided by a median strip so wide it has landscaping and benches. I don’t have to do anything heroic, like walk on freeway ramps, or through hard-hat construction areas. No trespassing. No poison oak. No superfund sites.

My guiding philosophy is that I’m exploring to learn about Oakland, not to bump into every wall in town.

I’m curious to see how other walkers handle the “EFI” issue. Anyone have any personal philosophies they’d like to share?

Not What I Meant by “Ladies’ Room”

There was something I wanted to show you all today, but at the last minute, I had another attack of self-consciousness and didn’t take a picture. I don’t think I’m being neurotic this time, though.

I was on Seventh Street and I passed a small mosque with beautiful calligraphy on the outside. What really caught my attention, though, was that there were two entrances, one for men and the other for women. It occurred to me that I’ve never seen this arrangement in a non-restroom situation. And yes, I have seen mosques before; I’d just never noticed dual entrances. (I did once go into a mosque in western China; I hope I didn’t do anything inappropriate.)

This evening I went back to take a picture. There was a man arriving at the same time, clearly there to worship, and suddenly I felt kind of like a hayseed and kind of like a very bad spy taking a picture. So no photo today.

Dead End Streets

Dead-end streets are awkward to deal with, and for a long time I had trouble finishing up my very own street for just that reason. The short end of the road I live on is really just a wide driveway for two buildings, but it has a street sign, so I felt I had to walk it. But I worried what the neighbors would think. The stub is so short and exposed that there’s no way to claim you’re looking for an address, or that you thought the street went through. It just wouldn’t be plausible. So for months, self-consciousness prevented me from crossing that block off my map.

Finally a neighborhood block party saved the day. The refreshment table was set up on the short end of the street, and a lot of people were clustered around it. I was able to mingle my way far enough across the intersection that I felt it counted.

I’m an Excellent Walker. Definitely an Excellent Walker.

Sometimes when I’m walking I worry that people are wondering what I’m up to. Generally I write this sensation off as some sort of adolescent flashback, but recently I went on a walk and realized people really were staring at me.

I was near the Emeryville border, in an area where a freeway has cut across the neighborhood. There, many streets that I’m sure used to be longer now terminate in an abrupt dead-end at the freeway right-of-way.

This must have caused enormous upheaval when it happened. I’m sure houses were demolished, and people living on either side of the freeway must have felt like the Berlin Wall went through their neighborhood.

One other very minor but interesting consequence of the freeway is that it’s really hard to inconspicuously walk the streets there. I kept coming to nub-ended roads and feeling compelled to walk to the terminus, then awkwardly turn around and waddle forty or fifty feet back the way I’d come. In most cases it was very obvious from the nearest intersection that the streets dead-ended, and I must have looked strange striding purposefully toward the chain link fence at the end of each one and then turning right around.

Finally a group of guys doing alfresco auto repair work wanted to know what I was doing. They said I looked lost, but I think that by “lost” they really meant “suspicious.” I found myself blurting out that I was compulsively walking the whole length of all the streets in the neighborhood, and that’s why I had to walk through their outdoor repair shop even though any fool could tell the street was not a through street.

They seemed to accept that. They must have seen Rainman.

Best Fifty Cents I Spent That Day

I forgot to say: The coffee was really good, too, and an unbelievable bargain.

Blogging ’Bout a Revolution

I had breakfast this morning at a coffeehouse on Seventh Street in West Oakland called the Revolution Café. It was a great place with a lot of atmosphere. I recommend it if you’re in the neighborhood, which is very close to the West Oakland BART station.

There’s a sign out front touting fifty-cent coffee, and that’s about the extent of the advertising. (Well, there was also a neon sign that said, “Open” and a paper one in the window that said, “Closed” but they cancelled each other out.) Inside, the décor was thrift-store coffeehouse funky, with lots of kitchy knick-knacks. The posters were revolutionary, but fairly subtly so. No Che Guevara or anything like that. I remember a few framed newspaper pages with headlines about the IWW. The Greatest, a movie about Muhammad Ali’s discovery of Islam was on the TV. There were lots of flyers around for anti-racism rallies and self-help group meetings. It was a positive vibe. I got the sense the place was more about internal overhaul than literal bloody revolution.

I had an interesting conversation with the owner, who looked visibly relieved when I mentioned that my Halloween had been quiet. He said he didn’t believe it was a good thing to celebrate death, which is how he saw Halloween. “Why are they calling it a celebration when people are dying?” he said, I think alluding to the fact that last year’s San Francisco Halloween celebration ended with 10 people being shot. “And why are people dying at a celebration? That’s not a celebration; they need to think of a new word for it.”

Ideas, anyone?

Empty Lot Wish List

It’s been brought to my attention that I could have been a little more sensitive in my posting about the vacant lot on 14th Street and what might go there. The poster is right, of course. No one who lives, as I do, in an apartment with safety bars over the windows has a right to be snarky about someone else’s neighborhood.

And the thing is, I didn’t mean to be. I’m really enjoying my exploring Oakland project. I think I did get a little freaked out after a couple of days walking around Lowell Playground watching too many drive-by transactions. But that was a short-lived slump. I’m back on the horse, enjoying and appreciating the many good things West Oakland has to offer.

And no, I don’t really wish a big-box store on the place. Here are a few better ideas. They aren’t any better thought out than my Target idea—just better generally.

1. Affordable housing. (Note to developers: "From the low 500's!" is not affordable.)
   
2. Community garden.
   
3. Library--this is an enormous lot. It would be like having a Powells Books where the merchandise is free.
   
4. Farmer’s market.
   
5. Zoo west.
   
6. Another park designed by the same people who designed Middle Harbor Shoreline Park.
   
7. Mother of all swimming pools.
   
8. Minigolf. Or bowling. You can’t do either within the city of Oakland right now.
   
9. Farmer Joe’s—with this much room, parking wars and shopping-cart collisions should be a thing of the past.
   
10. 100,000 square-foot Fenton’s. Oakland may not exactly be crying out for this much ice cream—but the world is.
    

Germany 2011

It was announced today that the next Women’s World Cup soccer tournament will be in Germany, in 2011. It surprises me a little that FIFA would give the German team the home-field advantage—they’ve won two World Cups in a row and don’t seem to need any favors right now. But it will be great to have the tournament in yet another country with a strong women’s soccer program.

So far that’s been the case with all five previous tournaments, held in China, Norway, and the United States. (Some countries hosted more than once.) Germany also has an excellent men’s team—they’re number five in the world right now. Germany is just an all-around soccer powerhouse and I’m sure the stands will be full.

I’m not sure if I’ll be in them, too, but I’m hoping.

Not Strictly Related, But….

…How about those Sox?!

One More West Oakland Photo

Here’s another interesting thing I found in the same neighborhood. It’s a memorial to the people (62 in all) who died in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. It’s on the Mandela Parkway, which, as I understand it, takes the place of an elevated freeway that once existed here but collapsed that day.

Amazingly, that earthquake really did only last 15 seconds, as the wall behind the statue says.

Where’s the Coffee and Bacon Factory?

Right across the street from the cereal factory is another mysterious building. It was mostly demolished, and covered in graffiti. Still visible were a lot of piping and some enormous metal tanks. My new neighborhood friend was able to clear up this mystery, as well. He says the building used to be a Carnation factory. That’s right; across the street from the cereal factory was where for many years Oakland’s milk came from.

The thing that surprised me the most about the site was the sheer size of the vacant lot left behind. Even in Oakland, a vacant lot covering more than a square block is an unusual sight. I suppose it won’t remain vacant for long, though. I am curious to see what ends up being built there. Condos would be my guess, although you could probably put a Target or a Wal-Mart there. That might not be the worst thing in the world. Honestly, in that area, the only mom-and-pop operations are check-cashing places and the kind of liquor stores where they ask you if you’d like your booze “for here or to go?” If ever there were an urban neighborhood where you could put a big-box store without anyone losing a job, this would be it.

Sweet-Smelling Mystery Solved

I had never thought of West Oakland as a nice-smelling place until recently. My main experience with the neighborhood until now was driving past the sewage treatment plant next to highway 580 on my way home from San Francisco. You can imagine what that smells like.

In the past few weeks, though, I’ve been discovering some pockets of the neighborhood that smell great. There are a couple of bakeries near the Emeryville border that constantly smell like cake, greatly improving a blighted and even hostile part of town. (Somebody threw something at my car as I was driving home from my borderlands walk. I think it was just a crumpled-up drink cup, but still, it’s the least welcome I’ve felt yet.)

Around 14th Street and Market Street, the air also smells nice. It’s not quite as sweet as the cake neighborhood; it smells more like baking bread, and I’ve never known why.

A few weeks ago, when I stopped to take a picture of this building, a man struck up a conversation with me that cleared up a lot. He told me that this forbidding edifice is a breakfast cereal factory. They make supermarket-brand versions of several different kinds of cereals. I eat Albertson’s shredded wheat knock-off all the time. I really like it, and I’d probably eat it even if it came from Libya, but it’s nice to know I’m buying locally. And contributing to neighborhood improvement at the same time.

There Goes the Neighborhood

Lately I’ve been walking west Oakland, which is not a good neighborhood. It does have some nice houses, a few new condo developments, and a few prominent businesses, like Esther’s Orbit room and The Crucible metal workshop.

But much of it is bland at best, blighted at worst. In the northern area, near the Emeryville border, you see a lot of derelict men pushing shopping carts and drinking out of paper bags. Closer to the West Oakland BART station, you get strips of public housing, and run-down little houses with chain-link fences around their yards.

To summarize: It’s not a great place, and last week, I managed to make it worse.

I was walking around listening to music and wearing a t-shirt that in retrospect I wish I’d left in the drawer. I bought it at the Hooters restaurant in Hangzhou, China where Pipi and I went to watch a soccer game on TV. (Honest.) At the time it struck me as ironic and fun. It has Chinese characters on it, so it seemed like it had more cultural value than it really does.

So I was walking around West Oakland wearing this hip, edgy, ironic shirt that’s going to wow all my friends at the next party when I found myself walking past a school—a junior high school, I think. It was recess time, and several girls were sitting by the fence braiding each other’s hair. I could see that one of them had stopped braiding and was saying something excitedly to me. I took off my earphones and asked her to repeat it. “I like your shirt!” she beamed.

This was exactly what I had been afraid she’d said. I certainly hadn’t meant to bring the word of Hooters to the youth of our nation. That was dumb. From now on, it’s plain white Ts, women’s sports jerseys, or shirts I’ve gotten from charity events, I promise.

Monterey Photos

They’re up—you can click here to see photos of my whirlwind trip to Monterey.

Mad Dash to Monterey

I just got back and am madly trying to finish the Monterey article. I took lots of photos, many of which were experimental, but some of which came out better than I expected. I’ll have them up as soon as I can. Probably not today, though!

Monterey

Philippine Airlines also wants me to write an article about Monterey and Carmel Valley, so I’ll be making a lightning trip down there this week, probably tomorrow. I have been there before, but I want to refresh my memory and take some photos. Philippine Airlines is a rare magazine that will accept photos and writing from the same person. Most magazines don’t have an actual rule against this; they just don’t believe one person can do a good job with both at the same time. It is a little difficult to concentrate on two things, but I’m looking forward to the challenge--and also looking forward to trying out my new camera, a Canon 8MP that I got to replace the one that went for a swim in China.

Shanghai Now and Zen

Good news from Philippine Airlines: They want me to do a short article on Shanghai, to be published in the December issue of their in-flight magazine. I think it’s going to appear alongside an article on Beijing by my friend John. They want something on the transformation of Shanghai from its romantic 1930s incarnation to modern Shanghai 2.0. That evolution is one of the things I find fascinating about Shanghai, so this is right up my alley.

Thanks, Readers!

I finally took the step of installing a counter on my blog. To my surprise, I’ve logged 508 visitors in the past month. That’s about 500 more visitors than I expected. Clearly my family can’t account for all of this. I don’t get that many junk postings, so I don’t think it’s spam crawlers, either. I don’t know who you all are, but thanks for stopping by!

Loyal readers will be relieved to know that as happy as I am with the total, it’s not nearly enough to start justifying advertising. So this content continues to come to you harassment-free.

Top-Five Worst Songs of the 1980s

True, by Spandau Ballet
Over-emoted, over-produced, and just plain overwrought, this slick piece of pop also features one of the yuckiest videos of the 1980s. I don’t know why over-gelled hair, a business suit, and lipstick look so good on Annie Lenox and so creepy on this band. They just do.

The Greatest Love of All, by Whitney Houston
Really? The greatest? How come it didn’t inspire a better song?

Endless Love, by Diana Ross and Lionel Richie
My father used to call this “Mindless Love,” and I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Arthur's Theme (Best That You Can Do), By Christopher Cross
Any song that romanticizes New York City in the 1980s is automatically suspect. Play this alongside literally any cut from Lou Reed’s “New York,” and it’s obvious that someone is not being emotionally honest.

Hello, by Lionel Richie
(It’s fair to conclude I’m not a Lionel Richie fan.) I think Split Enz said it best: “I don’t want to say I love you/That would give away too much.” (Message to My Girl.) All the above 80s ballads, but especially this last one, could have used a lesson in subtlety from our oddly-dressed down-under friends.

I mention this because I heard all of these songs (well, not the Spit Enz one) in Hangzhou. The Chinese definitely like their light, treacly vocal music, but there is no escaping it here. Light pop is not just for elevators anymore. It’s also in train stations, in taxicabs, in restaurants, and coming out of every car and shop window in the city. It would seem that on top of all its other claims to fame, Hangzhou is also the city where the 80s came to die.

Moller Mansion Mystery

From our 9th floor hotel window, Pipi and I could look right into the grounds of a building that our guidebook told us was called the Moller Mansion. It is not exactly a beautiful building, but it is impressive. (A lot of Shanghai architecture is like that.)

The book said the building had been constructed by a Swedish man in the colonial days, and that it had later been a communist youth league headquarters. After that, it became a hotel.

The book implied that it’s still a hotel, but if it is, it’s got the worst doormen in the world. I crossed the street to peek in the lobby one afternoon, and was chased away by a woman who kept repeating, “Closed, closed” in English. When I asked her in Mandarin what time I should come back, she ignored me with an intensity that only a Chinese security guard can muster.

The mansion’s web site says it’s accepting reservations for December. But it didn’t look like anyone was staying there during our time across the street. Almost all the lights were off at night, and I only rarely saw anyone on the grounds. It didn’t seem to be undergoing renovations, either. So the Moller Mansion’s purpose is a mystery for now.

One other mystery: Who does their landscaping? This monster topiary disturbs me a little bit.

Lost in Translation

Part of the reason the cab driver had such a hard time finding a large, neon-lit restaurant is that we couldn’t remember the Chinese name for the place.

“Hooters” doesn’t transliterate phonetically in any easy way to Mandarin, so marketers gave the place an entirely new name. Sidestepping double-entendre issues, they concentrated on the less troublesome kind of hooter. So in China, the restaurant is known as “The American Owl Restaurant.”

Putting My College Education to Good Use

Speaking a foreign language is difficult under the best of circumstances. I’d like to think it’s especially difficult in Chinese, a language where changing the inflection a tiny bit—raising your voice at the end of a sentence to indicate a question, for example?—can make a thought unintelligible. And speaking on the phone is harder still, because you don’t have body language or facial expressions to help you.

I say all this in an attempt to convey the level of motivation it took to track down the Hooters in Hangzhou.

During our time in Hangzhou, Pipi and really wanted to see a quarterfinal game being played in another city. In Shanghai, we’d seen a few televised games on ESPN in our hotel room. But our hotel in Hangzhou didn’t get ESPN. The television set had a poor picture anyway. We needed a sports bar.

Hangzhou is a city with an estimated expatriate population of about 6,000, but only 1,000 of those are from North America or Europe, which suggests that it’s not the best place to find a bar with burgers and big-screen TVs. We were going to have to do some sleuthing.

I first called the Shangri-La Hotel, the nicest joint in town. It had two things going for it: We’d been there, and had noticed that it definitely catered to Western travelers. More importantly, we realized it was also the place the U.S. soccer team was staying. (And I promise you, we only went there once to stalk them.)

But there was no luck there. Hard as it was to believe, they said they weren’t planning on showing the game in any public areas.

So Pipi hit the Internet, but had trouble finding listings for sports bars in Hangzhou. The only thing that kept coming up was a blurb for Hooters, which improbably has one of its three Chinese branches in Hangzhou.

I had never realized that Hooters thought of itself as a sports bar, having never been to one. (Pipi remembers that we once almost went to one in Memphis, because it was one of only two restaurants near our hotel, but oddly enough we ended up getting bad Chinese food instead.)

So I called the Hangzhou Hooters, and using the full extent of my three years of college Mandarin, was able to determine that they would, in fact, be showing the game. I got the address, too, and found it was well across town. I forgot to ask the cross street, though, which made the cab ride interesting.

The street that Hooters Hangzhou is located on is long, and the numbers seem to be particularly poorly marked. Our driver stopped once to ask another driver if he knew what block we were on, and twice pulled the taxi over, with the engine still running, and sprinted up and down the sidewalk looking for street numbers. Pipi asked me to remind her what that word was that the Shanghai doorman had used to describe us when we came home soaked from the Nigeria game. She thought this guy was pretty lihai, too.

Finally, we found it. It looked like I imagine an American Hooters looks, with pool tables, several bars, and lots of tacky signs on the wall. The waitresses looked surprisingly like I imagine American Hooters waitresses look like. Ours was named Kiki, which I know because she wrote it on a napkin for us. In my memory of it, she dotted the “i”s with a heart, but this can’t really be true. (I am sure, though that she did write, “thank you” on the bill accompanied by a smiley face inside a daisy.)

Hardly anyone was there, so we got a lot of attention from Kiki as well as the manager, who must not have drawn actual work duty that evening. I thought they might pull up chairs and eat with us until a gong sounded the signal that it was the time at Hooters when they dance. All the waitresses jumped up on one of the bars and began lip-synching to “YMCA,” complete with the ritual arm waving. It was weird. Not as weird as fish falling out of the sky, but almost as unexpected. Hangzhou had delivered us a surreal experience after all.

Everybody Gets a Job

We knew the boy was trouble the moment we entered the breakfast room. Our hotel had a breakfast buffet. The apparently teen-aged boy who worked there was either the son of the hotel owner, or at his first day of work ever. Maybe both.

He led us to our table and asked if we wanted coffee. I said I did, and Pipi said—in Chinese—that she didn’t. He looked at us blankly. Finally he poured me a cup—and then turned Pipi’s cup over to fill it. She repeated that she didn’t want any. Blank stare. Then he made a move to start pouring. Pipi turned her cup upside down. He froze, then walked away, shaking his head at those wacky Americans who can’t agree on anything.

During breakfast, I realized that the boy’s primary duty was not even seating people. It seemed to be to walk around with a tray of sterno containers for the buffet trays. His job description probably read: 1) Look pretty in uniform. 2) Try not to break anything.

Towards the end of breakfast, after passing through the room several times but not doing anything with the burners, he managed to drop the whole tray, spilling the gelatinous fuel all over the carpet. The boy disappeared immediately, leaving the woman he worked with to clean up the toxic mess. Just as she was finishing up, he reappeared with a new tray of sterno, which he promptly perched on the very edge of a table. This finally elicited a scolding from the woman, which he didn’t seem to notice.

The next day I went to breakfast myself—Pipi said the chicken feet, kimchee, and other unorthodox breakfast items make her loose her appetite.

As I was helping myself to the food—I love a buffet, no matter what’s served—a swathe of bunting that had been attached with Velcro to the front of the 20-foot long table suddenly detached itself and fell at my feet. I looked around for a possible cause and discovered our hapless boy standing a few feet to my right, with one end of the cloth in his hands and that same blank look on his face.

I shrugged, assuming that everyone would know it was the waiter’s fault, not mine. But just then, a little Australian boy, about four years old, shrieked, “Mum, the lady broke it!” (Mum looked pained, like she was hoping fervently I wasn’t an English-speaker. I don’t blame the kid, though; he probably thought he was going to take the blame.)

It reminded me of something that was sort of a mantra in my China backpacking days: Whenever we’d see four people on the scene of a one-man task, we’d say, “Well, I guess everyone gets a job.” It was never clear how the division of labor was worked out—who decided which one had to work and which ones got to sit around observing? But somehow every job site had its own arrangement, and 15 years later, even though I’m not sure full employment is a promise the Chinese government makes anymore, the Everyone Gets a Job policy still seems to be in practice at the Mason Hotel.

Where in the World is the Cup?

Speaking of the next world cup, it’s not yet clear where that will be held. There are four countries in the running, and a vote will be held in November to determine which one gets the tournament. The candidates are Peru, Canada, Germany, and Australia.

Peru would be an interesting choice because its team did not even qualify for the 2007 tournament. Canada might also find itself in the troubling position of being a host country that doesn’t make it out of the first round. Germany almost has the opposite problem—its women’s team won in 2003 and 2007, and the men hosted the 2006 men’s world cup. Enough already!

I’m personally pulling for Australia, a country I’ve never visited but have wanted to go to since the first time I heard the song “Land Down Under.” Aussie Aussie Aussie, oi oi oi!

Losing Hope, Gaining Perspective

You’re probably wondering what Pipi and I were doing in a place that we don’t seem to like very much. We asked ourselves the very same thing in Hangzhou, a city that thwarted our every attempt to find anything charming about it.

Hangzhou had one last disappointment in store for us. And no, I don't mean the hostile Buddha above. He doesn't mean it; he's just sporting a Sanskrit character that predates the Third Reich by centuries.

I'm talking about the United States’ defeat in the game they played there. It was an unpleasant match, played in stifling heat, with a hostile crowd that really had it in for the United States. The opponent was Brazil, and we got to know the Chinese word for that country, Ba-Shi, very well because the crowd chanted it non-stop. They cheered when Brazil got the ball, exploded when they scored, and roared with approval when the Brazilian players literally danced circles around the Americans with needlessly ostentatious and taunting footwork. I’m not sure where this antipathy comes from. My guess is that it stems from the 1999 World Cup, which came down to a final game between China and the United States. It was tied 0-0 through overtime, and was settled with a shoot-out, which the United States won by one shot. The goalie in that game was Brianna Scurry, the same goalie who played in this Brazil-U.S. game, and I think the Chinese fans were happy to see her shellacked.

So the game wasn’t that much fun to watch, but it did at least remind us of why we’d come to China in the first place, and to Hangzhou in particular. And we had a giddy moment at a lunch buffet at the fanciest hotel in town when former U.S. star Julie Foudy walked right past our table. (We were too shy to say anything, but we did revel in our proximity to soccer greatness.)

The next day we took the train back to Hangzhou, and things improved immediately. We both really like Shanghai, and instantly felt like we were on vacation again. The soccer became more interesting as well, with a dishy controversy erupting over comments made by the starting U.S. goalkeeper. Hope Solo, who had been the starter for about two years, was suddenly benched by the coach right before the Brazil game. When the U.S. lost that game, Hope responded with a juvenile tirade mocking the coach’s moves and implying that the keeper who did play is past her prime.

The team responded by basically saying they couldn’t be her friend anymore. She was banished from the team to the point where she not only wasn’t allowed to sit on the team bench for the next game, she apparently wasn’t allowed to eat with them or even go to the stadium to watch the match. I’m pretty sure they aren’t going to sign her yearbook, either. Newspaper reports said she still would probably fly home with the team but I don’t think she did and I actually would know because THEENTIRETEAMWASONMYFLIGHTHOME.

Sorry, being starstruck has made me lapse into capitals again. What I meant was, the entire U.S. women’s soccer team, except for Hope Solo, was on the same flight that Pipi and I took home.

After spotting players all over Eastern China, and the Shanghai airport, I finally decided to overcome my shyness. The team boarded before us and were scattered all over the coach cabin as Pipi and I got on the plane. When I found myself momentarily stalled in the aisle next to the row where Abby Wambach and Kristine Lilly were sitting, I made my move. I leaned over and told them I’d really enjoyed watching them play. Abby Wambach thanked me very sincerely for coming all that way to watch. She also apologized for not bringing home the trophy, which kind of flustered me. I stammered that they’d done well, the line started moving again, and the awkward moment was over.

What I wish I had said of course, is that there was no need to apologize; that we were disappointed after the Brazil game, but that the consolation match against Norway was so good that it redeemed all the drama that came before. So Abby, if you’re reading this (it’s okay; we all Google ourselves sometimes), please don’t feel like the team’s performance was anything to be sorry about. We loved watching the matches and were honored to be in the team’s company flying home. And I’m sorry about talking in run-on capital letters when we met. It’s a problem I promise to work on before the next world cup.