the-wrench

Kobe, Japan

2011-10-06T00:41:00.000-07:00

Some of our friends had flown to Japan to watch the Red Sox a few years back, and while they were here they also managed to watch a Japanese baseball game, too. After hearing about their experience, D and I decided that next time we went to Japan we'd try to do the same. It took some work (buying the tickets requires an address in Japan, so we had to get my uncle in Tokyo to buy them, and the game we wanted sold out instantly, so he had to scalp them), but we ended up with very nice tickets to see the Yoimuri Giants play the Hanshin Tigers at Koshien Stadium, near Kobe.

Despite living in Tokyo, my uncle has a clinic in Kobe that he visits once a week, so he's quite familiar with the area. He suggested that he meet up with us there to show us around a bit, and we quickly agreed, So, the day after the wedding we took the JR West train from Kyoto to Kobe, where we dropped off our bags at the Crowne Plaza Ana Kobe (right above the Shin-Kobe station) and then met my uncle for lunch.

He took us to a pretty traditional-looking Japanese place right next to his office. He said that he basically ate there every time he was in Kobe, which was once a week. The food was reasonably priced (about $15 USD per person) and pretty good.

From lunch we took a train to Koshien, which took about 20 minutes on the express. The stadium was right outside the train station, and we couldn't have missed it because there were tons of fans wearing Hanshin Tigers gear streaming towards it. Luckily our friend's mother had given us lots of Hanshin Tigers-branded goodies (including jerseys, noisemakers, and fans) so we could at least try to fit in. My uncle had also recommended that we buy balloons for the 7th inning stretch, and after scouring a few stands, we managed to find some.

It was really hot in the sun, so for the first hour or so I kept looking for cloud cover. There were tons of girls in pink outfits selling beer, drinks, and snacks, and they would prowl up and down the sections calling out whatever they had. They were even wearing knee pads to make it easier for them to kneel and transact with customers.

Overall the crowd was polite and well-behaved, but very enthusiastic. There were complicated chants and songs, which were different for each player. I tried to pick up the clapping part since I didn't understand the spoken chants, but even that was too complicated for me. It even seemed that only the fans rooting for the batting side would make any noise, and the fans rooting for the pitching side would sit quietly, waiting for their turn.

D was psyched about the variety of tasty snacks; we saw takoyaki, okonomiyaki, and lots of other fried goodies. We didn't want to eat too much since we had dinner plans, but in the end we did buy some some sweet potatoes, chicken karaage, and fresh potato chips.

We noticed a few other small differences: the seats were lower and thus more comfortable for me, they didn't sing the national anthem before the game, and no one walked around during at-bats, ever. Each team had two foreign players, who were among the better players on the teams. Generally the outfield play seemed a little suspect, and the home run totals were quite low (looking at the player statistics), but my uncle explained later that they had recently switched from the old lighter Japanese ball to the American ball, so batters were having some trouble adjusting this year.

Anyway, basically everyone was watching the game at almost every moment, until the top of the 7th, when everyone started blowing up their balloons. I almost felt bad for the players since no one was paying any attention to them at that point. As soon as we got to the seventh inning stretch, there was some kind of cue (which I missed) and we all released our balloons into the air at once.

It was quite a sight! We stayed until the bottom of the 8th, when the Tigers were up 9-4, and decided that we'd have to go if we wanted to make our dinner reservation. It was good that we did as the train was quite crowded already.

We met my uncle back in Kobe and he took us to a Kobe beef teppanyaki restaurant called Teishin Chikusan. We ordered a set menu which came with a beef appetizer (I chose roast beef, D had seared beef), a salad, and then lots of types of Kobe beef (sirloin, thigh, fatty sirloin, filet, and one other), served with veggies (purple yam, lotus root, mushroom, pepper, garlic) on the side. My favorite was this sirloin.

We were given ponzu and soy sauce for dipping, with wasabi and fine-grained sea salt. I preferred the salt as I found the wasabi a little overwhelming but D liked it. Other sides included pickled lettuce and cucumber, miso soup, and garlic Kobe beef fried rice. For dessert we had salty milk sorbet, with tea. It was quite salty (more than Bi-Rite salted caramel) but I liked it.

We stayed overnight at the ANA Crowne Plaza Kobe, which was very nice and conveniently located right above the Shin-Kobe train/subway stop. I think they mixed D up with another person of the same name, because somehow we got Priority Club treatment, and a room on the 32nd floor requiring key access in the elevator. It had a great view.

The next morning, we had breakfast at the famous Kobe Kitano Hotel, as recommended by my uncle. We'd thought it would be a Japanese-style breakfast, but upon arrival we quickly discovered it was French-style, but very fancy.

We started with five types of juice: mango, carrot, berry, green apple, and grapefruit:

In quick succession, we were served a giant basket of breads, with fruits, prunes, yogurt, tapioca and coconut milk, and assorted homemade butters and jams.

Later we were served roast ham, soft boiled eggs, coffee and tea. They provided an interesting contraption to take the tops off of the eggs; there was a domed part which sat on top of the egg, and then a metal ball which was attached on a stick. The metal ball was designed to drop onto the dome, and the impact would crack the egg around the bottom of the dome. We had to drop the ball four or five times to fully crack through the egg, but it worked pretty nicely.

After breakfast we just walked around the Kitano and Sannomiya areas and then headed to the Kansai Airport. To get there, we took the Port Liner monorail from Sannomiya to the Kobe Airport, and then took the Bay Shuttle from Kobe Airport to Kansai Airport. Ironically, the monorail had better views than the boat.

It took quite awhile for us to finally get to the airport, as the ferry only runs once an hour, but we did get there in time and even managed to buy some souvenirs for our relatives before flying back to Taipei.

Kyoto, Japan

2011-10-05T17:55:00.000-07:00

Earlier this year, D and I were invited to a wedding in Japan. I think we debated for less than thirty seconds, and then promptly began to research plane tickets.

The wedding took place at Matsunoo Shrine in Kyoto. We first stopped by Taipei for a few days to visit family, and then flew directly from Taipei to Kansai. While in Taiwan, we'd heard that a typhoon was supposed to hit Japan the same day we were scheduled to arrive, so we were a bit worried about our flight. In the end the typhoon hit Kyoto about an hour before our plane took off, but nevertheless we were only delayed by fifteen minutes.

Upon arrival we hopped into the Haruka airport express train, which took us to Kyoto Station. We'd decided to spend three nights in Kyoto; one at the expensive but amazing-looking Hoshinoya, and two at the cheap and convenient Hotel Hokke Club near the station. The Hoshinoya boat dock (yes, you take a boat to get to the hotel) was a twenty-minute cab ride from the station, and the cabbie had to call someone to figure out exactly where it was, but eventually we got there. The hotel staff greeted us upon arrival and took us into a very posh waiting room, where they served us tea and cookies and informed us that unfortunately the hotel was completely closed, because the typhoon had caused the river to rise so much that it was unsafe to cross by boat.

We were pretty bummed about the change of plan, but the hotel staff quickly offered several hotel alternatives of a "similar class". We chose their first suggestion, the Hyatt Regency, and they sent us there in a complimentary cab. We were skeptical about liking the Hyatt since it was an American chain, but we were much more impressed after arriving at the property. The front area was decorated with a field of bamboo shoots, and since it was after dark they were nicely lit. The interiors were decorated in a modern Japanese style, and the bellboys and the concierge were super helpful. The room overlooked the garden and was giant by Japanese standards, with a king bed and a spacious bathroom.

It was pretty late by the time we finally got settled in, so for dinner we just ate casually at a nearby izakaya called Manzo Hearts. For appetizers we had chicken karaage and agedashi tofu. The chicken was tasty but the tofu was some of the best that I'd had in a long time. D ordered oyako don as his main, and I ordered zaru udon, both of which were good too. I guess we were probably pretty hungry by then, too.

The room rate included free buffet breakfast, so despite having mixed feelings about American rather than Japanese breakfast, we went down early the next morning to check it out. It was a pretty impressive spread; there were lots of freshly cut fruit, juices, pastries, bread, muffins, cheeses, cold cuts, yogurts, granolas, and muesli. For hot foods there were waffles, pancakes, sausages, eggs, bacon, "German-style" potatoes, and even a ham station. Everything was so tasty that we both ate a lot despite wanting to save room for a proper Japanese lunch.

After breakfast we checked out, moved our luggage to the Hokke, and then set off for the Nanzenji Shrine. We spent about an hour checking out the grounds, and then walked next door to the Zenrinji Shrine, which is also called "Eikando".

Nanzenji:

Zenrinji (Eikando):

Nanzenji was more highly recommended, but I actually preferred Zenrinji; there were a whole bunch of very old, very low-ceiling-ed Japanese-style buildings (we were required to take off our shoes to enter) with walls decorated with original paintings. There were also altars and sculptures in many of the buildings, the most famous of which was the "looking back" Amita (Buddha) statue. It was very lovely but a bit smaller than I expected. We also walked up to the pagoda overlooking the site, where we discovered a gorgeous panoramic view of Kyoto.

It was already mid-afternoon when we left Zenrinji, so we thought we might have some difficulty finding food, but soon after entering the nearby "Philospher's Walk" we discovered a cute little shop which served some simple Japanese dishes, so we decided to stop for a bite there. D ordered a tofu donburi, and I had warabi mochi, which also came with a tall glass of iced green tea. Both dishes were delicious; I often forget how good silken tofu is in Asia, and I hadn't had warabi mochi since our last visit to Japan in late 2007. We topped that off with a giant can of Calpis soda from a vending machine, and then spent the rest of the afternoon on the Philosopher's walk. It was full of temples, but we decided against actually visiting any more of them.

After chilling back at the hotel for a couple of hours, we headed out for a kaiseki dinner. Originally we'd planned to have our fancy Japanese dinner the previous evening at the Hoshinoya, but since that'd fallen through, we'd asked the Hyatt concierge for a restaurant recommendation. Her pick was the Sakurada, which we later discovered has two Michelin stars.

The restaurant is located in a small alley which is inaccessible by car. The taxi driver who took us there was initially confused by our printout map, but eventually figured it out and got us there in record time. He stopped the car next to the alley and said several things rapidly in Japanese. Luckily I picked out "koko", "kuruma" and "nai" and figured out we'd arrived but the car couldn't go down that street. We got out and walked until we spotted a small green awning with the restaurant name on it in Japanese.

We walked inside and D confirmed with the kimono-clad waitress that it was indeed the Sakurada. She immediately knew who we were (guess they don't get too many foreigners) and seated us at the bar.

We were served the following courses in quick succession:

a light (savory) genmai tea, with puffed rice balls:

shrimp and two kinds of mushroom, served with ume flowers, taro stalks, and sake:

white fish garnished with a dab of ume paste and citrus rind, gingko nut tofu, and matsutake mushroom, in a light broth:

a sashimi dish of what the waitress described as "flat fish" (tasted like squid but less chewy), tai, and maguro, with purple shiso leaves, cucumber, ponzu sauce (for the white fishes), and soy sauce (for the tuna):

fried and breaded mashed lotus root in a gooey salty sauce, quite heavy:

grilled barracuda, baby lotus, "pumpkin" (tasted like sweet chestnut), edamame, what tasted like stalks of rhubarb, saba sushi, and mountain yam with vegetables (maybe chard?):

whole fried sweetfish with lots of egg inside, served with a sauce of "tade" and daikon:

crab and tofu (very gooey like cheese) served with kabocha and radish spheres and tomato gazpacho:

eggplant and duck meatball topped with ginger:

ochazuke with pickled veggies (cucumber, eggplant, radish), edible flowers, shiso, tai (with wasabi) in peanut sauce, and minced ume:

three kinds of grape, Japanese pear (with pomegranate seed), milk panna cotta topped with mango sauce, and a glass of pineapple juice:

a lily bulb jelly (very sticky, like mochi), with hot matcha green tea:

genmai tea (this time very light and not salty):

There was only one waitress who spoke English, but her English was quite impressive. There was also an older couple seated to our left who kept marveling at her ability to recall obscure food names. The older woman finally introduced herself as having spent several years as an exchange student at Stanford twenty years ago, and asked if she could take our photo for us. We said yes, of course.

At the end of the meal, we were given souvenir chopsticks and went on our way. As we exited the restaurant, we were greeted outside by the manager and an older man who appeared to be the chef. They asked us if everything was "oishikatta", and I didn't know the proper response so I just said "oishi" which means delicious. We all smiled and bowed at each other for a bit and then D and I went on our way.

The next day was spent at the wedding ceremony, the first reception (for family, coworkers, and close friends, about 80 in all), and the second reception (for friends only, also about 80, of which 10-15 overlapped with the first reception).

We took a taxi to the Matsunoo Shrine, arriving early so that we could look around a bit.

Unfortunately no photos were allowed during the traditional Japanese ceremony, but the bride wore an elaborate white kimono with what looked like a very heavy headpiece, and the groom wore a traditional black Japanese outfit. We all removed our shoes before entering the shrine area, which was really nice compared to having to wear heels!

Before the ceremony, we were ushered into a waiting area where the bride's guests and the groom's guests were separated, and given instructions on what to do during the ceremony. Luckily our part was quite simple; some bowing and clapping at the appropriate times.

As the ceremony started, we all walked (barefoot) in a line to the the altar area, and were seated to the right and left of the couple in a long line. The couple performed a variety of rituals, including tea drinking, some ceremony with tree branches, and touching a stone turtle (not sure of its significance). Afterwards we all walked back, put on our shoes, and took lots of group photos.

Once the photos were done, it was off with our shoes again, as we were directed upstairs to the reception ballroom. The bride, groom, and their parents formed a receiving line and greeted us as we entered, and then the speeches began. I would say the speeches were longer and more formal than American wedding toasts; they were given primarily by "important" people such as company presidents, and focused on praising the couple.

Next, the bride and groom took a mallet and broke open a giant barrel of sake, which was served to all the guests in souvenir wooden boxes:

Soon afterwards, the food was served. I was really, really impressed with the quality and quantity of the food; it was like having a kaiseki dinner at a wedding reception. Each dish was separately plated, and everything was fresh and served at the right temperature.

the menu (which we couldn't read, but looked impressive):

lobster salad:

sashimi course:

assorted vegetables and mushrooms:

a whole lobster!

steak:

palate cleanser:

sushi:

hamaguri (clam soup):

sakura rice:

milk-flavored panna cotta with fruit:

more fruit:

wedding cake:

Halfway through the meal, the bride and groom disappeared to change outfits, and then when they came back they visited and lighted a candle at each table. The costume change was impressive; the bride's hair and makeup were completely redone, and the groom changed into a light Western-style suit.After we all finished gorging ourselves, there were some additional speeches, from the father of the groom, and from the groom himself, thanking all the guests for coming. Then, the couple and their parents assembled into yet another receiving line, to wish all the guests goodbye as they left.We hung out in the waiting area for a little while afterwords, chatting with some other guests (luckily a few spoke English and a few others spoke Mandarin), and then we were off to the second reception, at a restaurant called With You.When we arrived, we discovered there was a sign-in desk, where guests were paying money. We quickly took out some of our remaining Japanese yen, but when we gave them our names we were told that we were "taken care of" and that we didn't need to pay. However, we were given some props and instructed to hold onto them for "later games".

The first thing that we saw was more food. Both D and I were stuffed and unable to eat anything, and it looked like the few other guests who had been at the first reception were too, but the rest of the people happily tucked into the spread. The food was served family-style and it was clearly not as fancy as at the first reception, but still looked quite good.

The activities were much more casual at this reception; first the bride and groom repeated their candle-lighting ritual, and did another cake cutting, and then there were some speeches, but this time the speakers were quite drunk and probably very funny (everyone else was laughing, at least). We also played bingo and some other games, and overall it just felt like a big party. Things wrapped up a little before midnight, and we exhaustedly hopped a taxi back to our hotel.

Dio Deka

2011-09-09T19:53:00.001-07:00

On Tuesday, D and I went to check out the newly one-starred Dio Deka with some of my work friends. I didn't bring my camera but luckily one of my friends did. He has much nicer glass than I do anyway.

Some thoughts...

The prices are quite reasonable; there are lots of entrees in the $30 range. We mostly ordered steak though, as we'd heard those were really good, and they were significantly more expensive. All of the food was good, with the exception of one side dish of mushrooms that was a little too sour and a little too dry.

We ordered the "Kounoupithi" baby cauliflower and "Gouronopoulo" suckling pig to share as appetizers. The cauliflower was cooked with feta and peppers, and had a nice tang to it:

The suckling pig was amazing; it was prepared a bunch of different ways and all of them were super tasty:

I ordered the "Paithakia" lamb chops as my main course, while the guys went for the ribeye and the bone-in filet mignon. Both the lamb and the filet were tender and juicy, but I liked the ribeye the best; it was beautifully marbled and the most flavorful. I'd never had bone-in filet before, and it was interesting in that it went from medium (at the end) to rare (at the bone). The end was just okay while the rare part was much better.

lamb chops:

30-day dry aged ribeye:

30-day dry aged bone-in filet:

For sides we had the aforementioned mushrooms and a creamed corn which appeared to be spiked with mint. I'm not a big creamed corn person (too sweet for my taste) but it was definitely creative.

We asked the waitress to recommend a red wine that would go with our menu selections. When she suggested a Greek wine, several of us were skeptical, but she promised we'd like it, and we did. She brought us a 2006 Gaia Estate Nemea Agiorgitiko, which was initially light and fruity but got deeper as it sat awhile. I liked that it wasn't too spicy.

Overall the service was excellent; at one point D's empty wine glass was literally cleared away seconds after he put it down.

We finished the meal with three desserts: the Milopita (apple tart tatin), the Mill-Fay (puff pastry with cream and candied almonds), and Loukoumathes (traditional Greek beignets). Both pastry crusts were extremely well-executed and nicely light and crunchy, making the desserts both tasty and easy to split. The beignets were good too, but mostly because they were soaked in delicious thyme honey.

apple tart tatin:

mill-fay:

beignets:

My verdict: highly recommended!

blogging activity

2011-08-11T10:22:00.000-07:00

I realized that I've stopped blogging as much, and it has a lot to do with the launch of Google+.

I've found that although a blog is still useful for writing up trips, major food outings, and maybe recipes, Google+ is flexible enough that I've started using it to share lots of other things I used to put in my blog: ad-hoc photos, random observations, overheard conversations, things that I did over the weekend, etc. I have yet to decide whether this is a good or a bad thing.

Anyway, feel free to add me on Google+, and if I know you I'll add you to my circles so you can see my content.

Caye Caulker, Belize

2011-08-05T19:01:00.000-07:00

It was late afternoon by the time we got settled at the Caye Caulker Plaza Hotel, and we found it difficult to tear ourselves away from the excellent a/c, so we didn't leave again until dinner time. After it cooled down a bit, we ventured out and ended up at Rose's Grill, where we had a variety of grilled seafood and meat. We started to get used to topping everything off with Marie Sharp's hot sauce, which they had everywhere in Belize.

Our objective for the next day was to go on a snorkelling tour. The receptionist at front desk was extremely helpful in calling around to get information and pricing for us, and in the end we ended up booking a trip to Hol Chan and "Shark and Ray Alley" with the well-recommended Carlos Tours. The cost was about 50 USD per person, which seemed pretty good for an all-day tour.

The next morning we walked over to the Carlos Tours headquarters to get geared up. After we were fitted, we headed over to the pier, where we were divided into two boats, one guided by Carlos, and the other by Romeo. Our group of eight were assigned to go with Romeo, along with one other guy who said he was from England.

The tour was advertised as having three stops, but Carlos spotted some fishermen hunting conch, so we made a "bonus" stop where we saw tons of rays:

We spent about half an hour there, and then proceeded to the Hol Chan Reserve. In the Coral Gardens, we saw sea turtles (we couldn't wait to jump out of the boat to see them up close!), eels, and schools and schools of fish:

For lunch we went to a restaurant called Celi's in San Pedro, on Ambergris Caye. They served a variety of fishes/meats with rice and beans, and also had burgers and sandwiches. I liked the food pretty well, but couldn't tell if it was due to being super hungry from snorkelling or because the food was actually good. Ambergris Caye was certainly much more built up and crowded than Caye Caulker.

We didn't have much time to digest our lunch before we headed back out, this time to Shark and Ray Alley. There were again tons of rays, and this time we saw nurse sharks too! The largest ones were over six feet long:

Our last stop wasn't at a specific location; instead the goal was to find and swim with manatees. We were very successful; Carlos managed to drop us in an area with three manatees, and we were able to get to maybe 30 or 40 feet away from them:

After all four exciting stops, we were all quite tired and ready to head home. On the way back, Romeo served us a giant plate of fresh tropical fruits. The mangoes were my favorite, but there was pineapple, watermelon, banana, and more. Between the ten of us (eight in our group plus the English guy and Romeo) we eventually managed to polish it all off before we arrived back in Caye Caulker.

We were very happy with both Carlos and Romeo, and gave them a nice tip, as well as buying the DVD (15 USD) of the photos that they had taken during the day with their underwater camera. (All of the snorkelling photos posted above were taken by them.)

It felt really good to shower and change, and soon afterwards we went out looking for dinner. Unfortunately, several of the restaurants that we were looking for were closed, so we ended up at the Rainbow Grill. I was not too fond of the food there; it was overpriced and pretty bland. It seemed quite popular with all the other tourists, though.

The next day, four of us started the long trip back to California, to attend a Memorial Day wedding. The other four stayed another two days to do some diving.

First, we caught the noon water taxi back to Belize City. I took this as we were waiting for our boat; it was our last glimpse of tranquil Caye Caulker.

We arrived in Belize City a little bit after 1pm, and then negotiated a taxi ride to the airport. Most of the taxi drivers wanted to charge us 30 USD since we had four people, but one agreed to take us for 25 USD, so we went with him. His taxi was not in great shape, and he stopped to put 0.8 gallons of gas into his nearly empty tank, but we didn't start to get really worried until the car started slowing down and finally stopped on the side of the road, a few miles from the airport.

The driver got out and fiddled around with the engine for awhile, and finally put in a new battery, which seemed to fix the problem. I remember thinking that I was going to be pretty pissed if we ended up having to walk the last couple of miles.

From there it was a pretty smooth trip back; we checked in, grabbed a quick lunch after security, and then sat around waiting for our flight to San Salvador. In San Salvador, we had a 40 minute connection, and two of our friends had to go through secondary screening, which involved removing their checked luggage from the airplane for a complete search, but we still made it onto our connecting flight to San Francisco, and then back home.

Overall I think we all had a great time. It was hard to say which part was my favorite; the snorkelling tour was amazing and rivalled our experience at the Great Barrier Reef, but the ATM cave excursion was also an unforgettable experience, and I really enjoyed our time in Guatemala learning about Mayan culture and seeing all the wildlife and ruins as well. Before the trip, we'd heard a lot about dangerous conditions in Guatemala, so we were careful with booking our tours and activities. In the end we were fortunate that everything went very smoothly, including all of our shuttle pickups, the border crossing, and even our very short international connections. I hope we'll get to do another fun group trip again soon!

San Ignacio, Belize

2011-08-02T10:00:00.000-07:00

We arrived at the Table Rock Jungle Lodge in mid-afternoon, so we were a bit disappointed to find that they didn't have a/c. (I guess none of the jungle lodges in the area do.) I guess it wouldn't have made much sense anyway, as our rooms were located in thatched cottages which were not airtight.

The couple who ran the place, Chris and Jen, showed us around; there were only about ten cottages, plus a main lounge/dining area, but the property itself was gigantic, with acres of fruit trees. They were also very serious about sustainability; we were given instructions on water and electricity usage, as the lodge generated most of its own power and used mostly purified rain water.

As it was still quite hot out, I chose to read in the hammock area, but several in our group decided to go fruit picking, and came back with a substantial haul of mangoes, oranges, and even some coconuts.

Afterwards, they went swimming to rinse off. The lodge is located on the banks of the Macal River, so it was only a short walk, and we discovered there were canoes available as well.

There were several resident dogs at the Table Rock, and they had a great time swimming with us as well.

Our first night's dinner at the Table Rock was amazing. Chris was the chef, and he served up a papaya salad, followed by delicious pork chops. Dessert had to be ordered separately, but after tasting the entrees we decided we had to try them. I liked the coconut flan very much, but I hear the cheesecake was good too.

After dinner we sat around playing board games for awhile, but we went to bed pretty early since we had to be up early the next morning.

The next day we had a tour booked with Pacz Tours to go to the famous Actun Tunichil Muknal (ATM) cave. It was quite expensive at 100 USD per person (normally 80 USD but with an extra 20 USD surcharge because of our "inconvenient" location), but nearly half the cost was the entrance fee, and they did supply us with lunch, so I guess it wasn't really so bad. It was certainly much more expensive than any of our Guatemala excursions, though.

We were picked up around 7:45am, but drove around San Ignacio for awhile getting our lunch and such. The drive from San Ignacio was over an hour as well, so by the time we got out of the van, it was nearly 10am. We hiked for about 45 minutes, fording the river three times, before we reached the entrance. There, we stopped and ate some of our lunch food as a quick snack before proceeding.

We were all wearing mostly swim gear, but we were instructed to fold our T-shirts up and put them into our helmets, so they wouldn't get wet. We were also given headlamps, and then we jumped into water about neck deep (or maybe chest deep for the taller people) in order to get inside. From there it was about an hour and a half of walking/wading/swimming through the cave, to reach the dry area with most of the Mayan artifacts. There were several areas where it was a pretty tight squeeze; at one point we even had to turn our heads sideways so that our necks would fit between the rocks on the two sides! I'm really not sure how a large person would be able to make it.

Once we got to the dry area, we were instructed to take off our shoes and put on our socks. We were then led through several areas where there were ancient Mayan artifacts just lying all over the floor. Orange lines were drawn on the floor to keep us from stepping on them, but otherwise there were no other barriers.

There were some places where we had to climb up rocks and ladders which were quite tricky and even a little scary for those who were afraid of heights, but we made it through with no mishaps.

Near the end, our guide pointed out some skulls which were the remains of human sacrifices, and finally the famous "crystal maiden", a young girl whose skeleton was almost entirely intact.

It was all a bit eerie but very cool. After taking lots of pictures, we turned around and headed back. For some reason, everything went much faster on the way back, and we exited the cave a little bit after 1pm. We were all pretty hungry so lunch disappeared quickly, and then we did the short hike back to the van.

When we got back to San Ignacio, we stopped at the main Pacz office to pay our tour fees. The guide seemed a bit surprised at the amount (he seemed to think it was low) but the guy in the main office verified our arrangement and rang us up. Next door, there was a homemade ice cream place, so we got some dessert for the bumpy ride home.

Overall I would say we all enjoyed the cave tour very much, but I'm not sure if that was because of our guide or in spite of him. He seemed to like the sound of his own voice a lot, and was very repetitive, but in the end I guess he got us where we wanted to go.

That afternoon we did a bit more exploration on the Table Rock property, and discovered a neighboring lychee farm! The lychees were delicious; just as good as in Taiwan.

For dinner, Chris served us another fabulous meal. The starter was a chilled melon and cilantro soup, and then we had roast chicken as the entree. The chicken was good but not as amazing as the previous day's pork chops. For dessert we had peanut butter pie (yum!). After dinner, Chris and Jen let us play games in the dining room until we were tired.

The next day, we had a nice leisurely breakfast; Chris made pancakes and french toast, and there were lots of fresh fruits as well.

We weren't scheduled to be picked up until 1pm, so we spent the rest of the morning canoeing and mountain biking (yes, the lodge even had bikes), before returning to our rooms to shower, change, and pack. Once we were ready to go, we returned to the dining area for lunch, where we had giant chicken and cheese quesadillas. They were much too large to finish (I think I ate 1/3 of mine) so we took quite a bit to go.

Our driver, William Hofman, arrived promptly at 1pm. He was quite a character; during the entire drive from San Ignacio to Belize City, he regaled us with stories about his own life, Belizean life, and more. I was napping on and off, but here are a few choice tidbits that I do remember:
- The police in Belize are armed, but their guns are old and crappy, and the Mafia has much better guns.
- The women in Belize are mostly out to find men that will give them money. As a result, they'll sleep with anyone and everyone.
- There are TV stations in Belize where movies are shown a day after US release. It's unclear how legal they are, but the police don't care.
He also had an unhealthy obsession with the Fast and the Furious series, so we got to hear a lot about how many times he'd already watched Fast Five.

We'd planned to take the 4pm water taxi, but we arrived early, just as the 3pm was about to leave, so with some mad scrambling we were able to get on the earlier boat. The ride itself was pretty uncomfortable; hot and crowded, but only 10 USD per person for an hour-long ride. After we disembarked, it was only a few blocks walk to our hotel, the Caye Caulker Plaza Hotel. Despite the name, it was relatively simple, but had awesome a/c, which was pretty much all I cared about at that point.

Tikal, Guatemala

2011-07-31T10:49:00.000-07:00

The next morning we woke up in time to explore the property a bit. Casa de Don David is located next to a lake near El Remate, 15 minutes outside of Tikal itself. There are some cute fruit trees and all the rooms are well air-conditioned, which turned out to be really important, as it was much much hotter in El Peten than in Antigua.

After a hot breakfast, we were picked up by our driver and our guide for the day, Samuel. We made a quick stop to buy our entrance tickets (about 20 USD per person) and then we were on our way.

We started out over by Complex Q (and the matching Complex R). Pretty much every place we stopped, Samuel asked us if we wanted to climb up to take a look, and we said yes. At the top of the Complex Q pyramid, we had our first glimpse of some howler monkeys, but they were too far away to get any good photos.

We wondered why Complex R and Complex Q were so similar, and Samuel told us that each set of twin pyramids was built at 20 year intervals to mark the end of a "k'atun", a unit of time in the Mayan calendar. These particular pyramids were built in the late 6th century.

At first we were really psyched to see these coati running around, but we soon realized they were really common.

From there we hiked up towards Temple IV, the highest point in Tikal. This is the view from the top of Temple IV, with Temples I, II, III, and V visible in the distance:

There were some people working on replicating of the original carved lintels that had been inside of the temples, and Samuel persuaded them to let me (and my camera) take a peek:

It was a hot day and we were a bit tired from all the climbing already so we stopped at some picnic benches after descending from Temple IV for a snack and some cold drinks (amazingly there was a guy there selling drinks, and even more amazingly, they were not a total ripoff).

Afterwards we looped by Complex N and saw some of the giant underground caves that the Mayans had used to store food and water, and then went to climb "El Mundo Perdido", aka the Lost World. Samuel explained to us that it was the oldest part of Tikal, and had been built in the 4th century.

Nearby he showed us a series of seven temples which were built for astronomical observation purposes; when viewed from a nearby platform, the first would line up with the sun at the winter solstice, the middle one at the spring and fall equinoxes, and the last at the summer solstice.

Next we attempted our highest climb yet; Temple V.

The climb was not so bad despite the wooden stairs being a little rickety, but it was a little scary to look down from the top.

After catching our breaths again at the bottom, we headed for the famous Great Plaza. On the way we spotted some spider monkeys at close range:

The Great Plaza and its temples (I & II) are probably the best known structures at Tikal. Samuel told us we could climb up Temple II, so we went up and were able get some nice shots of Temple I.

That was pretty much the end of the guided part of our tour; from there he set us loose in the North Acropolis and we wandered around exploring by ourselves for an hour or so. It was amazing that there weren't more tourists; I think the whole day we ran across maybe ten small groups of other people. We guessed that the rest had been scared away by the reports of gang violence on the Mexican border, and enjoyed the peace and quiet immensely.

On the way out we spotted some toucans; one living inside a tree trunk, and this one just hanging out on a branch:

We got back to our lodge in mid-afternoon, and were eager to shower, change, and just lounge around in our hammocks for the rest of the day while we waited for the heat to subside. For dinner we had beef shortribs and some delicious fresh juices (mango and watermelon), and of course eventually we ended up playing some Settlers.

We'd had a good time with Samuel the previous day, so we asked him to take us to another site the next day called Yaxha. It's most famous for being the site of Survivor Guatemala, but also has several impressive ruins and borders a lake.

This is one of the temple pyramids at Yaxha:

I think we were all a bit tired from the previous day's excursion, and certainly Yaxha is not as impressive as Tikal, so we mostly just wandered around, occasionally climbing some ruins and spotting monkeys and other wildlife.

There was a large ballcourt near the entrance, which prompted Samuel to explain the Mayan ball game to us. The players were not allowed to touch the ball with their hands or feet, but were expected to put the ball through stone rings to score points. The games were sometimes played as part of rituals and could even involve human sacrifice (we were unclear if it was the winners or the losers who would be sacrificed).

After leaving Yaxha, we proceeded on to the Belizean border. We had arranged for Samuel and our driver to take us all the way to our lodge near San Ignacio, so they coached us through the border crossing. First, we had to pay an entrance tax to Belize. Then, we got our passports and unloaded all our luggage from the van. We crossed the border on foot with our luggage, so they could inspect it if they liked (they didn't bother), and then we reloaded the van on the other side. Samuel cautioned us not to speak to him in English while we were crossing; I wasn't clear on the rationale but it seemed there was some hostility between the English-speaking Belizeans and the Spanish-speaking Guatemalans.

The border crossing took a good half hour, and it was really hot, but otherwise everything went smoothly. There were tons of guys trying to help us exchange money on both side of the border, but they were pretty good at going away once we refused.

It was less than twenty minutes from the border to the town of San Ignacio. We stopped there briefly to get some Belizean dollars from an ATM (roughly 2:1 vs the USD). We had booked two nights at the Table Rock Jungle Lodge, and distance-wise it was only about three miles from San Ignacio, but unfortunately it was down a really nasty dirt road. I think it took us another 20-30 minutes of very bumpy driving to get there, so we were quite exhausted when we finally arrived.

Antigua, Guatemala

2011-07-28T22:23:00.000-07:00

In late May, D and I went on a trip with a bunch of college friends to Central America. I've been delinquent about posting trip notes, so I've probably forgotten some stuff, but I'm going to try to remember as much as I can.

The eight of us set out from SFO on Thursday night. We transferred through San Salvador early the next morning (the airport was nicer than I expected) and then arrived in Guatemala City around 9:30am. It took a few minutes for us to get oriented, find an ATM, and find a shuttle driver, but eventually we were on our way to Antigua via shuttle bus. The fixed price was quite reasonable; 10 USD per person for an hour-long drive.

The Guatemalan quetzal seems to be pegged to the US dollar in the high 7s, but a lot of locals would use 8 to do calculations, so it turned out not to be a bad thing to have brought some US cash.

We arrived in Antigua before noon and checked into our hotel, the Posada de Don Rodrigo. It was located centrally and was quite nice, with a couple of courtyards, traditional decor, helpful staff, and even some free internet terminals (and very weak free wi-fi).

After we got settled in we headed out for lunch. We decided on Fondo del Calle Real, which was recommended by several tourbooks as having good traditional Guatemalan food. I ordered a combo plate which came with a pupusa, chili relleno, fresh cheese, beans, plaintains, rice, and salad. It was pretty good; I especially liked the plaintains and the pupusa. Others ordered various meat stews which they did not like as much. So much for tour books.

For dessert we picked up some chocolate bread from Dona Luisa Xicotencatl bakery, and then hung out munching on it in the Parque Central; a cute square bordered by a cathedral and lots of shops, with some benches and fountains.

Later we visited the Cathedral de Santiago, a ruined church from the 1770s. It was rather peaceful walking around inside the high walls with no ceilings.

For dinner, we ate at our hotel, which was pretty pricey by Guatemalan standards, but the food was better than at lunch.

The next day we were up bright and early for our Lake Atitlan tour. We were picked up by our driver and driven several hours to one of the villages bordering the lake, where we met our tour guide, Lee Beal.

Lee and his wife Elaine fed us some delicious tropical fruits (the mangoes were especially tasty) and then hooked us up with some kayaks so we could explore the lake.

We kayaked for about an hour, and then got cleaned up and proceeded onward by boat. We stopped in the village of Santiago first for some lunch (delicious fried chicken plates for about 5 USD) and then to hunt down the current home of Maximon, a local Mayan god. Maximon is a very interesting kind of god; his worshippers offer him cigarettes, alcohol, and money, in addition to prayers, and his effigy appears to smoke continuously. I didn't take a photo because it would have cost us 10 quetzels, but I did find this photo online:

We got back on the boat in order to get to a smaller, more peaceful village named San Juan. There we visited a women's weaving cooperative where we were given a weaving demonstration.

The quality of the material and the work were quite good, so many of us bought souvenirs to take home. I myself bought a large shawl which was dyed in bright blues, greens, and purples.

From there it was another short boat ride and then a 30-45 hike back to Lee's place, where we were picked up by our van driver and taken back to Antigua.

For dinner we decided against trying to find more Guatemalan food; instead we ate at a panini place called Tartine's. We had a much better experience there than at either of the restaurants we'd eaten at the previous day; there was a nice roof deck and the food was tasty. Some of the neighboring tables seemed to be annoyed that we were talking and laughing, and kept looking at us oddly (they were all couples), but the staff were perfectly nice so we didn't let that ruin our evening.

For dessert, we returned to Fondo del Calle Real to try "traditional Guatemalan desserts". We ordered four of five of them, and they were all terrible. Sigh.

On our last day in Antigua, we had a late afternoon flight to Flores, so we decided to fit in a Pacaya volcano hike in the morning. Unfortunately the volcano had just erupted the previous year and no actual lava flow had been visible since then, but it was a good workout and we certainly saw a lot of ash and could feel the pockets of hot air near the top of the volcano.

On the way down we ran into this cow, which was very much not amused by us. Our guide Jose finally chased it away with a stick so we could proceed.

As we were walking down, I noticed that an older Asian man was wearing a baseball cap with a Taiwan flag on it, so I asked him in Chinese if he was from Taiwan. He said he was but had been living in Guatemala for over 20 years. We had a nice chat (later he discovered D and I spoke Taiwanese and he was even more excited) and at the bottom he ran to his car to get us some pineapple cakes. I was quite amused.

We got back to Antigua in plenty of time to shower, pack, and check out, and even had time to grab a proper lunch before heading to the airport. Again we went with the non-local food; we had some sandwiches and pasta at Dona Luisa Xicotencatl, the place we'd been buying bread from, as it was just down the street from our hotel.

After checking in for our short flight, we sat around playing games for awhile, and then headed to our gate. There we were informed that our flight would be delayed 1.5 hours, but we were immediately given vouchers for free meals, which turned out to include our choice of sandwich, drink, and dessert. I was quite impressed with TACA's handling of the situation, actually.

Nevertheless, when we finally arrived in Flores, we were quite exhausted, so we were happy to see the shuttle driver from Casa de Don David (our lodge in El Remate) was still there waiting for us. Upon arrival David immediately showed us to our rooms and told us we could figure out registration at breakfast. Nice.

It makes me feel old when...

2011-06-13T12:13:00.000-07:00

...I refer to "Army Street" and no one knows what I'm talking about. Boo.

honey walnut shrimp

2011-06-12T10:14:00.000-07:00

D loves honey walnut shrimp, so I've tried a few recipes previously (mostly unsuccessfully), but I think I finally hit on a good one last night.

Honey Walnut Shrimp

1. Boil walnuts in water, changing water frequently, until water runs clear. Add 1 cup sugar and boil again.

2. Remove walnuts from water and fry in hot oil until golden brown, then add honey and cool on cookie sheet.

3. Whip 4 egg whites until white and foamy, add 2/3 cup mochiko and water. Dip deveined shrimp in batter and fry.

4. Toss fried shrimp with mayonnaise, condensed milk, and honey, then top with walnuts.

how my brain works

2011-06-06T11:10:00.000-07:00

I think I may be a terrible person.

friend #1:	Didn't you see my super cute photo of <his kid who I've only met once doing nothing particularly interesting> on Facebook?
me:	No, I found Facebook kind of tedious, so I stopped using it.

friend #2:	Didn't you read about me meeting Tyson Beckford on Facebook? He has a little bit of a Jamaican accent! And he called me baby!
me:	Hmm. (briefly considers reactivating Facebook account)

In my defense, Tyson Beckford continues to be super hot.

chloroquine monday

2011-05-31T09:49:00.000-07:00

I got back on Saturday night (Sunday morning, really) from a week-long trip to Guatemala and Belize with friends. The eight of us spent two nights in Antigua, two in El Remate (near Tikal), two in San Ignacio, and two in Caye Caulker. After that, four of us left so we could attend a wedding on Sunday, and the remaining four stayed for two days of diving. Details to follow, before I forget everything...

Anyway, we were advised to take precautions against malaria, so we all started on a chloroquine regimen about a week before the trip. The pills are supposed to be taken weekly, on the same day each week, for a week before and four weeks after exposure. I took the first dose on a Monday, and I didn't feel any severe side effects (a little headache maybe), but one of my friends experienced some dizziness. "Chloroquine Monday", as we've been calling it, hit again on the day we spent hiking all over Tikal. Most of us were okay but the same friend had really bad nausea and fatigue all day. I just took the third dose last night, and again it wasn't too bad, but nevertheless I will be quite glad when we're all done.

positive identification

2011-05-16T11:15:00.000-07:00

I ran the Bay to Breakers again this year with some friends. I was definitely not in good running condition, having had knee problems and a lingering cough over the past few weeks, but managed to finish anyway.

Afterwards we walked back to a friend's house, where we'd stashed a change of clothes and some groceries. We took turns showering and cooking, and eventually we ended up watching the party (she lives on Fell Street, which is pretty much party central) while munching on French toast and breakfast sandwiches.

I told everyone to keep an eye out for my coworkers, who were dressed as lemmings in green wigs and blue snuggies. We finally spotted them shortly after noon, at which point we had an exchange that went something like this:

friend:	Wow, the guys in the back are holding someone up. She looks really drunk! Do you know her? It's a dark-haired girl.
me:	(glancing out the window) Hmm. No, I don't think so, I only know like 4 out of the 13 lemmings, and they're all white guys.

Then, this morning at work:

me:	Hey, I saw you guys on the course yesterday. Who was the drunk girl?
coworker #1:	Umm. No comment.

A couple hours later:

me:	How was your weekend?
coworker #2:	Oh, good. Met up with J and some of the lemmings after the race.
me:	Hmm. (J is an Asian female, a coworker from another office.) Hey <coworker #1>, was J the drunk girl?
coworker #1:	I said no comment!

Hehe.

bike to work day

2011-05-13T11:00:00.000-07:00

Goal #2 achieved! Yesterday in honor of Bike to Work Day, I finally biked to work.

My bike is 18-years-old and crappy; my parents bought it for me when I was in high school. I was a little concerned about the bike surviving all the way to work since it's nearly 20 miles door-to-door.

The first three miles from my house down to 101 are a steep descent; I literally did not have to pedal for over a mile and a half. I stopped by Oracle briefly to meet up with a friend, and from there we took the second half of the bayway route.

The route was pretty complicated but luckily I had written up a little card with directions and pasted it on my bike. Also, there were often little colored arrows pasted on the ground at the more confusing intersections, and then as we approached Mountain View there were lots of other bikers to follow.

In the end it took about 1 hour and 40 minutes, which works out to roughly 12 mph. Not great, but then again it was my longest bike ride in over fifteen years.

Anyway, that's ten items done or in progress, which gives me 2.5 years to knock off another twenty. Still on track!

whew

2011-05-04T11:29:00.000-07:00

me:	Hey, what's with the teeny tiny font on <product>?
other engineer:	What are you talking about, it's not teeny tiny!
me:	Are you kidding? It's making my eyes hurt.
him:	Hmm...screenshot?
him:	(upon receiving screenshot) Eww, okay, that is eye-hurting. Maybe the fonts on your box are messed up.
me:	Heh, I told you! I know I'm old but I'm not that old.

We later figured out that it was his fonts that were messed up and everyone else was seeing the teeny tiny ugly fonts, so we filed a bug.

six years later

2011-04-20T13:56:00.000-07:00

Six years ago, D was given a $200 on-call bonus that could only be used to go out to a nice dinner, so we booked a reservation and went to Michael Mina. We had a really great experience; at the time they had a three-course prix fixe where each course was itself a trio. For instance, my "citrus" dessert featured orange, lemon, and lime.

We finally returned to Michael Mina last month for the first time. I've never been to Aqua, so I'd never seen the "new" location even in its previous incarnation. Initially I thought it was nicer, because it wasn't located off of a hotel lobby like the old spot (now Bourbon Steak), but after awhile I decided I liked it less; it's noisier and feels more casual.

We went with some friends, and the four of us decided to order a la carte.

First we were served this grilled cheese sandwich with artichoke soup. I guess it was a large amuse. The soup was quite tasty but the sandwich was unremarkable.

D ordered this pork belly and geoduck clam "salad", which was served with butternut squash puree and vadouvan curry. I liked it very much; more than my own appetizer.

Mine was this "Australian wagyu" shabu shabu, served with foie gras torchon, radish salad, and a hot dashi broth, in which we cooked our own meat. It was pretty good (hard to complain about wagyu and foie), but I thought D's was more unique.

We also ordered this kabocha squash souffle with black truffle cream, for the table. It had been awhile since I'd had a savory souffle, and this one was well-flavored as well as being properly light and airy.

D ordered a duo of crispy fish with pea shoots, hearts of palm, and Thai lobster sauce.

My entree was a braised kurobuta pork with spring garlic, green polenta, bourbon, and apple. I usually don't like polenta much but enjoyed this green version very much; it wasn't just the color that was different. The sauce was a bit sweet for me, but the pork was nicely tender.

This "pre-dessert" was comprised of vanilla ice cream and cooked pineapple on some kind of cake. It was too strongly flavored to count as a real palate cleanser, and was probably too large as well.

For dessert, of course we ordered the full tasting.

The first course was a little bit savory; it was a passionfruit panna cotta with grapefruit, avocado, and passionfruit chicharrones. I liked it very much, after removing the avocado.

The next dish was deceptively simple; there were two wafers infused with jasmine & brown sugar. This was actually my favorite; I reallly liked the jasmine flavor and the flakiness of the wafers.

These crisps were flavored with white chocolate and grapefruit. D liked these very much but I thought they were a little bland.

The next dish looked really cool, but wasn't that interesting in flavor. The ingredients were listed as campfire marshmallows, devil's food, cocoa nib, and smoked sugar.

I also liked these tiny milk chocolate and honey lozenges very much, but I love fresh honey.

The final dish was a briquette of coffee and cardamom. The coffee flavor was very strong, which meant I liked it and D did not.

Overall I would say we were a bit disappointed. The first time we'd gone, we walked out thinking it was one of the best meals that we'd ever had. This time, we thought the food was good, but not amazing. We really missed the trio approach; when each ingredient was prepared three different ways, it felt almost like we were judges at an Iron Chef competition. I'm guessing that we're also less easily impressed now, having been lots of nice restaurants in the past six years. Anyway, it was a fun night out with friends, and I do think that the dessert tasting was very good.

Iguazu Falls, Argentina (2008)

2011-04-19T20:22:00.000-07:00

After our second short stint in Buenos Aires, we flew to Iguazu, to see the famous waterfalls.

On the morning of our flight, I woke up with a sore throat and a stuffy nose, and was afraid I was getting sick, but it went away soon after we arrived in Iguazu, so I later concluded it was due to smoke inhalation.

For once we had a lazy morning; we did do a little more shopping at the Galerias Pacifico but otherwise just hung out at the hotel until it was time to go to the airport.

We arrived in Iguazu in mid-afternoon. There was a small hiccup when one person went looking for a bathroom and ended up outside the baggage claim area, but she had all the baggage claim tags. In the end we apparently looked sufficiently clueless that the guy was convinced we weren't luggage thieves and let us through.

It was a short ride by car ($12.50) to our lodge, the Riotropic. The lodge grounds were quite pretty, and our room was large, but wooden walls meant poor sound insulation and encounters with some creepy crawly things on several occasions.

When the first person went to take a shower, the rest of us heard a blood-curdling scream a few minutes later as she'd discovered a gecko on the wall of the shower. She soon reported that the shower pressure was absurdly bad, and the shower "stall" was basically the entire bathroom.

For dinner, we headed into the town of Puerto Iguazu. We ended up at a place called El Quincho del Tio Querido, where we had a fabulous dinner. The entrees were about $7-8 each, the decor was nice, with colorful tablecloths and lights strung up along the ceilings, and there was even live music. I ordered the "Lomo Michael" special which turned out to be beef loin wrapped in pancetta with a delicious gravy, served with cooked apples, prunes, onions, carrots, and bits of jelly (almost like cherries). The overall flavor was a little sweet, almost Asian, and they'd cooked the meat properly medium rare, for once. Yum!

I also had a "licuado"; a shake of sorts with papaya, peach, banana, and pineapple. In the end we were all really happy with our meal. Afterwards, we stopped by a souvenir shop and discovered the T-shirts were really cheap there, so we bought a bunch.

The travel day had been somewhat rainy, but luckily for us, the next morning dawned bright and clear. After our hotel breakfast (quite tasty, and served on a patio), three of us caught a taxi to Iguazu Park. The entrance fee was about $10, which we later agreed was very reasonable. We spent some time trying to book a moonlight tour for that evening, and decided on the $23 option with dinner at La Selva, instead of the $13 option without dinner.

By the time we actually entered the park it was after 9:30am. We walked the Green Trail to the station, and then continued on the Lower Circuit (aka "Circuito Inferior") to San Martin Island.

Along the way, we saw some great views, some with rainbows, and lots of small animals (lizards, birds, butterflies, and other insects).

I think this must be some kind of giant rodent; they were all over the place.

These coatis were too fast for me; I only caught their tails.

We met up with the fourth person for lunch; she'd stayed back at the lodge that morning. Lunch was not exciting (pizza) and not cheap. Afterwards we took the train to Devil's Throat (aka "La Garganta del Diablo"), through which flows half of the overall volume of the river. It was an amazing feeling just to stand there at the top getting sprayed by the mist and looking all around. My camera kept getting wet, but it was well worth it.

We rode the train back down and then took a "Grand Adventure" tour. As we were waiting for the tour to start, there was a small commotion among our fellow tourgoers, and we looked up to see several toucans.

The first part of the tour involved riding in a 4x4 through the jungle. After that there was a boat trip, during which we got drenched by several of the falls, including the San Martin (the second largest fall). I thought the jungle part was kind of hokey and we'd spent plenty of time walking around the jungle earlier in the day already, but the boat part was really fun.

We spent our last hour on the Upper Circuit, until we were subtly herded out by a park ranger. The moonlight tour got cancelled due to weather and/or lack of a moon, so we got refunded and went back to town for dinner. This time we ate at El Charo, which was about the same price as El Quincho, but the food was noticeably worse in comparison. The four of us ordered various types of lomo, with pimienta, ajillo, champignon, etc., and it was all okay but not awesome like the previous day. We did discover caipirinha by accident; someone ordered it because she saw "azucar" and thought it would be a soft drink, but when it turned out to be alcoholic, she had the rest of us help her finish it. I decided very quickly that I was a fan.

Back at the lodge, we had an incident with someone discovering ants in her hair, and I managed to break the flusher on the toilet, but eventually we all got to sleep.

On the day of our return journey, we slept in and got up around 9am. Our air conditioner had gone wonky overnight so we were pretty cold in the morning, but luckily no one got sick from that. At breakfast we ran into a couple from Los Angeles who spoke excellent Spanish. Their month-long itinerary included Mendoza, Bariloche, El Calafate, and Ushuia. I was madly jealous.

We caught a taxi to the airport at noon and arrived at 12:20pm. The check-in agent automatically moved us up from our 2:10pm flight to a "12:25pm" flight which he said was leaving 20 minutes late anyway. It ended up leaving at 1:10pm, so we got to Buenos Aires a bit before 3pm. We claimed our luggage and found a car to take us to Ezeiza (the international airport) for $25. The air was even nastier than before, and it was at this point we finally found a newspaper and figured out what was happening. It took us about 15-20 minutes to get the car, and the ride took another 40 minutes, with me covering my nose with my sleeves practically the entire time.

Once we got to Ezeiza, the rest of our trip home went smoothly.

I'm quite amused reading through these notes now, because I wrote that I bought a Peruvian alpaca scarf at the airport, because "who knows when I'll be in Peru?". I guess there's no way I could have known that I'd be hiking the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu only a year later.

Peninsula Valdes, Argentina (2008)

2011-04-19T19:39:00.000-07:00

On our second day in Argentina, we took an early morning flight from Buenos Aires' Jorge Newberry airport to Trelew, a small Welsh-influenced city in Patagonia. One of my friends developed really terrible stomach pain sometime in the middle of the night (which persisted for the rest of the trip), but we packed up her stuff and she managed to stick it out through the ride to the airport, the two hour flight, and a subsequent bus ride to our hotel, where she spent the rest of the day.

The rest of us were picked up at the airport by Cuyon, our tour company. Our tour guide's name was May and she spoke excellent English. There was one other passenger, a Spanish-speaking girl named Silvina. We headed to directly to Punta Tombo, about an hour away. Punta Tombo is the home of the largest Magellanic penguin colony in South America. It cost us about $7.50 per person in entrance fees, but soon we were surrounded by hundreds, if not thousands, of small penguins. There was other wildlife as well; mostly guanacos (similar to llamas), rhea (large flightless birds that looked kind of like small ostriches), and even an armadillo.

The penguins were clearly the stars of the show; they came super close to us and were often right next to our feet. We were strictly instructed not to approach them, but May said it was fine if they approached us. We spent several hours there enjoying the friendly penguins.

Afterwards, we took a bus to a small town called Gaiman where we had Welsh tea (for $8.50 per person) at a place called Ty Gwyn. The portions were very generous and the tea was unlimited. This photo only shows one plate of three; we were served jam and butter, scones, cheesecake, chocolate cake, pastries with dulce de leches, pastries with coconut and jam, apple tarts, fruitcake, and more.

We couldn't come close to finishing the whole spread, but packed the rest for later. We did walk around Gaimen for a few minutes after tea, to look at the unique houses; they'd used white stone from nearby bluffs to build them. The local industry was still primarily agriculture, and the surrounding farmland was lush and green in contrast to much of Patagonia, due to the town's proximity to the Chubut river. There were sheep with lambs nearby, and tall poplar trees planted as wind screens. On the way back to Trelew, we even passed by a canal with some wild flamingos.

From there the tour guide took us to Puerto Madryn, where we checked into our hotel, the Hosteria Solar de la Costa, where our friend was waiting for us. The total cost for the day's tour was $110 USD per person.

For dinner, three of us walked into the town of Puerto Madryn and found a nice-looking restaurant called Placido. We spent a total of $40 on sauteed calamari with veggies, cod, salmon, Patagonian lamb, and a couple of glasses of wine. Not bad.

The next morning, all four of us had our free breakfast at the hotel and were ready to go at 7:15am, which was our pickup time. By 7:45am we were getting worried, and then at 7:50am the agency (not the same tour company as the previous day) called to say they were having van trouble, and would be over in "a few minutes". At 8:15am we had the hotel call to figure out what was happening. Again, they said they'd be over shortly. At 8:30am we called Cuyun, the previous day's tour company, and asked them to come get us. At 8:35am the first tour company's van arrived, but we were pretty mad as they were an hour and 20 minutes late, so (with the help of the very nice hotel staff) we pretended we'd already left. At 8:38am the Cuyun van arrived, and we went on our way.

We went first to the Center for Interpretation of the Peninsula Valdes. The most impressive thing there was a right whale skeleton, plus a pretty vista of the isthmus outside.

From there it was a few minutes to Punta Norte, where we saw two or three large groups of sea lions. I thought it was especially cute when a mother sea lion returned from the ocean, and her calf went waddling down the beach to meet her.

At the next stop, Punta Cantor, there were a few penguins, but nowhere near as many as the previous day at Punta Tombo.

There were some elephant seals as well, but they were pretty boring and immobile. We did walk to a spot where we had a nice view of the mouth of the Caleta Valdes.

We'd hoped to spot some orcas, perhaps even as they were hunting the seals, but we were told they could only be seen at high tide; 7am or 7pm, so we were out of luck. We had lunch at Puerto Pyramides; the food was not very interesting but afterwards we walked around outside the restaurant and there were some random things lying around; old railroad equipment and the like, so I took some photos of those.

We got back to our hotel shortly after 5pm. Two of us decided to venture out for dinner; the other two stayed at the hotel. We walked along the shore a bit, bought some postcards and tasty Yenelen chocolate, and then had a light dinner at Cantina El Nautico. Unfortunately we'd left our best Spanish speaker at home, so there was an amusing exchange when I asked if the restaurant was "abierto" (one of my few Spanish words) and the guy at the door told me "ocho", so we had to go away and come back fifteen minutes later. Initially I was afraid reading the menu would be a huge ordeal, but luckily I tend to pick up food words best in any language, so we ended up with some pretty tasty "arroz con camarones" (rice with shrimp) and a salad.

We had another mad scramble the next morning; we'd been told the airport shuttle would come "as early as 7:30am" so we'd planned to wake up shortly before 7am. I forgot to set my alarm, so I didn't get up until someone else poked me at 7:05am. At 7:10am we got a call which was all in Spanish. I thought he said 7:15am and I thought I was saying 7:45am but basically no communication was happening. Anyway, finally I said, "Si, transfer" and hung up. At 7:15am the receptionist knocked on our door and said that the shuttle had arrived, setting off a frenzy of packing. We got everyone packed and out the door at 7:30am, but the shuttle driver was visibly annoyed.

After that our transit back to Buenos Aires went pretty smoothly; we mailed some postcards and did some souvenir shopping, but the only thing that looked vaguely interesting turned out to be a fruitcake, so that was the end of airport shopping for me.

Buenos Aires, Argentina (2008)

2011-04-19T16:26:00.000-07:00

I get a lot more vacation days than D does every year, so typically I'll plan one trip a year without him. In 2008, I went on a week-long trip to Argentina with three of my girl friends. We went to Buenos Aires, Iguazu Falls, and the Peninsula Valdes, to see the Magellanic penguins.

Our flight from San Francisco to Miami was uneventful, but we refused to buy sandwiches at $10 apiece, so we were pretty hungry when we landed. Miami International has really terrible food, and several places were closing already, so we ended up at Manchu Wok eating pseudo-Chinese food.

We got to our gate at around 10:15pm for our 11:20pm flight and discovered it'd already been delayed until 12:45am. To make a long story short, the scheduled departure time went from 12:45pm to 1:00am to 1:45am to 2:30am. We finally took off almost 3.5 hours late, around 2:40am, and were served a dinner of chicken and rice. I slept for over 6 hours and then awoke to find a breakfast of croissants and yogurt.

We arrived in Buenos Aires around noon and bought a $22 ride to town. It took a little over 30 minutes to arrive at our hostel, the V&S Hostel Club, where we checked into a 4-person room ($60 with private bath).

For the rest of the afternoon, we walked around checking out the major tourist areas. First we walked through the Plaza Mayor and Casa Rosada area, then down Florida Street.

It wasn't too crowded because it was a Sunday, but there were still lots of street performers and vendors selling snacks.

Afterwards we walked to San Telmo, where we walked through the weekend antiques market in the Plaza Dorrego, and the shops on Boliver and its adjoining streets.

We stopped at a cafe to get a "snack", and ended up with a giant pile of empanadas and an equally giant slice of flan with dulce de leche.

After that we wandered around near the water for awhile before heading to Siga La Vaca for dinner.

The appetizers there were decent; lots of sliced meats, cheese, olives, spanish omelet, and some interesting salads, but the meat was too well done all around. (We tried beef, chicken, and pork.) I'm guessing we could have asked for rarer cuts if we'd spoken better (or any) Spanish. The sauces were yummy so I ended up slathering my meat in mystery red and green sauces. Dessert was pretty good; I ordered something totally indecipherable on the menu, which ended up being ice cream with raspberry sauce and candied chopped almonds. Despite the overcooked meat, it was a rather large meal, so we walked all the way home in order to try and digest it.

We spent the next two days in the Peninsula Valdes area of Patagonia, but returned to Buenos Aires around noon on the third day. Upon arriving at Jorge Newberry (the domestic airport) we tried to get a "remise" (like a taxi but with preset prices). The cheapest quote was for $7.50 but with a 40 minute wait. Next cheapest was Manuel Tienda at $8, but with a 25 minute wait. We went with a quote for $10 with "no wait" which ended up being 5-10 minutes anyway. Oh well.

The driver Felipe was very gregarious and even managed to have a pretty prolonged conversation with the one member of our group that spoke some Spanish. I only understood the part where he asked what we thought of Argentinean men and whether we had boyfriends.

After we checked back into our hostel, we went sightseeing again. Unfortunately one of my friends was having some serious stomach pain so she stayed home, but the rest of us walked down 9 de Julio towards the obelisk, then to Avenida de Mayo. We stopped at the tourist information booth to inquire about getting to MALBA (a museum in Palermo) and discovered it was a bus ride away, so instead we asked about tango shows, and were directed to Cafe Tortoni. There, we bought four tickets at about $15 per person for that evening's show.

We'd heard a lot about the famous Argentinean "mate" drink before arriving, so when we saw a place called "Mate Bar", we decided we had to stop and try it. The waiter was super nice and brought us an order of mate with cookies even before we ordered.

We added a quartet of "pinchos" which turned out to be beef, chicken with veggies (kind of like fajitas), battered fried thin slices of meat, and chunks of breaded fried mozzerella with marinera sauce. The friendly waiter even instructed us on how to drink the mate; pour hot water, stir with sugar, drink, add more hot water, etc. We paid about $10 for all of our food and drink, and went on our way.

Next up was a visit to the Recoleta district. We walked up Alvear Street admiring the fancy houses, hotels, and shops, and then checked out the park at the end, the Santa Pilar church, and the famous Recoleta Cemetary which houses Evita's tomb. The cemetary was smaller than I'd expected but the tombs were grander. Some were quite modern and the coffins were mostly above ground and visible through glass doors!

We had a mid-afternoon snack at Freddo (ice cream and milkshakes), and then walked up Quintana to the Plaza San Martin, where we saw the English Tower (a gift from the local English community), the Palacio San Martin, the monument, and the square itself, where there were lots of couples (old and young) making out. Hmm.

For some reason, the air was terribly smoggy; much more than on the previous Sunday, when we'd been wandering around San Telmo and the Plaza Mayor. A few days later, we finally figured out why; some farmers had set fires trying to clear land for crops, but the fires (over 300 of them) had gotten out of control and consumed thousands of acres, creating a thick blanket of smoke over the surrounding area, including Buenos Aires and parts of Uruguay. We were extremely lucky that our domestic flights weren't affected; we flew out of Jorge Newberry on April 17th and back on April 19th. On the day between, all incoming domestic flights were all diverted elsewhere. Whew!

On the way home we bought some candies and cookies at a "25 hour" store, to take home as souvenirs. We also stopped by the Galerias Pacifico to admire the nice painted ceilings, and then headed back to the hostel to pick up our sick friend.

Around 7:30pm we arrived at the Tortoni Cafe. The show was surprisingly good! I especially liked one segment which included two guys doing percussion with ropes and drums, and the live music was also better than I'd expected.

That night we spent some time using the free internet at the hostel to chat with some ER doctor friends, to try to remotely diagnose our sick friend. There was an episode that involved me and and of the other girls running out to a pharmacy which was just about to close, and trying to communicate with the cashiers using charades and poor Spanish. Luckily, the security guard (of all people!) spoke a few words of English, so we got what we wanted. Actually they were all really nice to us; I'm guessing it was obvious that we were in dire need of assistance. In the end we felt slightly better it being nothing life-threatening, but still didn't know exactly what was wrong.

Japanese efficiency

2011-04-19T11:39:00.000-07:00

D's dad was scheduled to arrive on a flight from Tokyo at 1:50pm. We figured that with immigration, baggage claim, and customs, it would be after 2:30pm by the time he got out, and planned accordingly.

At 1:05pm we got a call saying he'd arrived (45 minutes early). I just checked the flight status and the flight left Narita 13 minutes early, and made up another 32 minutes in-flight. Is this what happens on flights out of Japan?

catching up on travel blogging

2011-04-18T13:58:00.000-07:00

As you may have noticed, I've finally started to make major progress on my goal of transcribing my old paper travel journals into my blog. I've discovered that it's incredibly difficult to make time for this kind of thing when I'm at home and there's work to do and people to see and events to plan. When I'm on vacation, I spend a lot of time at airports and on airplanes and otherwise waiting for things, and it's really easy to just rip through pages and pages of notes. Next up, Argentina!

As an aside, I'm looking at the dates on these and I'm amazed that I spent 2.5 weeks in Southeast Asia, came back for five days, and then promptly flew off to South America for a week. I'm not sure what I was thinking at the time...

Halong Bay, Vietnam (2008)

2011-04-18T13:46:00.000-07:00

We got woken up the next day by the hotel staff at 4am; they had been trying to wake up room 402 and accidentally dialed us in 502. We were cranky but were able to get a few more hours of sleep before heading down to breakfast at 7:30am. The menu had several options on it, and we thought we could only choose one per person, but then we saw other people ordering multiple items. Anyway, Danny had pho and I had a crepe.

Our tour company (Huong Hai Junks) arrived to pick us up at 8:30am, and we started on our 3 hour bus ride to the docks at Halong Bay. There were a total of eight tourists on our bus, plus a few people who seemed to be with the tour company. One couple was from Columbus, Ohio; they were very talkative and friendly. Another couple was French-Vietnamese; the woman lived in LA and the man in Toulouse. The last couple was from Oregon, with a daughter living in California, so they were excited to learn that we were from the Bay Area too.

We finally arrived at the dock around noon, having made really good time. In fact, our driver was beyond crazy; he spent more time in the passing lane than in our lane. We were greeted by the sight of tons of tourists, and correspondingly many boats. We were checked off a list and herded onto a small boat with about 10-15 other people. Then, that boat tied up with our actual junk, and we hopped on board.

Our room turned out to be quite nice; although the "shower" was basically the entire bathroom. After dropping off our bags, we went upstairs to the dining room for lunch, where we were served juice, some wine (sweet and light), fresh shrimp, steamed clams, steamed crab, fried battered sweet potatoes, cooked cabbage, fried fish, sauteed squid and vegetables, and rice.

We set sail while we were eating, and I kept popping out to grab some photos, because the views were gorgeous.

After awhile a staff guy came by and said something about kayaking and changing. I thought he meant me, but stuck to my capris and tevas. It turned out that he meant himself, since he soon reappeared in a T-shirt and warmups, instead of his uniform. D and I were the only ones who had chosen the kayaking option, so when we stopped at the kayak shop we hopped off and the rest of the boat continued on to the beach. We kayaked around for about 30 minutes, and then rejoined the rest of the group on the beach, from which we climbed up some stairs to a pagoda with a great viewpoint.

Afterwards, we got back into our kayak and paddled to Luon Cave, past the Man's Head Island, Tortoise Island, a "goat" shaped rock and some other interesting formations. We ended up paddling for a good two hours, and then climbed back on the boat for a shower.

We had about an hour before dinner so we just sat around chatting with our fellow passengers as we watched the sun set on the bay. It was amazingly beautiful. One couple was from Paris, and other from Denmark. Another seemed to be speaking German, but I couldn't tell for sure. Several of them had personal tour guides with them.

For dinner, we had vegetable soup, giant fresh shrimp (even larger than at lunch), a cucumber salad, crabs stuffed with a crab mixture (very yummy!), fried calamari, fish cooked with tomatoes and onions (reminded me of escabeche, almost), and chicken sauteed with carrots and beans. We were amazed at the quality of the meals; all fresh seafood was delicious.

Afterwards we hung out on the upper deck for awhile enjoying the twilight, but soon went to bed, as there were mosquitoes around.

The second day of our tour started when we were called for breakfast around 7am. It was a continental breakfast; baguettes and pastries with jam and butter. Afterwards we were taken to a cave which was gorgeous and very well marked with displays. We took tons of photos there.

We got back on board around 9:30am and checked out so the staff could clean the room for the next group, who would come on as soon as we'd disembarked. We were served "brunch" around 10am; it started with ham and fried eggs, french fries, shrimp with veggies, fried squid, spring rolls, radishes and cabbage, and more. We got back to shore shortly after we finished eating, and got off just before noon.

We got back on the bus for our ride back to Hanoi, but halfway back we stopped for 30 minutes at a rip-off souvenir sweatshop warehouse-type place. It was really annoying there, but the drivers insisted we had to stay the full time despite the fact that no one was buying anything. We arrived back in Hanoi around 3:30pm, and checked back into our hotel. To our surprise, we were given a free room upgrade, from a standard ($35) room to a superior ($50) room! We guessed it was probably because of the 4am wakeup call fiasco. The room was a huge upgrade; it was much much larger and slightly nicer as well.

We stopped by the seamstress to pick up my ao doi, and then went back to Quan An Ngon for dinner (we'd gone to the branch in Saigon on our first night in Vietnam). We ordered bun bo hue (beef noodle soup; very spicy and very good), BBQ beef with salt and chili (also too spicy for Danny, but I loved it), and glutinous rice balls with mung bean (turned out to be similar to Chinese sesame balls). We'd learned that the "che" dessert drinks were delicious, so we ordered two: black bean with coconut, and jelly, tapioca, water chestnut, and pomegranate seed. Once again, everything was excellent.

Afterwards we went to check out the night market. We stayed there for a good hour and a half, and bought some cute souvenir magnets, Vietnamese cookies, postcards, bookmarks, and T-shirts, before heading home.

On our last day in Vietnam, we had a morning flight, so we didn't have much time after breakfast. We spent a little time walking around the area immediately outside our hotel, and bought one more silk embroidery picture, before catching the hotel car to the airport. We connected through Taipei and had just enough time to eat some beef noodle soup and pick up some Taiwanese pineapple cakes and sun cakes, before flying the rest of the way home.

Hanoi, Vietnam (2008)

2011-04-18T13:19:00.000-07:00

It was another early flight to Hanoi, so we were up at 5:30am. The hotel didn't officially start serving breakfast until 6:30am, but we went down at 6am and guess what, they had almost everything ready. After breakfast we took our hotel car to the airport, checked in, and went through security. We were momentarily confused by our gate number, which was listed on the boarding pass as "Front Door". It turned out the airport had only one gate, and all flights were serviced by bus. The Vietnam Airlines flight was a bit bumpier this time, but despite only being an hour long, we were served a pork and cucumber sandwich and some chocolate.

After landing we found our car and drove about 45 minutes to our hotel. In the front passenger there was a girl who seemed to be a friend of the driver. She must have heard me speaking Mandarin to D, because she asked if we were Chinese. I told her that we were Taiwanese, and we chatted a bit in Mandarin. It turned out she had just come back from three years of studying Chinese in Guangzhou. Anyway, she suggested we check out the weekend night markets, and told us a little bit about Hanoi.

Traffic in Hanoi was even crazier than in Saigon; drivers were less accomodating of pedestrians and of other drivers. We got to our hotel, the Hanoi Elegance 2, around 10am. Again our room wasn't ready, so after a quick change in the lobby restroom, we stored our luggage and set out to explore the city.

First was the Museum of Ethnology, which was a very well-done and thorough presentation on the different ethnic groups that populated Vietnam. I especially liked the replicas of the various traditional houses. Then, after some trouble trying to flag down the right type of taxi so that we wouldn't get scammed (finally hailed a Hanoi Tourist Taxi), we headed to the Temple of Literature.

We ate lunch at Koto, another youth training non-profit restaurant, where we ordered passionfruit and mango lassi, an appetizer sampler, chao tom, and beef with morning glory. Afterwards we walked through the temple, checked out a nearby park, and then went to see the Ho Chi Minh complex.

The mauseleum wasn't open since it was after 11am already, but I'm not sure we'd have wanted to see a dead preserved dictator, anyway. We did visit the One-Pillar Pagoda, the Presidential Palace, the House on Stilts, and the Flag Tower (meh).

We decided to walk home, and along the way we saw yet another statue of Ho Chi Minh, lots of impressive looking buildings (I guessed embassies), and some military buildings with lots of security. In fact, I stopped to take a photo of some cool planes in a gated courtyard and we were quickly shooed away by a scary-looking uniformed guy.

As we neared our hotel, we stumbled across a pastry shop, where I bought a bag of about 15 Belgian macarons for less than $3. I also got some treats that tasted like Ferraro Rocher inside but had a green rice krispy-like exterior, and a coconut flake confection in the shape of a cone. All three were yummy, but the green one was my favorite.

We got a little lost in the Old Quarter trying to find our hotel again, as the streets were narrow, winding, and not well labelled, but eventually we found it, checked in, and showered.

For dinner we went to Hanoi Garden, across the Old Quarter, where I had soft shell crab (cooked with garlic, onion, chili, and basil) and D had grilled pork with coconut milk. We also split a sampler of six types of spring rolls. Two were pretty basic, but there were some really interesting ones; one was a shrimp cake sandwitched between two layers of fried stuff, another seemed to have squid and/or other seafood in it, and one had a textured flaky exterior, and was strongly mushroom flavored.

Afterwards we walked to Hoan Kiem Lake and checked out the Ngoc Son Temple, which was lighted up after dark.

We happened to walk by the Water Puppet theatre five minutes before the last showing, so we bought "first class" tickets for $5 apiece and watched the 45 minute show, which was much better and less cheesy than I'd expected.

We thought about taking a Perfume Pagoda tour the next day, but decided against it as it was a full day and would have left us no time to do anything else. Instead we "slept in" until 8am and enjoyed a leisurely brefakfast at the hotel.

Next we headed to a tailor, where I bought a custom-made ao doi for 1.1M dong (about $135), to be picked up in two days time. Communication was pretty difficult as no one in the store spoke English; even asking for timeline, price, deposit amount, etc. was a bit painful. We did bargain from 1.28M to 1.1M; I'm guessing we could have done better, but the storekeepers were really nice and tried really hard to help us so I didn't mind too much.

We looked at some (super-expensive!) art galleries, souvenir shops, and pottery stores in the area, and then headed back to the lake.

We made brief stops at Le Thai Lo monument and St. Joseph's before going to Pho 24 (a fast food chain) for lunch. Their pho was really cheap, tasty, and filling, and it came with something that tasted like bits of you tiou. We also liked their cans of sugar cane juice.

Nearby was the swanky Sofitel Metropole Hotel, which had been open since 1901 and was super posh. We briefly contemplated the $15 chocolate buffet but in the end we decided we were still too full and it was kind of a rip-off besides. We spent $1-2 buying postcards at a bookstore instead, and amusingly were given the last 1000 dong (12.5 cents) of change in the form of two pieces of 500 dong gum.

We looked briefly at the exterior of the History Museum (not as cool as expected) and the Opera House, and then went back to the Ngoc Son Temple, for an actual visit this time.

The interior was pretty nice, and the exterior was pretty and peaceful, so we hung out there for awhile and wrote up some postcards.

On the way home, we stopped at Memorial House, right next to our hotel. It's a traditional Vietnamese house which has been converted into a small museum, and only cost about 50 cents to enter, which I thought was a bargain.

For dinner, we ate at 69 Bar, a few doors down. We had beef and papaya salad and bun cha, plus sauteed bananas in orange and lime for dessert. They also had a very interesting drink made of coffee, milk, pineapple, and lemon, which sounds terrible but was actually quite good.

Hue, Vietnam (2008)

2011-04-17T21:44:00.000-07:00

We'd wanted to visit somewhere in Central Vietnam, and for awhile I debated between the imperial tombs of Hue and the "charming" city of Hoi An. In the end I decided that Hue sounded less touristy, so from Saigon we took a 7am flight there. We got up at 5am that morning, and when we got downstairs we found the receptionist and the shuttle driver asleep on cots in the lobby. After waking them up, we checked out and went on our way. Amusingly, we'd planned to use the ATM in the lobby, but at 5:30am apparently even that was not turned on yet.

Upon arrival in Hue, we realized I'd given the wrong flight information to the hotel car. Luckily the Orchid Hotel had a reception desk in the airport (!!) and they set us up with a taxi. We arrived a bit before 9am but our room wasn't ready yet, so the receptionist invited us to have free tea/coffee, juice, and watermelon while we waited. We also used the free internet stations in the lobby and set up a boat tour for the next day ($5 per person including lunch). Actually, everything was amazingly cheap in Hue; the hotel car only cost $9 and the room $32/night, including buffet breakfast for both of us.

When we got to our room we discovered lots of nice touches; a DVD player with DVDs available for loan at front desk, free tea/coffee, a scale, modern decor (including a stained glass bathroom window), high quality towels, and a very comfy bed.

It was nearly 11am when we headed out to grab some real breakfast. We wandered around for awhile before stumbling across a local place where the owners barely spoke English. We were most definitely the only tourists there. We ended up pointing at some pork chops, which cost less than $2, with rice. We'd planned to visit Hue's famous citadel afterwards, but found ourselves caught in a torrential downpour. In the three blocks between the restaurant and our hotel, we got completely soaked, giving us little choice but to go back to our room to change and wait out the weather.

It took about an hour for things to clear up to a reasonable degree, so we set out again a little after noon, walking across the Trang Tien bridge towards the Citadel. Shortly before crossing the bridge, we had our first encounter with Hue's unreasonably aggressive cyclo drivers. It took quite a lot of effort to get rid of the first one; we finally stopped into a souvenir shop for several minutes, at which point he gave up. We encountered another after entering the Citadel gates, but managed to ditch him by quickly reversing directions a couple of times (he couldn't keep up). We finally found the front gate to the Imperial Enclosure, noted the nearby 9 cannons and flag pole, and then walked through the Noon Gate, with its raised pavilion, to the gardens inside. We spent several pleasant hours there, exploring a variety of gorgeous temples, palaces, and other structures, including the ruined Forbidden City.

We finally left to find some food, and decided that since we hadn't eaten much all day and it was nearly 4pm, we'd splurge on a set course meal at Y Thao Garden, past the far wall of the Citadel. We arrived very hungry, hoping they would serve us despite the very odd hour. Y Thao turned out to be a spacious traditional Vietnamese home, surrounded by a lovely garden.

The setting was amazing, but it was a little odd to walk into what looked like someone's home and then wander around asking if they were open. Luckily they were, and since we were the only customers, we were given a prime table on a little patio overlooking a fish pond. Later on we discovered that the pond was also inhabited by several frogs.

The menu was $20 per person (very expensive by Vietnamese standards) and included: spring rolls arranged on a pineaple in the shape of a peacock, vegetable and chicken soup, Hue-style Vietnamese pancake, a very interesting dish of shredded pork with sesame, peanuts, and basil, served on large shrimp chips, lemongrass grilled beef, lotus rice, and fresh shrimp served with sea salt and pepper.

For dessert we had oranges and green bean cakes molded beautifully in the shape of fruits. The entire meal was amazing, and I took photos of every course. Even the drinks (mango and lemon juices) were delicious.

Afterwards we walked back around the Imperial Enclosure to the Dong Ba market, but were somewhat disappointed; it was mostly clothes and trinkets, and many stalls were already closing just after 6:30pm. We left the market, but on the way home, D managed to buy two more silk embroidered pictures for less than $4 apiece, which made him quite happy.

The next day we were up early again. The hotel's free breakfast was amazing: fried rice, fried noodles, bacon, crepes (plain and with bananas), several kinds of spring rolls, many kinds of fruit, several kinds of cake, made-to-order omelets, and more. (We really liked the Orchid Hotel!)

Our tour started at 8am; at that time several motorbikes arrived at the meeting location, and each of us climbed on behind a driver. We were taken down to the river where we boarded a small boat with six others; a Korean-AUstralian couple, a French couple, and two brothers from Holland. There, we met our guide Ngu, who was very nice and spoke pretty good English. She was also well under five feet tall and looked about twelve years old, but when she spoke it was clear she was much older.

The boat first took us to the Thien Mu Pagoda, and then to the Tombs of Tu Doc, Minh Mang, and Khai Dinh, as well as a smaller temple near the Minh Mang tomb. My favorites were Thien Mu, which had an amazing view, and the interior of Khai Dinh.

We paid the admission fees ourselves; they were usually 55K dong ($7) for foreigners and 30k dong ($4) for Vietnamese. At least once the ticket seller asked if we were Vietnamese, and seemed ready to give us the lower price. It's unfortunate that neither of us speak a word!

We often used motorbikes to get from the river to the sites, and there was one amusing incident when D's motorbike ran out of gas. Luckily, another person from our tour (the Korean guy) was nearby, and the driver for his motorbike motioned to D to climb on. I arrived first and was very amused when the last motorbike arrived several minutes late with three guys onboard, especially as both D and the Korean guy were quite tall and the seat was not very large.

Along the way we were fed a lunch of rice, fried noodles, and some kind of pancake-looking veggie omelet. One thing that I really disliked about the tour was that people were constantly trying to sell us things. First, the older woman (not our guide) on the boat tried to sell us drinks, and then paintings/cards, and then a "deluxe lunch" (for $8!). Then, the motorbike drivers at Tu Doc tried to get us to buy them drinks, and all along the way people were trying to sell us water, pineapple, postcards, and various other souvenirs. It was all very offputting.

On the bright side, the tombs were gorgeous, the boat ride was pleasant, Ngu was a good guide, and I took a billion pictures. On the other hand, we were starving after the light lunch and the active afternoon, having wandered all over the sites and climbed up 127 steps at Khai Dinh. So, after giving Ngu a "generous" $3 tip (she was surprised and very grateful), we headed to second lunch at 4pm. We ate at the Mandarin Cafe, where the owner is also a photographer, and his photos decorate the walls of the cafe. They were quite good, and the food was cheap and delicious; we paid maybe $3 per entree.

Afterwards, we walked back towards our hotel, stopping to by some sesame candy along the way. By the end of our second day, I seemed to have mastered the art of fending off cyclo drivers; apparently the trick is not to speak at all, but to just smile and wave them off. I guess it's the only way to possibly pass for Vietnamese.

We got back the hotel early and spent the evening catching up on photos and email with the free internet. Around 7-8pm, we heard a soft knock, and were pleasantly surprised when we opened the door and found a hotel staffer with a complimentary bunch of bananas. As you can probably tell, the hotel left a really good impression on us.

Mekong Delta, Vietnam (2008)

2011-04-17T21:06:00.000-07:00

Before arriving in Asia, we'd already booked an overnight Mekong Delta tour with the highly-reviewed Sinhbalo Tours. The cost was only $125/per person at the time of booking, and it got reduced to $90/pp later, when some other people joined our tour.

The tour van arrived bright and early the next morning, but we did have time to grab some banh mi for breakfast, from a street vendor outside of our hotel. We were soon joined by two other couples; one from London (they were in the midst of a 4-month trip!), and one from Chicago (the girl was interviewing to teach at the international school). We drove 2.5 hours to catch our boat (somewhere near Cai Be) but it was a nice van (Mercedes-Benz, no less) and we had a good time chatting with the other travellers.

Once we got on the boat, we just cruised around, stopping occasionally to check out locals making various foodstuffs; coconut candy, rice cakes, peanut candies, ginger candies, dried banana and sweet potato chips, coconut rice crackers, etc.

Of course we ended up buying some; the coconut candy was particularly good.

The canals reminded me a bit of Venice but with only very primitive buildings and much cleaner water.

For lunch we ate at a small restaurant on the shore, which was raised up on stilts. They served us fresh fish spring rolls, pork, beef and rice, noodle soup, spring rolls, and fresh fruit with chili salt. The food was tasty (D especially liked the fresh-caught fish in the rolls) and the location very picturesque.

After lunch we cruised down to Vinh Long where we got back in our van and drove to Can Tho (via car ferry). We arrived around 4:30pm and checked in at Tay Do, our hotel. It was billed as a 2-star by the tour company but turned out to be quite nice. For dinner (not included in the tour) we all went together to a restaurant called "Mekong" on the riverfront. They had a mix of cuisines, but we wanted more Vietnamese food, so I chose chicken with lemongrass and D had another banh xeo. We also had some fresh spring rolls, and paid a total of $9 for the two of us. Afterwards we swung by the local market to look at some craftwork before heading back to the hotel.

We were up even earlier the second day; packed and down to breakfast before 6:30am. The free breakfast was not very exciting; mostly just rolls, jam, and cheese. We met up with our tour guide and were on our way again by 7:30am.

Our first stop was the Cai Rong floating market. The guide explained to us that each boat advertised its goods by running them up on a long pole. So, for instance, the boat which was selling watermelon had an entire watermelon tied to its pole.

We cruised around on a small boat looking at the various goods, and then asked to stop on a pineapple boat. We hopped over, and paid about 50 cents for an entire pineapple. The pineapple vendor figured out that we meant to eat it right away, so she peeled and cut it nicely for us, so we could eat it right off the stem.

From there we went to visit a local elderly couple's house, where we were fed snake wine (we didn't know what it was until we drank it), banana wine, and more fruit. There was a funny episode where the husband tried to communicate using charades that the snake wine was good for male fertility.

The couple was super friendly, although they spoke no English at all, and their garden was lovely. Our guide told us that although they were in their 70's, the husband still shimmied up their coconut tree every morning to harvest coconuts.

We noticed that all along the river, everyone was super friendly, especially the children. Every person would wave back with a huge smile whenever we waved at them. We kept cruising and soon found the Phong Diem floating market (much smaller than Cai Rong). On the way, the mother and son who were navigating our boat fed us some fruit (papaya, pineapple, and banana), which was really nice of them, but by this time I was getting kind of sick of fruit. We finally arrived at the dock by mid-morning to catch our bus. Soon afterward, our tour guide (not knowing that we were sick of fruit) took us to a fruit stand. Luckily there were some new varieties, though: jackfruit, sarsparilla, and a small round fruit almost like longan but much tarter.

It took quite awhile to get on the car ferry this time, so it was past noon when we stopped for lunch. Our guide asked us what we wanted to eat, and we told him that we wanted to eat "what you would eat". He was a little horrified at that and said that the places that he ate were "dirty", but we insisted that we would be fine, so we ended up at a very local eatery which barely a restaurant at all; more like a bunch of tables outside of someone's kitchen. It wasn't that dirty by Asian standards, but there were definitely flies in the vicinity, and chickens wandering around under the tables. We were served stir-fried pork, catfish in a sour soup in a clay pot, sauteed pumpkin blossoms, mango, and candied lotus fruits. The bill ended up being about $6 per person, which was more than I thought it should cost, but it's hard to complain when the difference is so small. From there it was another 2-3 hours back to Saigon.

We were dropped off at our individual hotels, but we agreed to meet up again for dinner. We ended up at Quan Nuong 3T, a very popular Vietnamese BBQ place, located above Temple Cafe and Fanny's Ice Cream. We were told the Temple Club was a favorite with "Brangelina".

The six of us were joined by some friends of the Chicago couple (teachers at the international school), and as a group we ordered lemongrass beef, beef with cheese, live shrimp (one giant shrimp per skewer, still moving!), squid, garlic rice, morning glory, veggie soup, and venison.

Of course everything also came with lots of fresh veggies. My favorites were the shrimp and the lemongrass beef, although some in our party were cringing while watching the live shrimp cook over the flames.

Saigon, Vietnam (2008)

2011-04-17T20:34:00.000-07:00

On our last day in Siem Reap, we spent a leisurely morning at the hotel before heading to the airport ($5 by hotel car) for our flight to Saigon. The airport was super crowded but we got on our flight without incident. We arrived around 2:30pm and then took another prearranged car ($15 this time) through 30 minutes of crazy traffic to our hotel.

After checking in and dropping off our bags at the An An Hotel, and verifying the next day's tour, we finally had time to eat "lunch". We wandered around for a few minutes before stumbling across a super casual pho place where we happily slurped down large bowls of beef pho. It seemed like the broth was clearer and less salty than in the US. Also, it only cost about $1.50 per bowl.

Since we were leaving the next day for the Mekong Delta, we thought we'd take advantage of the few hours before dinner to look around a bit. First we visited the Hindu temple, where I got really annoyed at a guy who was insistent about trying to sell us incense. Next was Ben Thanh market, which was huge, but hot and crowded, so we didn't stay there long either.

We walked up Le Loi to the Opera House and the post office, stopped by Notre Dame, and then went to Quan An Ngon for dinner.

The restaurant served lots of traditional Vietnamese street foods, but in a sit-down setting (and for a slightly higher but still very reasonable price). We ordered vermicelli with pork, pork chop with rice, Vietnamese pancake (delicious!), some spring rolls, and dessert-like drinks of coconut milk with mung bean, tapioca, peanuts, and some kind of jelly. Overall, we were very happy with our first Vietnamese dining experience.

We spent the next two days in the Mekong Delta area, before returning to Saigon for one more full day. On that day, we started with yet another fresh banh mi from a street stand. We tried the "pork sausage" this time, which turned out to be quite similar to Chinese sausage. I liked it better than the more generic meat combo that we'd had before. Next on the agenda was "bun moc" (pork and mushroom noodle soup) at another local stand. When we arrived, the stand was completely full, with tiny chairs and low tables all over the sidewalk, and there was apparently no real line. We must have looked pretty confused, because a nice local eventually waved at us and helped us find a seat. We soon figured out that he spoke Chinese! He said he was originally from Guangzhou. He also helped us order a large bowl ($3) and some kind of mung bean drink (50 cents, and very good).

After breakfast, we went to see the "Reunification Palace", formerly known as the Independence Palace, which was historically interesting but not very pretty.

Nearby was the War Remnants Museum, which we enjoyed much more than we'd expected. It sounded like a grim topic for a museum, but the displays were actually kind of uplifting; they often showed people making the best of things. The exhibit that made the biggest impression on me was a black-and-white photograph of a woman rowing down a river in a boat made out of an old hollowed-out missile. Practical, indeed.

From there it was a long-ish walk to the Jade Emperor Pagoda, which sounded cool but turned out not to be that impressive.

For lunch we "splurged" and spent almost $40 at a gourmet Vietnamese place called "Lemongrass". We started with really yummy lemon soda, Vietnamese coffee, and free shrimp chips. Then we ordered shrimp on sugar cane (served with fish sauce and veggies), bun bo xao (sauteed beef with rice noodles, my favorite), and chicken and egg noodle soup for D (light and refreshing but rich in flavor).

We enjoyed that lunch very much, especially because the restaurant was air-conditioned.

Since we were full and happy, we decided to brave the Ben Thanh market area again, and this time we actually picked up some souvenirs; chopsticks, purses, embroidered pictures, and greeting cards. We also munched on some waffle-like snacks that we bought from a street vendor.

For dinner we decided to hit the famous Temple Club. It was really nicely decorated, and they made great cocktails. For dinner we had beef salad with lotus root in a vinegar-y sauce (excellent), steamed clams, and tamarind fish. Afterwards we went downstairs to Fanny's for some "kem" (aka Vietnamese ice cream). We tried three flavors: "young rice", green tea, and peanut, of which the peanut was by far the best; not too sweet and very peanut-y.

Alinea (part 2)

2011-04-16T09:59:00.000-07:00

I did a poor job of photographing this dish, but if you look carefully you can see a whole vanilla bean protruding from the fried banana and hamachi. The menu listed ginger and "West Indies spices" as well, but I think they were only used for flavor. I was afraid that the hamachi would be noticeably cooked, but it wasn't, and the banana was the stronger element anyway. There wasn't a noticeable vanilla flavor; in fact I kind of wished I could have taken the bean home with me as it appeared to be completely intact.

The next course was served with a glass of Pont Neuf red in a fancy glass:

As you can see, the tableware for this "Canard a la Cussy" was equally elaborate, and seemed pretty out of place compared to the rest of the very modern serving pieces. It only made sense when the waiter explained that this particular duck recipe was over 300 years old. The light and airy puff pastry was stuffed with fois gras, braised cockscomb, and duck innards, and then topped with several slices of tender duck breast and a tiny piece of fried skin. The dots of wine sauce were a little heavy; I only used about half of them, but everything else was delicious.

We were a bit confused when presented with this container of eucalpytus leaves. The waiter told us not to eat the leaves (as they are poisonous to humans) but to pull out the silver pin. On the end was a piece of venison cooked with cherry and cocoa nib. A few seconds after we finished our bites of venison, we all had a funny look on our faces. The venison was gamey (and I normally love venison), it overwhelmed any hint of cherry and/or cocoa, and the eucalptus aroma didn't really come through. In the end, this was the only dish that I thought was just plain bad. Interestingly I went online and read some reviews from other people who seemed to like it. I wonder if the venison was just off that day.

The waiter later told us that the next dish was his personal favorite (and he'd been with the restaurant since it opened in 2005). It was called "black truffle explosion"; the raviolo was filled with black truffle sauce, and topped with romaine and parmesan. We were warned to eat this in one bite with mouths closed, and sure enough, when I finally bit through the pasta, the black truffle juice exploded all over my mouth. It was very good, but I actually liked the "hot potato, cold potato" truffle preparation more.

They again used very unique servingware for the truffle explosion, so we asked the waiters where all the dishes came from, and they told us that Chef Achatz owned an interest in a servingware company, so he actually custom ordered a lot of the dishes for the restaurant, such as the three-tier sphere for the rabbit course.

A palate cleanser of yuzu snow marked the end of the savory courses. We were specifically told not to lick the metal as they had used liquid nitrogen to freeze the juice. I wonder if anyone has actually done that before, and gotten their tongue stuck to the bowl?

The first "dessert" course was actually still quite savory. There were bits of sweet potato, sweetened pecan, and brown sugar. There was a puff of jalapeno cotton candy on top, and dabs of cayenne goo on the plank, from which the "heat had been removed" but the flavor was still present. The plank itself was made of smoked cedar, and indeed the aroma contributed heavily to the autumn-y flavor of the dish. It was almost like a deconstructed sweet potato pie.

This was my second favorite dessert. Each side of the tube was stopped up with a different flavored jelly. The "near" side was lemongrass, the "far" side dragonfruit, and in the middle was a cocktail of those two fruits, plus finger lime, cucumber, and I believe some basil. I had to suck pretty hard to unstop the lemongrass end, and as soon as I did, the entire tube came rushing down. It was a refreshing and delicious combination.

The next three desserts were served together, and we were told we could eat them in any order, but I think this one should have come first. It was a piece of bacon infused with butterscotch, apple, and thyme. I would have been a lot more impressed with this a few years ago, but I've been having lots of yummy bacon flavored desserts recently, including at work. I also had a little trouble trying to get the bacon off of the wire.

This is the one I ate first; it was entitled "nutella, bread, banana, chocolate". It doesn't look like much, but when you put it into your mouth it transforms from dry and bread-like into a blob of tasty nutella-y goodness. I liked this best of the three.

This paper-thin preparation of lychee and jasmine tea was a little too sweet for my taste, and I couldn't taste much tea flavor. It was fun to eat, though.

By this time we'd figured out that Chef Achatz wasn't just visiting tables, he was doing some kind of very elaborate dessert preparation. When the waitstaff cleared off our table to lay down a gigantic silicone mat, we knew it was our turn.

After they put down tons of little white pots of ingredients, the chef (and one of his sous chefs) appeared and started painting the table with them. There was chocolate sauce, cream sauce, caramel sauce, dehydrated blueberry paper, fresh blueberry compote, honey, and peanut powder.

The caramel sauce in particular was always spooned in a circular shape, but would form little squares or rectangles as it spread. We've yet to figure out why. There were little glass cylinders in which the chefs poured creme anglaise, which was later bruleed after it had set. Towards the end, blocks of liquid nitrogen frozen chocolate mousse were brought in, engulfing the table in vapor, and then broken up with utensils into smaller pieces.

The experience of eating off of the table was super fun, making this easily my favorite dessert, especially since we could easily load our spoons up with whatever ingredients we liked best. For instance, my favorite parts were the creme anglaise with honey and the frozen chocolate mousse. The caramel sauce, despite its awesome squareness, was not that flavorful. I think in the end D ended up chasing down every last blueberry.

Before the dessert finale, we had asked our waiter if we could get Chef Achatz to autograph our menus, and also if we could possibly get a photo with him. He told us that it was possible to have a photo, but it would have to be after the meal, in the kitchen. That was very much not a problem for us, so after we were done, he went and chased down the chef for us, and we got our photo, as well as a glimpse of the kitchen.

We were also successful with the menus, and each of us ended up with a different inscription. I think mine says "Toward Creativity". Before we visited, I'd seen menus on the website, and wondered about the little bubbles on each row. When we were presented with our copies, the waiter explained that the sweeter the dish, the further right the bubble (and conversely the more savory the dish, the further left). The darkness of the bubbles indicated intensity, and the size indicated quantity. I thought the whole scheme was really quite clever (I love infographics).

From start to finish, the meal took almost five hours, but we were never bored. Several of the dishes were highly interactive, the presentations were unique and varied, and overall it felt more like dining theatre than just a dinner. To me, only two of the 22-courses were misses; the gamey bite of venison served with eucalptus, and the mint watercress foam part of the urchin dish. Every other dish was creative and delicious. After finishing the second half, my favorites remained the hot/cold potato truffle bowl and the yuba shrimp, but the fancy-plated duck and the truffle explosion were also highlights for me. As for dessert, it's hard to beat the on-table presentation of the chocolate mousse finale, but I also quite enjoyed the sweet potato pecan cedar plank and the lemongrass dragonfruit shot.

We were super excited to be able to not only meet Chef Achatz but also to have him prepare our dessert, sign our menus, and pose for photos with us. I had read some biographical articles about him prior to our visit, and in some of them he came off as arrogant, so I'd been prepared for the worst. Instead, he was friendly, funny (a little snarky, which is a plus in my book), and very accommodating.

On the way out, D said, "We should just stop eating. Nothing is ever going to top this." Of course he was kidding (and he ate plenty for breakfast), but the four of us did later agree that as food experiences go, our dinner at Alinea was arguably the best meal ever.

Alinea (part 1)

2011-04-15T17:19:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned before, I went to Chicago last weekend. D had a business trip there all week, and my brother lives in Chicago, so I booked a bunch of restaurant reservations and hopped on a free flight (using United miles to get there and American miles to come back). My brother's girlfriend lives in Cincinnati, so she drove down for the weekend to hang out with us too.

Last time I visited, the four of us went to Moto. This time, we splurged even more and went to Alinea.

I'm going to do my best to do a full recap of the meal, but I don't have access to the phone that we used to do voice recording (yes, we taped the waiters' descriptions) so I may have a few gaps...

We were seated upstairs, at what looked like the best table in the house. It was gigantic; there were four of us but I think the table could have seated eight. The upstairs area was divided into three or four smaller rooms; we were in the most interior room, and were seated against the back wall facing out, so we could easily watch the waitstaff as they served other tables. Halfway through the meal we spotted Grant Achatz at some other tables, and we started to get excited about our prospects of meeting him.

The tables were set without tablecloths, so all the silverware was placed on little pillows:

Soon after we were seated, a waiter came by to ask us about food allergies and constraints. We didn't have many requests, so pretty soon we were served our first course. It was described as steelhead roe with dijon, rutabaga, and grapefruit:

There was also some kind of quinoa-like grain in the rutabaga puree, and some shavings of radish, both of which added texture. At the time we thought it was pretty tasty, but it was soon blown away by the next dish.

The base of this dish was formed out of yuba (tofu skin) and cooked milk. It was wrapped in shrimp, and sprinkled with black and white sesame, miso, and togarashi. This was one of my top three savory dishes of the evening.

Next we were served three courses together. The first was called "oyster leaf", but the waiter assured us that no oysters were used to make the dish. Apparently the leaf itself, which has to be specially imported from Europe, naturally tastes like oyster. (It really did.)

The second shellfish course was a scallop cooked with Hitachino Weizen (a Japanese beer) and Old Bay seasoning. I was afraid the Old Bay would overwhelm but it was surprisingly subtle. I liked this one the best of the three.

Finally, there was a razor clam, accompanied by carrot, soy, and daikon. We were instructed to eat this all in one bite, like a shooter. The sauce smelled a little like hoisin, and was similarly salty, but went well with the veggies.

I had a bit of trouble photographing this one. The waiters handed the bowls directly to each of us, and we were told not to put them down, as the bottoms were not flat. On top of the fork was a preparation of urchin in bits of vanilla jello, and then inside the bowl there was a foam of mint and watercress. The urchin was fine but I didn't like the foam part at all; I would say this was one of only two dishes that I did not enjoy that evening.

This was one of the most fun dishes to eat. The waiter explained that although everything looked white, only half of the ingredients were normally white; the other half were normally dark (e.g. coffee, black pepper), but had been processed to remove the color. We basically spent the whole time trying to identify the ingredients as we ate. There was a custard-like substance which was halibut-flavored, something that looked like coleslaw but turned out definitely not to be a vegetable; it was more like chicharrones, and parsnip made into a little fruit rollup-like shape. There were other bits that tasted like sesame, lemon, cream, vanilla, and more. Amazing.

At this point the waiters brought out what looked like a set of flags. They told us that they were merely for decoration "for now".

Also very mysterious was this rabbit parfait. We were told to enjoy the food but "not to move the porcelain". The rabbit flavor was infused into a mousse, which was served with crunchy shredded rabbit belly and squash, a piece of squash paper that was quite tasty, pumpkin seeds, and tiny sage leaves.

After we finished the parfait, the waiters returned to take the top off of the servingware. Inside was a rabbit "rilette" which I liked very much. The rabbit was served two ways; as a bit of fried rilette and in a piece of blood sausage. There were dabs of apple butter and squash puree, lots of black trumpet mushrooms, and a hint of cinnamon.

There were little slits in the dishware, so we suspected yet another course, and indeed the waiters returned one more time to unveil a rich rabbit consomme, flavored with cinnamon and sage, and kept warm with a hot rock.

The others didn't think this wild mushroom dish was that impressive, but I love mushrooms, so I enjoyed it very much. The mushrooms were served with pine, sumac, and ramps, and had lots of textures; spongy, crunchy, powdery, creamy, and foamy.

This was my favorite savory dish of the night. The waiter called it "hot potato, cold potato" and it literally consisted of a piece of hot potato, along with black truffle, butter, and cheese, on a tiny pin, which was suspended above a broth of cold potato in a tiny wax bowl. We were instructed to pull out the pin (releasing the ingredients) and then shoot the bowl immediately; this ensured that we would get both the hot and cold sensations, in addition to the flavors.

We finally discovered what the "flags" were for when the waiters brought out wooden planks that had metal bits inside. We were taught how to assemble the metal parts into a rack of sorts, and then told to place the "tomato and fermented black garlic pasta" on top. The waiters then served us some delicious shortrib, and we were further instructed to add all of the other ingredients, before eating it all together as a roll. This was our "3D food experience" of the night.

The condiments were (starting from the left): sea salt, blackberry, grilled onion, black garlic, pickled turnip, nicoise olive, and cherry. On the spoon was a distilled tobacco gelee, in the middle, a ribbon of turnip, and on the glass, a tomato cream sauce.

Halfway through the meal, my favorites were the yuba shrimp skewer and the hot/cold potato dish, but I had also been quite impressed with the study in white and the 3D shortrib pasta. To be continued!

enjoying life

2011-04-12T11:35:00.000-07:00

On the whole, I quite enjoy my job. Every day, I get to work on interesting products with smart and fun people. When I stay home sick for a couple of days, I feel like I'm missing out; I like knowing what's going on in the tech world (inside and outside the company), I like being involved in developing new features, and I like the social aspect of hanging out with my coworkers at work. I would certainly be bored to death if I had no job and stayed at home every day.

However, I was thinking last weekend (on a plane coming back from Chicago) that if I somehow acquired enough money that I could just fly around and do fun things for the rest of my life, I'd probably be fine with that too. In fact, I think one of the reasons that I like my job is that it pays me enough and is flexible enough that I can do things like fly to Chicago for the weekend. Yup, it was only three days, but I got to spend quality time with my brother and his girlfriend, experienced five hours of delicious interactive dining theatre, had a nice long run along the Chicago lakefront, waited in an hour-long line for gourmet hot dogs with lots of other friendly food-lovers, and fell asleep in the living room while lying on the floor watching movies.

On the agenda for next week: visiting friends in Los Angeles, visiting family in Houston, and a cousin reunion at The Wizarding World of Harry Potter in Orlando. My youngest cousin is finally old enough to do fun trips (she's going to college this year), so I hope this is the first of many exciting cousin adventures.

overspending on the arts

2011-04-03T18:09:00.000-07:00

I feel like I've been overspending on arts and culture events recently.

A few weeks ago I went with some friends to see the SF Ballet's Program 3. We've been going every year for the past few years, so I guess this particular expenditure wasn't unusual. The program began with Yuri Possokhov's "Classical Symphony", which we realized we'd already seen last year, but it was still quite enjoyable. The second part was "Nanna's Lied", which was an extremely dramatic piece set in early 20th century Germany. I was happy that we got to see Yuan Yuan Tan as Nanna, as she is a family friend, but I'm not sure that I liked the overall theme; it was a bit too tragic for my taste. The program finished with the very modern "Artifact Suite", which had some interesting ensemble work and cool lighting effects, but I thought it went on a bit too long.

A few weeks later D and I went with some other friends to see Rock of Ages, which is an 80's rock musical. I joked to D that it was probably the first time that he (and not I) had been the one to propose going to see a musical. He's a sucker for 80's music, despite having missed most of it the first time around. Anyway, it was pretty cheesy but consciously so, and still a fun time.

While we were there, I saw an advertisement in the program for a one-man show by Hugh Jackman. Tickets went on sale on April 1st, and I promptly grabbed two of them (for myself and a friend; I'm not going to make D watch Wolverine sing) for mid-May.

Finally, last week D discovered that Journey would be in town in October (with Foreigner and Night Ranger), and started researching tickets. Only VIP seats were available at the time, but general sales started on April 2nd. That morning, I was up and at the computer by 9:55am, and was able to get some okay seats in the second tier for $107 apiece. I decided that I'm too old for lawn seats at the Shoreline.

Anyway, I feel like I should call a moratorium on buying tickets, but the other day my mom was asking about going to see the SF Opera's rendition of Don Giovanni...

photo gallery party

2011-04-01T17:13:00.000-07:00

D's birthday party this year was pretty simple, but required a bit of advance planning. The idea came from another party that we'd been to a few years ago that was held at an art gallery; we thought it was really fun to have photos to look at while eating and chatting. Since D and I were not about to go and buy a lot of expensive prints, and we have a lot of friends who are talented photographers, we thought we'd hold a contest instead.

I asked each of our guests to send one photo, cropped to 8x10. I then printed, matted, and hung each photo somewhere in our house. I ordered the mats from Golden State Art for a little over a dollar apiece, and hung the photos using 3M Poster Strips, so they could easily be removed later.

Each photo was assigned a number, and guests were given fake $100, $50, and $20 bills that they could use to vote for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place winners.

The nice thing was that other than putting up the photos, I really didn't have to do much else, and people seemed to have a good time. Well, there were some snacks, of course.

Anyway, without further ado, here are the top three photos...

#3 - taken in Jeju Island, Korea (by me!):

#2 - taken in Tokyo, Japan:

#1 - taken in Costa Rica:

worthy investment?

2011-03-24T14:18:00.000-07:00

I was watching TV in our family room the other day, when I noticed D had been wrestling with something in the kitchen sink for awhile. I asked him what he was doing and he showed me that one of our small Corningware bowls had gotten wedged into one of our larger Corningware bowls. He'd tried using soap (didn't help), knives (too thick), cardboard (still too thick!), and some other solutions, but had been unable to dislodge the bowls. I thought for a couple of minutes, and finally decided to see if heat would do the trick. I boiled some water, put the larger bowl in the pot until it was too hot to touch, took it out (using dish rags), and then banged it against the counter, making sure the rags would soften the impact. Bingo!

On the way out, I remarked to D that it appeared my very expensive engineering education was good for something after all.

Siem Reap, Cambodia (2008)

2011-03-23T16:51:00.000-07:00

We had an early morning flight to Siem Reap, so we were down to breakfast by 7am. Everything went smoothly except we were a bit surprised by the departure tax; luckily it was only $6 per person. Despite it only being a 35 minute flight, Siem Reap Airways served us a cucumber and egg sandwich, fruits, and juice. I had a little scare onboard when I discovered my hands were shaking and thought I was getting sick, but then D pointed out it was likely the four cups of delicious coffee that I had had with breakfast. Oops.

We were checked into our hotel, La Maison D'Angkor, well before noon. The hotel staff was happy to arrange a tuk-tuk driver for us for the rest of the day (12-6pm) for $15. For lunch we had the driver take us to Shadow of Angkor, where the food was okay but the fresh watermelon juice were delicious.

Afterwards we started on the temples. First we went to the gigantic Angkor Thom, where we saw the famous Bayon with the giant faces:

Afterwards we proceeded to the Baphuon, the Terrace of Elephants, and the Terrace of the Leper King. I was most impressed with the Bayon; the Baphuon seemed like it was in worse shape, and it took us awhile to find the elephants, as they were not well marked:

From there we went to Ta Prohm and Phnom Bapkeng. Ta Prohm was my favorite; it's known as the jungle temple because there are giant trees growing all over it. I think it was also used to film part of the first Lara Croft movie.

Phnom Bapkeng was primarily popular with tourists because it offers a nice view of Angkor Wat at sunset. I was not that impressed with the view there, but I could have been biased because of the huge crowds.

We started again the next day at 4:30am in order to try to catch the sunrise at Angkor Wat. We got there at 5:45am which was in plenty of time, but we still had to jostle for position among all of the tour groups and other early risers.

After sunrise, we stuck around and explored Angkor Wat for several hours, before driving out to Banteay Srei (we'd hired a car for the day for 55 USD), which is loosely translated as "citadel of women". I liked it very much; it was small but full of beautiful intricate carvings.

We also visited Kbal Spean, which is a site consisting of lots of stone lingas (phallic symbols) around a river. It required some hiking (35-40 minutes) to get to the carvings, and I wasn't too impressed by the carvings, but apparently they are notable because there are so many of them.

The driver that we'd hired turned out to speak English pretty well, which was an unexpected bonus. He gave a running commentary during the long drives, from which we actually learned a lot. For instance, it sounded like there was a lot of foreign investment in Cambodia (mostly Vietnamese and Korean) which meant that the locals weren't profiting that much from all the tourism. A daily wage of 1-2 USD was considered "good". He also had some comments about local politics which were over my head, and took us off the main roads to show us some traditional houses and villages (more like clusters of houses).

When we got back to the Siem Reap area, we went to Preah Khan and Neak Pean. The first was great; there were endless rectangular doors and tons of carvings. I remarked to D that it felt like it could have been computer-generated (which he thought was super geeky of me). Neak Pean consists of four "healing ponds" with an island in the center. It was nice to look at (and nearly deserted!) but I hear that it is much cooler when the ponds are full.

Phnom Penh, Cambodia (2008)

2011-03-18T20:08:00.000-07:00

I'm starting up again with the transcription of my old travel journals, with our trip to Cambodia and Vietnam in spring 2008.

We flew to Phnom Penh through Taipei so we had time for some Taiwanese snacks during our three-hour layover. We arrived shortly after noon and took a $9 taxi to the Pavilion Hotel. We tried to get some local money from the ATM but it dispensed US dollars! We were a little annoyed that we'd just paid extra fees to get the same money we could have brought from home, but laughed it off. We soon discovered that everyone did in fact accept USD and in fact gave change in USD, except for very small amounts, which were returned not in US coins but in paper "riel". The accepted conversion rate was 4000:1.

The hotel was quite nice, with decent air conditioning and solar panel heated water. The bathroom was new and clean. There were also prominent signs stating that sex tourists were not welcome. I guess it must be a pretty bad problem in Cambodia. There was a funny incident where D tipped the bellboy $1 for carrying our four bags; he was worried that it was too little, but realized it must have been too much as the boy was profusely grateful and was super eager to help us during the rest of our stay.

We left the hotel at 2pm to do some sightseeing...big mistake. It was very hot (probably mid-90s) and very humid. We went to the National Museum and Royal Palace, hoping for some time indoors, but were more impressed with the gardens than the (non air-conditioned) exhibits. We had some trouble finding the "silver pagoda" which turned out not to be silver.

National Museum:

Royal Palace:

For dinner we went to a restaurant called Khmer Borune. We ordered three dishes:
- lakh lakh beef: cubed chunks of beef with onions and tomatoes, served with vinegar-y sour pepper sauce, very good
- nataing pork: my favorite, cooked with coconut curry and served over crispy rice cakes
- palm sugar fish: served with a caramelized sauce (I didn't try it)

For dessert we were given free mangos, plus we ordered Khmer cake, which was also yummy; it seemed to have been made with coconut and maybe mung bean. Overall we were quite happy with our meal, and had a fun time chatting with a neighboring couple from New Mexico who had just returned from Siem Reap and gave us some useful tips, such as the going rate for tuk-tuks ($2).

After eating, we walked to the supermarket to get water, since we were still dehydrated despite drinking tons of water at dinner. Everyone seemed to cross the street completely haphazardly, so navigating the street after dark was a bit of an adventure. The streets were also a little sketchy looking, but luckily we didn't have far to walk to get back to our hotel.

The next day we were slightly jetlagged so we were up by 6am. We got ready in time to have an excellent free continental breakfast. My favorite item was the delicious fresh passionfruit juice with lots of crunchy seeds; it was a little bit like drinking pearl milk tea. The coffee was also very good, and there were baguettes and a nutty bread, served with fresh fruit, jams and good butter. Around 8am we started walking towards Wat Phnom.

It was about a 25-minute walk, but the weather was much nicer in the morning so we didn't mind. The wat itself was not spectacular but rather charming. The caretakers were very friendly and smiled at us a lot.

Afterwards we grabbed a tuk-tuk to the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, which chronicles a lot of the atrocities that occurred during the Khmer Rouge regime.

It was sad and depressing but educational and I guess worth seeing.

We decided against going to the Killing Fields though; we'd had enough history by then and the tuk-tuk drivers were a little too eager to take us there. We got lunch at the adjacent Boddhi Tree Umma where the service was excellent and the (Western-style) food was fairly tasty. We had a nice conversation with an older American couple there who were living in Cairo. After eating we grabbed another tuk-tuk back to the hotel to hide out during the hottest hours of the day.

For dinner, we ate at a restaurant called "Friends" which is also a training program for street children. The food was good and we were hungry so we had a lot of it: sweet potato fries with chili mango sauce, pork and beef meatballs with rice, mango salad with sesame and peppers, "fish" cakes with rice noodles (refreshing!), and Cambodian chicken curry (good but generic). The portion sizes were large for tapas and we couldn't finish, but it was reasonably priced at $18.50 total, especially given that part of the proceeds were going to the training program.

We finally made it to the Russian Market after dinner, but we were less than impressed; the silk goods weren't of very high quality, and the sculptures and trinkets struck me as cheesy. There was an open air food court of sorts behind the market, where lots of locals were snacking, but there were tons of flies, so despite our usual affinity for street food, we passed.

On the way home we were stopped a block away by a police barricade. We couldn't figure out why until we saw a huge wedding next door to our hotel. They were playing surprisingly modern music (lots of guitar), and there were hundreds of guests, dozens of police cars, and everything was decorated elaborately with lots of flowers.

rerun sadness

2011-03-18T16:00:00.000-07:00

Over the summer I became obsessed with How I Met Your Mother and started watching reruns like mad. In the beginning it was great; pretty much every episode was new to me, and I could watch them back-to-back for days. After a few months, I could only find a new episode about every week.

About a month ago, I stopped finding any new episodes at all. It took awhile to dawn on me that maybe I'd already seen *all* the episodes. Yesterday I went and read through the entire list of five seasons of episodes and confirmed that yes, I've seen all of them. Boo.

(The last "new old" episode I watched was Slapsgiving. Hilarious.)

The Restaurant at Meadowood

2011-03-05T17:54:00.000-08:00

Last weekend, D and I drove up to St. Helena to have dinner at the newest Michelin three-star restaurant, The Restaurant at Meadowood.

Along the way, we stopped at the ferry building for lunch and got an amazing cheeseburger from the 4505 Meats stand and a fatty pork sandwich from Il Cane Rosso.

We made further stops at Bouchon Bakery for macarons, and Oxbow Public Market, where we cobbled together the next day's breakfast: sausages from The Fatted Calf, baguettes from The Model Bakery, and Appalachian and Midnight Moon cheese from the Oxbow Cheese Merchant.

We finally arrived in St. Helena a little after 5pm. The property at Meadowood is gorgeous, and reminded me a bit of Blue Hill at Stone Barns. All of the staff were really nice and we were directed to a parking area, and then up a small brick path.

When we arrived at the door to the restaurant, we found it locked. It was 5:15pm, and our reservation was for 5:30pm, so granted they didn't technically have to be open for us yet, but still I found it strange. Anyway, we walked around for a few minutes looking around the property, so we were pretty cold when we finally entered the restaurant just before 5:30pm. The maitre d' offered to take my coat, and I told him I'd keep it as I was still warming up, but he insisted the dining room was very warm, so I let him take it. He was right about the temperature in the dining room, but later on when I had to use the restroom I discovered it was outside, so I was pretty cold getting there and back.

After we entered the (cozy, intimate) dining room, we were seated at a nice window table and our server (really nice, a little too chatty) was soon over with our menus. Meadowood offers two options: an eight-course prix fixe, and a four-course menu where each person gets to pick four dishes of his/her choice. We discussed it for awhile, eventually the "soy-cured foie gras", the lobster, and the duck swayed us towards the tasting menu.

Before the menu began, we were served several substantial amuse bouches. The first one was a "crudite pillow" filled with liquid fromage:

Next was my favorite, a hominy and pork fritter with powdered sour cream.

This dish was served simultaneously; it consisted of flash frozen vegetables with lettuce creme fraiche and garlic vinaigrette snow. I was surprised by the use of several molecular gastronomy-style techniques throughout the meal.

Finally, we were brought a persimmon-flavored mousse with citrus peel, eel bacon, and some other garnishes. I am not a huge fan of persimmon but this dish was well-executed and I did enjoy it.

Then it was on to the menu itself. The first course was the soy-cured foie gras (wrapped), with what tasted like marinated giant clam on the side. I enjoyed it, but D prefers foie gras served whole, instead of as a terrine, so I think he was a bit disappointed.

This was described as a garden potage with roasted grains, matsutake mushroom, and whipped bacon. It was pretty yummy although the whipped bacon was a little overwhelming, but not especially interesting, flavor-wise.

I liked the creativity of the next dish, which our server described as "deconstructed dim-sum". The white part was langostine in a rice flour wrapper. Underneath was pork belly with honshimeji mushrooms, and there were scallops on the side. The langostine was yummy if a bit salty, but the pork was not that great; tougher than I expected.

The "charmoula rubbed duck" was served with celery leaf, rhubarb, and mustard. Again I thought it was a bit saltier than I would have liked, but I did enjoy the tartness of the rhubarb and mustard seeds.

This dish was entitled "black and white" and contained sweetbreads, served with black truffle, black trumpet mushrooms, and parsnips. The sweetbreads were tender but again salty, but I liked the mushrooms very much.

I thought the presentation of this cheese dish was very cute. It was pecornio with bits of pear and macadamia nut brittle, served with a nutty bread and some spiced chips.

The palate cleanser was quite interesting; it was made of rye and geranium mead, with green apple gel underneath. The taste wasn't very strong but I guess that was the point.

The dessert was called "impressions of coffee" and again the presentation was nice, but at this point I was starting to get tired of the deconstructed look. Also, although tasty, almost everything on the plate tasted pretty much the same; like coffee, just with different textures.

At this point D and I were discussing our impressions and we had concluded that the food did not quite live up to its three-star billing. Then, the server arrived with this presentation of mignardises:

She described the treats as: almond financier brushed with mushroom and fennel powder, goat cheese puff, campari gelee, chocolate fudge, and marshmallow with fruit jam. They were sitting on top of a (non-edible) piece of real moss. This left a really good final impression on us, but we still concluded that while worth the visit, we probably would not return again, given the price and the distance we had to drive to get there. I do wonder if we had gone before the third star was awarded, if our expectations would have been lower and if we would have had a difference experience.

Baker & Banker

2011-03-01T18:22:00.000-08:00

I'd had Baker & Banker on my restaurants list for awhile, so when my friend said she wanted to go, I told her to pick a date and I'd be there. We went on a rainy Friday; I'd booked an 8pm reservation because I knew traffic would be crazy, and we left my house at 7pm, but we still barely made it after spending 25 minutes between the Cesar Chavez and Bay Bridge exits.

The restaurant was cute but dark, so my photos are pretty bad. I'll include them anyway for the sake of illustration. We were a party of three, so we were given a nice corner booth.

The prix fixe was 65, which was an okay deal for four courses, but the wine pairing was only 35, which seemed like a good deal, so we decided to go for it. (Starters were 10-15, entrees were 20-30, and desserts were 8.)

First up was an amuse bouche which looked like a tiny cream puff, but was filled with something cheesy, with a savory/salty sauce. I've forgotten exactly what it was but it was tasty.

The first starter was a duck confit with a delicious coleslaw-like salad, topped with hazelnuts and apple cider vinaigrette. I think this was my favorite dish; the confit wasn't too salty, nor the vinaigrette too sour, and overall it tasted way better and more interesting than it sounded, so it was a pleasant surprise.

Next was a shellfish risotto, topped with fried shallots and cilantro oil. I liked this too; the seafood flavor was quite strong and there were nice juicy bits of shellfish in the risotto. I couldn't really tell that there was cilantro in it, though.

The entree was a wagyu beef with oxtail croutons. The croutons were clever, and overall I enjoyed the dish, but I felt that it was the least creative of the three savory dishes, although well-executed.

At this point we were served a generous portion of passionfruit sorbet. Not much to say, it cleansed the palate.

The dessert was described as a "vanilla cheesecake" which did not sound interesting at all, so I was surprised that it came liberally topped with caramel sauce, with a thick layer of crumbly cake underneath:

It was better than what I'd been expecting, but I liked the savory dishes more.

Overall we had a very pleasant evening; the food was yummy, service was good, the wine pours were generous (almost too generous!), and we were excited to spot both Lori Baker and Jeffrey Banker circling the dining room interacting with diners. I'd recommend a visit.

proper English

2011-02-28T09:11:00.000-08:00

I was amused by this exchange following a "Pimp My Ride" reference in a post:

coworker #1:	The objection I have to "Pimp my Ride" is largely the name. It's a noun used as a verb, followed by a verb used as a noun. I'm not even very comfortable with the "my" either -- the protagonists of the piece are not "pimping" my "ride", but I as the viewer am observing whilst this act befalls a third party entirely unbeknown to me. A more correct title would be "Television programme wherein individuals have outlandish enhancements made to their vehicles."
coworker #2:	I can only conclude that you would have fewer objections to a show entitled Ride my Pimp.

coworker #1:

The objection I have to "Pimp my Ride" is largely the name. It's a noun used as a verb, followed by a verb used as a noun. I'm not even very comfortable with the "my" either -- the protagonists of the piece are not "pimping" my "ride", but I as the viewer am observing whilst this act befalls a third party entirely unbeknown to me. A more correct title would be "Television programme wherein individuals have outlandish enhancements made to their vehicles."

coworker #2:

I can only conclude that you would have fewer objections to a show entitled Ride my Pimp.

california love

2011-02-25T10:19:00.000-08:00

A few days ago, a friend and I were discussing how high California's taxes are. We currently have the sixth highest state income tax at 10.6% (trailing New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Wisconsin, and Rhode Island), and the highest sales tax at 8.25% (not counting local taxes). She laughed at me when I concluded "it sucks here, too bad it's so nice". Admittedly that was not my best communication moment, but I think both of us understood what I was trying to say. It really is very hard for me to imagine living anywhere else, and as much as I complain about costs, it's still a no-brainer for me to stay.

Tangentially, I recently ran across this quote which amused me:
It is an odd thing, but every one who disappears is said to be seen at San Francisco. It must be a delightful city, and possess all the attractions of the next world. -- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

you know you're old when...

2011-02-20T15:11:00.000-08:00

...no matter what kind of social gathering you're at, if there are ten or more people, at least one has had knee surgery. Sigh.

more Vosges bars

2011-02-19T11:31:00.000-08:00

I've been obsessed with Vosges chocolates for several years now, so when D went on his business trip to Vegas and asked me if I wanted anything, I rattled off a list of new Vosges bars that I wanted to try. I asked him to buy "three or four" but apparently there was some special bulk discount so he came home with six!

I've now tried all of them, and some were noticeably better than others. In reverse order of preference:

Blood Orange Caramel: blood orange + Campari + burnt sugar caramel + hibiscus flowers, 70% cacao dark chocolate. This one was terrible. It sounded delicious, but when I tried to break the bar into pieces, the caramel came spilling out. The blood orange and Campari were supposed to be tart enough to offset the caramel, but they weren't. I may not even finish this one.

Marzipan: Sicilian almond marzipan + amaretto, 62% cacao dark chocolate. Like the Blood Orange bar, this bar consisted of chocolate filled with gooey stuff inside. I'm not a fan; I prefer the ingredients blended into the chocolate itself. I guess I'll have to read the descriptions more carefully in the future, so I can avoid these. On the bright side, in this case the marzipan was not as sweet as the caramel, so although I disliked the texture, the taste was okay.

Bapchi's Caramel Toffee: Sweet butter toffee + walnuts + pecans, 45% cacao deep milk chocolate. After the experience with the Blood Orange bar, I was afraid of anything labelled "Caramel" but I was pleasantly surprised; in this case it was just caramel flavor in the crispy toffee. If this had been a dark chocolate bar I would have liked it even better, as it was a little bit sweet, but it was good anyway (I've nearly finished it already).

Peppermint Candy Cane: all natural candy cane + peppermint, 62% cacao dark chocolate. For once, the bar tasted just like it sounded. It was yummy but not very exciting.

Cherry Rooibos: African rooibos tea + dried Michigan cherries, 45% cacao deep milk chocolate. This one was D's favorite, and my second favorite. The tea gave it a nice exotic flavor, and the cherries reminded me of one of my all-time favorite Vosges bars, the Goji bar. Although it was milk chocolate, we did not find it too sweet, and between the two of us, we finished this bar within a week.

Gingerbread Toffee: gingerbread spiced toffee, 65% cacao dark chocolate. I liked this one the best. The spiced toffee was subtle, crunchy, and delicious with the dark chocolate. Unfortunately it seems to be a seasonal bar as I can no longer find it on the Vosges website.

Overall, I think Gingerbread Toffee and Cherry Rooibos have joined Mo's Bacon Bar (the dark chocolate version) and the Goji bar as my favorite bars. As far as the truffles go, I'm still waiting for spring so I can order the Green Collection...

unexpected benefits

2011-02-09T13:08:00.000-08:00

I finally went to a PT today about my knee, since I'd had some trouble on Monday at kickboxing and then yesterday at basketball.

She diagnosed me with an MCL strain/sprain, and said that it should be recovered by 4-6 weeks from the date of injury, which is about 1.5-3.5 weeks from now. She also massaged it for awhile and said that it was healing a little "lumpy" and that I should massage and then ice it every day to keep it smooth, so it would form "good" scar tissue (that won't hinder movement or cause pain in the future).

We then had the following exchange:

her:	Your range of motion is surprisingly good, though. Usually sitting eight hours a day is bad for properly stretching out a healing MCL.
me:	Oh, I have a standing desk.
her:	Aha, that explains it. Yup, that probably saved your range of motion. I won't suggest additional stretching, then.

sweeeet

2011-02-08T14:34:00.001-08:00

$ cat /proc/meminfo
MemTotal: 24739480 kB

(finally rebooted to install my new RAM)

conflict

2011-02-08T11:19:00.000-08:00

I just realized why I keep missing episodes of House. My cheapo Dish DVR cannot tape House, Chuck, and How I Met Your Mother at the same time. I guess I should be thankful for Hulu.

very cool

2011-02-08T11:18:00.000-08:00

I'm sitting at my desk around 5:30pm yesterday and I get a chat message from one of the front desk guys at the gym. He asks me if my phone was in a soft Droid case. I try not to get too excited, but I confirm that yes, it's a Samsung Nexus S with the special "tiny androids" backplate and it's in a Nexus One soft case. He says, "I think we have your phone."

I run over to the gym and confirm that yes, in fact, it is my phone. Unfortunately there's no way to unsend the wipe signal, so pretty much as soon as I unlock it, it does a factory reset on itself, and now I'm busy reinstalling all my apps and reconfiguring all my settings. I'm not complaining, though!

At first I thought I really might have been so stupid as to have just let it fall out of my bag, but then I called T-Mobile to re-enable the service, and the phone still didn't work. I opened up the back cover, and the SIM card was installed upside down. Also, the battery was at over 90%. Clearly, the phone had not been on all weekend without a charger.

Anyway, I'm really really stoked to have my phone back! And, I think it's time to invest in a padlock.

not cool

2011-02-04T17:45:00.000-08:00

I went to the gym today at lunchtime, as I always do on Fridays. I went to the locker room, changed, put my things in my gym bag, put the bag in a locker (no lock, like all lockers in our gyms), and went to class. After class I showered and changed back, and then looked for my phone, which I had put in a pocket of my bag. I couldn't find it.

I was pretty sure I'd had it on me, so I checked the locker again, and then the bag. I still couldn't find it, so I went back to my desk and checked my purse. No phone.

I went on Latitude and tracked myself. My last known location was 11:51am at the gym.

I called my phone. It went straight to voicemail.

I called the gym. They hadn't found any phones.

I called security. They were able to tell me that I swiped into the gym at 11:48am, but as there were no security cameras in the locker room (duh), they couldn't do much else for me. They also said no phones had been found.

I called techstop, and they sent a wipe command to my phone. They advised me to wait a few hours to see if the thief would attempt to turn on the phone, thus executing the wipe, and then to file a police report and call my carrier.

The City of Mountain View has a nice online form, so I filed a report immediately.

Looks like I'll be talking to T-Mobile tonight.

I'm pretty bummed that I lost my brand-new unlocked smartphone, not to mention my SIM card. I'm also sad that someone here at work would steal from a fellow employee. Plus, I feel oddly naked without a phone. Sigh.

#10 in progress

2011-02-03T09:15:00.000-08:00

Conversation with a coworker:

me:	It's done! I have plane tickets to Chicago and a reservation at Alinea in April.
him:	So, you're flying to Chicago to eat at a restaurant.
me:	Umm, no. I'm flying to Chicago because D has a business trip anyway, and to visit my brother, who wants to go to Alinea too.
him:	Heh, okay whatever.

(I also want to eat at Hot Doug's and go to The Violet Hour.)

23andMe

2011-01-30T13:26:00.000-08:00

23andMe was having a sale over the holidays, so I bought kits for both D and me. D got his results back last week, but I just now got mine. As expected, I do not have the alcohol flush gene. However, I do have the lactose intolerance gene, although as far as I can tell I'm not intolerant. I also have 4.4x the usual risk of developing Celiac disease (allergy to wheat gluten). I wonder if eating tons of bread increases or decreases that risk?

Lisbon, Portugal (2005)

2011-01-29T15:54:00.001-08:00

Our train arrived in Lisbon early the next morning, and we hopped a bus to downtown. There we discovered that Lisbon is quite hilly. Although our hostel was only 500 meters from the bus stop, the distance consisted primarily of 4 sets of stairs.

After dropping off our luggage at our hostel (Pensao Londres, 80 EUR/quad), we went back towards town and got breakfast at A Brazilica, a cafe that seemed quite popular with the locals.

Then, we headed towards Belem, where we saw an old monastery which housed the tomb of the explorer Vasco da Gama, a monument to Portuguese exploration headed by Prince Henry the Navigator, and the Tower of Belem.

We then tried to go to the Basilica Estrela, but got sidetracked at the Praca do Comercio, down by the water. We hung out for awhile, shopping and snacking, before finally catching the tram to Estrela. Unfortunately, when we got there at 7pm, there was a service going on, so we just looked at the exterior, peeked at the adjacent gardens, and then headed back.

We had dinner at Martinho da Arcada, one of the oldest restaurants in Lisbon. Despite its reputation and the nicely dressed waitstaff, the food was only so-so.

As we were walking back to our hostel, we saw lots of people in formal dress emerging from the subway to walk down a red carpet into some kind of event. That, combined with the fireworks setup that we saw in Belem, made us think that it must be some kind of holiday, but we couldn't figure out what it was.

The next day, we took a train to a nearby town called Sintra. There, we visited the very colorful Pena Palace, we walked up and down the walls of the "Castle of the Moors", and admired the view from the mountain top.

It was a comfortable day trip from Lisbon and a nice break from visiting big cities.

(I don't know what happened, but I seem to not have taken any notes on the very last day of our trip. I'm guessing we probably wandered around Lisbon some more? I have a couple photos that look like they were taken from up on a hill. Oops.)

On the morning of the fourth day, we caught our flight to Heathrow, and then back to San Francisco.

Now, over five years later, I'd say my favorite part of the trip was our visit to the Alhambra in Granada. I also have fond memories of eating paella in Valencia, and of our time in Paris; although I'd been before, it was very different having Parisian friends taking us around. In addition, we had never driven in Europe before, and it was really nice being able to see some of the countryside and smaller towns for once, rather than being restricted to trains and big cities.

Madrid, Spain (2005)

2011-01-26T21:23:00.000-08:00

It took about six hours to drive from Seville to Madrid, so we arrived at the Hostal Adriano a few hours before dinner. Our quad was cheerfully furnished with colorful Ikea-looking furniture, but the elevator was broken and we were on the 4th floor. This was somewhat of a pain especially with luggage.

For dinner we went to a tapas bar called Taberna Maceiras, which was yummy and cheap. I especially liked their seafood dishes; mussels, clams, and a tasty octopus dish. Afterwards we walked around the Paseo de Prado and saw lots of fountains and interesting-looking buildings.

The next day we walked to the Puerta de Sol, to the Plaza Callao, and then up the Gran Via, pausing occasionally to shop along the way. I quickly decided that I liked Madrid better than Seville; the streets were wider and straighter, not paved with cobblestones, and everything was newer and grander-looking.

We had lunch at a cafe on top of El Corte Ingles (a giant department store) and then wandered over to the Palacio Real (Royal Palace) and its gardens.

We also stopped by the nearby Almudena Cathedral (not super impressive, or maybe we were sick of churches).

After walking through the historic Plaza Mayor, we found lunch at a wacky-looking restaurant called Malacatin. There, we paid 18 EUR apiece for a barrage of meats and vegetables, including: chickpeas, potatoes, cabbage, beef, ham, sausage, chicken, and lots of other dishes that I've forgotten. We ate ourselves sick, and then headed to the Museo Reina Sofia.

There were pretty good exhibits showcasing Dali, Miro, and Picasso, but otherwise I wasn't particularly interested in the rest of the modern art. The building itself was kind of cool looking, with glass elevators overlooking a square. We spent some time at an art fair that happened to be taking place outside.

For dinner, we ate at Arroceria Gala, which specialized in (of course) rice and paella dishes. The paella there was okay, but I still liked the version we had in Valencia best.

On our last morning in Spain, we finally got a chance to try traditional Spanish churros. The accompanying "hot chocolate" turned out to be almost the consistency of chocolate pudding, and about as rich. We'd only gotten two orders for the four of us, and were still unable to finish them. I can't believe Spanish people eat churros with chocolate for breakfast! It tasted very much like a heavy dessert to me.

We then spent a few hours at the Prado Museum. They had a great display of Goya paintings, including the 3rd of March, as well as some Velazquez, Rafael, El Greco, Titian, Rubens, Rembrandt, and Caravaggio. It was quite an impressive collection.

We also drove out to the Plaza de Europa to see the new "leaning towers" and to check out that area of town, before returning to our hostel to grab our bags.

From there, it was two transfers to get to the main train station; first the Metro from Sol to Plaza de Castilla, and then the SE (special edition, presumably?) bus to the Chamartin train station to catch our overnight train to Lisbon. We got on at 10:45pm, settled our luggage (our cabin consisted of two sets of bunk beds, a sink, and not much else), played hearts for an hour or so, and then went to sleep.

warning: much whining follows

2011-01-26T15:40:00.000-08:00

On Saturday, I sprained my knee getting off a chairlift, which meant the end of my ski weekend. I spent Sunday in the lodge watching football, which would have been kind of okay, except I also had stomachache (probably from eating ramen and s'mores all day).

On Monday, I came down with a horrible cold and went home early. On Tuesday, I stayed home entirely, due to being incapacitated by that cold. On Tuesday night, D came home from work with my cold. Due to both our colds and my knee not recovering very quickly, we had to cancel our Tahoe trip for next weekend. Grr.

This morning, I went to the dentist and had some fillings. During the process, the dentist said "hmm...", took a bunch more x-rays, and then told me I'd have to come back for more fillings. Twice.

It is really not my week. I wonder if I should hide in a bunker on Friday.

Granada & Seville (2005)

2011-01-25T17:51:00.000-08:00

The road between Valencia and Granada wasn't great. We left just after 3pm but didn't arrive at our hostel until after 10pm. We did stop at a small diner outside of Jaen for a quick dinner, and we also got lost at the very end due to bad directions, but I'd say the drive takes a minimum of six hours.

Driving long the interior was pretty different from the coast. There were lots of mountains and tunnels, and the people seemed a lot less used to tourists (or maybe just Asian tourists), although not in an unfriendly way. I didn't feel like I was constantly checking my pockets anymore, but very few people spoke any English, so it was harder to get around.

The hostel, once we found it, was really nice. It was called Hostal Camino Real, it cost only 39 EUR for a double with ensuite bath. The entire building seemed new, and both the bathroom and the bedroom were spacious, with a bidet and a heated towel rack in the bathroom. It was run by an older woman who sounded American (or Canadian) and was friendly and helpful. The location was super convenient for us, since we were primarily focused on visiting the Alhambra, and the hostel is right on the road leading up to it.

We'd discovered while in Valencia that the advance tickets for the Alhambra were sold out already, for the date we wanted. Our only option was to arrive early and try to get one of the 2000 tickets which were released at 8am every day.

So, the next morning, we were up by 7am, and in line by 7:40am. We were probably around 200th in line, so we got our tickets within 15-20 minutes of opening, and were inside the gate by 8:30am with our audio tour guides.

We spent the next four hours looking around, at the Nasrid palace, Charles V's palace, the gardens, the Alcazaba, and all the other sights. We had an amazing time at the Alhambra; for me it was the highlight of our trip.

I took a whole bunch of pictures before finally exiting the area around 12:45pm, tired and ravenously hungry, since we hadn't had time for breakfast. We headed into town to grab a bite, and ended up eating at a pizzeria called "Yesterday".

By 3pm we were on the road towards Seville. Although the distance was only 265 kilometers, and it only took 2.5 hours to drive, it felt like forever; I guess we were tired from our early morning, and (again) the road wasn't great.

We got to Seville around 5:30pm and checked into our hostel, Casa Sol y Luna (42 EUR/double). After an hour or so of vegging out, we went to a local bar/cafe for some tapas and "fino", a very dry sherry. Then we walked to the Cathedral, through the Alcazar Gardens, and enjoyed an ice cream on the waterfront, before heading back to the hostel.

The next day, we dropped off our laundry with the hostel owner (10 EUR/load) and bought tickets to El Arenal, a flamenco show. We got a late brunch at Cafe Bar Campanario, by the Cathedral (cheap and delicious tapas and sangria). We decided against going inside the Cathedral itself, and did some shopping in the area near our hostel instead, until everything started to close for siesta around 1:30pm. We retired to our hostel since there was nothing to do but wait out the siesta, and went out shopping again around 4:30pm, in the Calle Sierpes area. D and I ended up buying some ceramic serving plates as gifts.

For dinner we ate at El Baratillo / Casa Cheri, a very homey paella place where one woman took all the orders, cooked all the food, and chatted up all the diners.

After dinner she pulled out a guest book for us to sign, which was filled with notes from hundreds of guests from all over the world.

Finally, at 10:30pm, we went to see the flamenco show. There were six dancers, three guitarists, and three singers. It was pretty good, but not as impressive as I'd hoped.

Barcelona & Valencia (2005)

2011-01-20T21:00:00.000-08:00

From Carcassonne, we drove over the Spanish border to Barcelona. All went well until we reached the city, and then there were a series of small mishaps. First, we missed a turn in a roundabout, so we came out on the Avenue Diagonal instead of the Avenue Meridiana. Then, we got stuck not being able to make a left turn for what turned out to be several miles. Finally, we got a flat.

Luckily our friends were much more useful than we were in this situation; the tire got changed in 15 minutes flat. We asked a passing couple for directions, and although they were very nice, their rapid mix of Catalan and Spanish was quite difficult for D to understand. Also, the two of them gave conflicting advice. D ended up trusting the woman, and did manage to get us to our hostel shortly afterwards. We'd had a great experience with the Pensione Fernando back in 2000, it was an easy call to go back there.

Similarly, for dinner, we returned to to Le Quinze Nits, off of the Placa Reial, and just like last time, while we were waiting for a table, we watched some poor tourist get their pocket picked. Ahh, Barcelona.

Dinner was fantastic. First of all, the four of us drank two liters of sangria. For food, I had beef carpaccio, a lobster and shrimp turine, and half of a "Catalana dessert" which tasted somewhat like flan. Everything was delicious, and the bill only came out to 38 EUR per couple.

The next day we got off to bit of a a late start. For breakfast, we had Spanish omelettes at a cafe off of Las Ramblas. Then we went down to the Hertz office to figure out out what to do about our flat. They wanted to charge us 120 EUR just to fix (not replace) it, so we decided to get it fixed ourselves before leaving town the next day. We bought our Madrid to Lisbon overnight train tickets since we were near the train station, and then finally set off on our self-guided city tour.

First, we hit the Sagrada Familia. The insides of the spires are hollow, and there is a (small, six-person) elevator that rises about 65 meters inside one of them. From there, we walked across a small bridge from one spire to another, and then ascended another 25 meters by stair. The stair circled around the spire's interior, with cutouts to either side, so we had some dramatic views of the city:

After coming back down, we went on a walking tour of L'Eixample district, which took us past several houses designed by Gaudi. We had lunch at a tapas place called Jofama, and then continued on to the Parc Guell. We walked around most of the park before heading back downtown for dinner. Despite not having reservations, we managed to squeeze in at 8:30pm (opening time) at Agua, a very popular waterfront restaurant, where we had fresh seafood tapas and entrees. For dessert we ordered an espresso mousse, which was supposedly created by Ferran Adria, but it wasn't as impressive as I'd expected. Afterwards, we walked around La Barceloneta (a neighborhood by the beach) for awhile before heading back to our hostel.

First thing the next morning, we went to find a tire repair place. It turned out to be quite an impressive operation; there was space for about four or five cars, and it was located at a triangular intersection, so the cars could easily drive in and out. It cost us 190 EUR to replace the tire, as it turned out to be unpatchable, but we figured Hertz would have charged us extra anyway.

Before leaving town, we stopped by the Olympic Park, where we wandered around for while in the garden near the torch, the stadium, and the entrance area.

From Barcelona it was about 3.5 hours to Valencia. Upon arrival we drove through the city to El Saler, just outside of town. We hung out at the beach for couple of hours; it was a bit rocky but the weather was warm and the water calm.

Afterwards we checked into our hostel (the Home Youth Hostel, for 62 EUR per quad), and set out to find some dinner. The restaurant recommended by our guidebook, El Rall, opened at 9pm, like most Spanish restaurants. We got there slightly before that to try and snag a table, which we did. There, we finally had a chance to try paella Valenciana (chicken & rabbit) in addition to some tasty tuna carpaccio. The paella was excellent, and the service size for four was extremely generous; we didn't even try to order dessert. The bill came out to less than 80 EUR for the four of us, so it was quite reasonably priced, too.

The one thing that we really wanted to see in Valencia was the new City of Art, Science, & Nature. Specifically, I'd heard "L'Oceanographique" aquarium was really impressive. So, we slept in a bit, and then packed up and headed there.

The entrance fee was pretty steep at 21.50 EUR, but it turned out to be really worth it. In three hours, we walked through all of the open exhibits and saw one of the two shows (the dolphins):

Other highlights included: walruses, beluga whales, penguins, sea otters, Japanese giant crabs, various sharks, and a Mediterranean exhibit. We also grabbed a quick lunch at a cafe inside, before leaving for Granada.

Chenonceau, Bordeaux, & Carcassone (2005)

2011-01-19T07:37:00.000-08:00

The next morning, we got all packed up and took the Metro to Gare de Lyon to pick up the rental car. We spent a couple of minutes wandering around in the railway station before spotting a "voitures" sign. Then, when we spotted the Hertz stand, we saw that was boarded up and locked shut. I was pretty worried at first, but when we got closer we were able to decipher a sign telling us that the Hertz was now located across the street. After that, we quickly found the right place.

Unfortunately, that wasn't the end of our troubles. The person who was helping us seemed fairly junior, and he was certainly very confused by our reservation (which we had made through Auto Europe and not Hertz, with a reduced drop fee). It took us 45 minutes to get our car, which ended up being two classes larger than we had wanted (Peugeot 407 wagon). Apparently it was a pain to drive, not that I dared to attempt driving it in Paris. We finally got on the road around 11am.

Our goal was to arrive in Bordeaux by evening, but along the way we visited the Chateau Chenonceau, not too far from Tours. We spent most of the afternoon there, walking in the gardens and looking around inside the castle itself:

In Bordeaux we checked into our hotel, the Hotel Choiseul (kind of old and dingy), before having dinner at Le Valentino, a small but trendy Italian-French fusion place off of the rue St. Remi. We had some trouble locating the restaurant (my fault) so we did get to see a fair amount of Vieux Bordeaux (Old Town) that evening, as well as lots of fancy boutiques in the Palais du Bourse area.

The next morning we checked out and headed to a nearby laundromat. Laundry cost 3.80 EUR for a 3kg load (washer only), and 1.10 EUR per 10 min for the dryers. In the end it was quite expensive, but we didn't have much choice. At this point I realized we'd forgotten our travel towels in the hotel, so I ran back just in time to catch the desk clerk as he was leaving for the afternoon! Luckily he was able to understand my broken French and he let me in to retrieve our towels.

For lunch we got some panini sandwiches near our parking garage in the Place des Grandes Hommes. Then, we set out for St. Emilion, a famous wine region near Bordeaux. It turned out to be a charming area with lots of old buildings and small streets. We walked up a tower to admire the view, and then decided to rent some bikes to further explore the area (10 EUR apiece). During our ride, we also stopped by a small chateau called Villemaurine and had a nice tour and tasting.

We left St. Emilion around 6pm, and arrived in Carcassonne just in time to check into our hostel at a decent hour. We'd chosen a tiny place called Sidsmums which was run by a British family. It was pretty bare but cute, with wood cabins and pebbled paths, and it was completely dark and silent at night, so we got a good night's sleep.

We got off to a later start the next morning, partially because we consciously decided to sleep in a bit, but also because one of our friends had forgotten her wallet under her pillow, so we had to turn back and get it. I guess I wasn't the only forgetful one!

We had a fairly cheap (5 EUR) breakfast in a small cafe near the canal in the lower city, and then tried to catch the shuttle to La Cite proper. We waited about 25 minutes before giving up and driving up. Surprisingly, we had no trouble finding parking up there, and it only cost a couple of Euro.

We wandered around inside for most of the rest of the day, climbing up and down the ramparts and watchtowers, and exploring the castle and the churches, including one very old cloister wall:

We did some souvenir shopping on our way out, and I was surprised they didn't have the Carcassonne board game available.

Paris, France (2005)

2011-01-15T09:13:00.000-08:00

D and I moved back into our house around Halloween, but I'm still cleaning up boxes from my study. A few weeks ago, I ran across a stack of composition notebooks. Back before I bought my netbook, I used to keep travel journals using pen-and-paper. I have notes from our trip to Western Europe in 2005, our trip to Eastern Europe in 2006, Cambodia and Vietnam in 2008, and Argentina, also in 2008. I'm glad that I have all the details down somewhere, but when people ask me for travel advice, it's way better to have them online, so I think I'm going to take some time and start transcribing them into this blog.

I'm starting with the oldest notebook, which chronicles an 18-day trip through France, Spain, and Portugal that D and I took with two friends. We left San Francisco on September 2nd and returned on September 20th.

We arrived in Paris in late afternoon of the 3rd. I had pre-booked us at the Fourcy branch of the MIJE hostel, which turned out to be centrally located, with small but clean rooms (32 EUR per person for doubles). Reception spoke excellent English but I did have to speak a few words of baby talk to the guy selling phone cards down the street: "telecarte" "pour telephoner", and "oui".

One of our friends had a high school friend who lived in Paris with her boyfriend. We met up with her and she took us to her apartment in Montrouge, where they served us delicious homemade crepes. Her boyfriend is from Bretagne (Brittney) which is where crepes originated, so I imagine they were quite authentic. We had toppings such as salmon and cheese, eggplant and pork, and olives. For dessert the choices were: assorted fruits, lemon and sugar, nutella, chocolate, and cointreau with sugar. Delicious!

The next morning we had free baguettes, croissants, coffee and juice at the hostel, and then headed off to the Louvre, since it happened to be the one Sunday a month that museums in Paris are free. D and I had been to the Louvre previously (in 2000) but our friends had not, so we hit all the famous pieces first (Mona Lisa, Madonna on the Rocks, Venus de Milo, Winged Victory, etc.), before perusing the Richelieu wing at a more leisurely pace. We also saw the apartments of Napoleon III for the first time, which was a bit like Versailles, although smaller and less grand. We also hung out in the Jardin des Tuileries for awhile before meeting back up with the friends from the previous day, plus another who arrived from London on the Eurostar. Once we found everyone, we took the subway out to Montmartre, where we hiked up to Sacre Coeur.

I had been up there twice before, but the view is really nice and the surrounding neighborhood very cute, so I certainly didn't mind returning again. We tried to get lunch, but the restaurant that we had in mind was closed for holiday; apparently it's common for French people to do this in late summer. We finally just got some fresh sandwiches (ham and cheese, etc.) from a little sandwich shop.

After eating, we went to check out L'Arc de Triomphe, and then walked back up the Champs Elysees, past the shops to the garden-like area, before cutting over to Les Invalides, and then into the Musee Rodin. The museum was nice, small, and filled with Rodin sculptures, both in the gorgeous garden and inside the one small building.

For dinner, we ate at Le Petit Prince, where the decor was interesting and the food was fabulous. The special was a duck-themed meal with three kinds of foie gras; one raw, one chilled, and one cooked. I had an appetizer of mussels and a main course of veal, cooked with fondue cheese and onions. It reminded me of French Onion Soup, but with different cheese. For dessert we had warm chocolate cake and millefeuille with strawberries and cream.

On our last full day in Paris, we had planned to sleep in, but were woken up around 8am by the fire alarm. After standing in the courtyard for 10-15 minutes, we were told it was a false alarm, but since we were already up, we figured we'd just head out. Note to self: in the future, when there is a fire alarm, go ahead and take the extra five minutes to get fully dressed and pack a day pack, because everyone sure as hell will.

After that auspicious beginning, we decided to go to Notre Dame, followed by the Centre Pompidou, and then the Picasso Museum. We had some problems finding lunch again (everything was closed) but finally ended up at a brasserie called Les Quatre Fils, where we ate croque monsieur, omelettes, and salads.

Afterwards, we decided to go back to the river to catch a boat tour. We went by boat from Notre Dame to the Eiffel Tower, where we tricked D into taking the elevator to the very top, from where we took tons of pictures.

One of my relatives had recommended Le Relais de Venise, so we went there for dinner. Upon being seated, we were asked one question each: "medium, well done, or rare?" before being served a salad, bread, fries, and steak with a curry-style sauce. At first we were a little worried about the portion sizes, but then the waitress came back around and dished out seconds, which made it a great deal for 24 EUR each (including wine).

We then took the Metro to Montparnasse where we had drinks at the restaurant on the 56th floor, while waiting for the Eiffel Tower to light up (every hour on the hour). I snapped a lot of photos, none of which turned out, but it was a nice view nonetheless.

whirlwind tour of the Big Island

2011-01-11T21:15:00.000-08:00

After several relaxing days in Maui, we headed to the Big Island for the rest of the week. I'd read my Big Island Revealed guidebook thoroughly before arriving, and had planned out an ambitious itinerary.

We arrived mid-afternoon and picked up our rental car. We had originally booked a compact, but the tourbook "strongly suggested" a 4x4, so we paid an extra $100 or so to upgrade to a Jeep Wrangler. Best decision ever.

After stopping by our hotel in Keauhou, we headed down the coast to South Point. It was super windy there, so all the trees were leaning over:

When we reached the coast, we tried to find the famous green sand beach, but after 20+ minutes of pretty extreme off-roading, we hadn't found it and the sun was starting to go down, so we gave up and just admired the sunset while driving back:

On the way home, we stopped by Annie's Island Fresh Burgers for dinner. They closed at 8pm, and by the time we arrived it was already 7:30pm, but they were super nice and the burgers were amazing. I had "Steakhouse Burger" which was topped with mushrooms, gorgonzola and arugula, and D had the "Fresh Catch Wasabi Sandwich" which was a fish sandwich on sourdough with wasabi sauce and onion rings inside. I don't remember the name of the actual fish, but D said it tasted kind of like butterfish.

The next day, our primary goal was to explore Volcanoes National Park. Since we knew it would be a long drive, we got up at 6am and were on the road by 7am.

First we stopped by Punalu'u, another black sand beach. It was less impressive this time since we'd already seen one in Maui, but still really pretty:

We arrived at the park well before noon, and drove all around the open parts of the summit area:

It kept raining on and off, but we decided to try a hike anyway. We parked our car at the Kilauea Iki Lookout and headed into the crater on the Kilauea Iki Trail.

The trail wraps around the right side of the crater rim before descending onto the crater floor:

It showered on us a couple of times, but it was so warm that we dried off pretty fast. It was a fun hike, and only a couple of hours long, so afterwards we grabbed a quick lunch at a tiny cafe in the town of "Volcano" and then proceeded onward to Hilo.

I had two primary objectives in Hilo; to buy cookies and candies from Big Island Candies, and to buy mochi from Two Ladies Kitchen. We accomplished both.

Our stop at Big Island Candies was super-efficient; it looked like they were used to tour groups, they had tons of samples, and we quickly decided on several boxes of Mac Nut Crunchies, a few bags of the famous chocolate caramel dipped shortbread, and some of the new toffee candies. I also liked the Kona coffee cookies but the bags were too big and looked too crushable to take home, so I passed on that. The salesladies were super nice and kept pushing more samples at me while trying to talk to me in Japanese. They seemed a bit confused when I replied in English but continued to encourage me to "try! try this!".

Our experience at Two Ladies was totally different. It was New Year's Eve and they were technically closing early at 3pm, but when we arrived at 3:45pm the door was still open, so we went in anyway. We tried to place an order but at first the guy behind the cash register said they were closed. We then tried to buy a pre-boxed assortment anyway, and as we were trying to get that rung up, a girl came out of the kitchen and said that they'd accept our order. We quickly scanned the menu and picked out eight flavors, waited until the cashier had helped another two or three customers (the place was crazy busy), and tried to place our order. It turned out they were out of a few flavors, so we tried again. In fact, we tried like three or four times, each time waiting in line again, and by the time we got and paid for our order, we'd been there for over half an hour. Some of the flavors that we either attempted to order or ended up getting were: lilikoi (aka passionfruit), peach, plum, sweet potato, daifuku, tsumami, chiso, yomogi (some kind of leaf), kamato, peanut butter, and brownie. The whole time, I was impatient to leave because I wanted to hit a few more sights in Hilo before heading back to the volcano, so I was totally not appreciating the super-chill super-slow Hawaiian mode of operation. Later when we were eating the delicious strawberry red bean mochi in the car, I grudgingly decided it had been worth the wait after all. In fact, D says he may be spoiled for mochi forever.

Despite the delay, we did manage to stop by nearby Rainbow Falls before leaving Hilo:

From Hilo, it was about an hour drive to the lava flow viewing area at Kalapana. There were warning signs recommending 4x4 a few minutes out, but it wasn't really necessary, and right at the end we were directed to park and walk. It was only half a mile from the parking lot to the barricaded area, but it was a bit treacherous walking across the solidified lava, so the USGS had marked out a safe trail:

The lava was amazing. We got right up to about ten feet away, and could see clearly as the orange extrusions appeared, grew, and then cooled off and became dark grey and solid. There was a security guard there but he was super nice; he helped people get close-up photos with their cameras, poked at the lava with a stick to show us how hard it was, and answered lots of random questions. He explained that the part of the lava that we were standing on was only three days old, and that typically tourists were not allowed to get this close to the lava flow, but luckily the USGS had recently come by and certified a safe path for us.

We stayed for a good hour and a half, until after sunset. As the sun went down, it was easier to see all the glowing bits of orange everywhere, but it got harder to take photos:

As we were standing there looking at the lava, I recognized a former coworker of mine! She used to do marketing for my team's project, but had left to join a startup, and I hadn't seen her for several years. She had apparently gotten married as she was there with her husband, but otherwise looked much the same. Small world, indeed.

On our last full day in Hawaii, we decided to make good use of our Jeep yet again. First we drove up to Waipi'o Valley, on the north side of the island. The drive there was pleasant, but from the overlook it was a mile down a 25% grade mud/dirt road with multiple switchbacks, followed by a flat part covered in giant mud puddles. I was seriously afraid we were going to drown the engine, but we did make it to the beach, and it was very relaxing and peaceful there:

After getting back to the top, we first stopped by Tex's Drive In in Honokaa for some malasadas (Portuguese doughnuts), and then at Hawaiian Style Cafe in Kamuela for a real lunch. I ordered a Kalua pig hash and D had a combo plate of honey fried chicken and kalbi. When we saw the food we realized our mistake. Either we should have saved the malasadas for later, or we should have shared one dish. Despite being quite cheap, the portions were huge, and came with lots of sides (mac salad, fried potatoes, and more). We ended up taking half of the food to go, and headed for the Saddle Road.

The Saddle Road sits between Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea and links Kona and Hilo. The guidebook said that it was not in very good shape, but I think it must have been paved since then, because we had no problems at all. About halfway down the road, we turned towards Mauna Kea, heading for the Onizuka Center for International Astronomy.

The summit of Mauna Kea is at an elevation of almost 14,000 feet, is a dry environment, and has stable airflow. As a result, it is one of the best sites in the world for astronomical observation, and there are thirteen world-class observatories up there, funded by eleven different countries.

Ellison Onizuka was an astronaut who was born and raised in Kona. He successfully completed a mission on the Space Shuttle Discovery before being killed later in the Challenger explosion. The Onizuka Center is named for him. We stopped there at the Visitor Information Station, where we inquired about the best way to approach the summit. We knew that we were required to have a 4x4 vehicle, but they also gave us a detailed map and told us that if we could catch up to the tour which had left just ten minutes prior, we could see the inside of the Keck Observatory.

We started up the gravel road, which didn't seem that steep to me, but we had a hard time keeping up a decent speed, and D said the Jeep would fishtail from time to time. About a mile and a half in, it started beeping and flashing "hot oil". I told D to pull over, we turned off the A/C, waited 5-10 minutes, and started again. This time we made it up to about mile 4 before the beeping began. Again we waited a few minutes, and this time we were able to hit the pavement at mile 5 and make it up the rest of the way to mile 8.

The view at the top was breathtaking:

It was also really, really cold at 40 degrees, plus wind chill. Luckily we had both brought fleeces, windbreakers, and I had a scarf. We'd lost the tour on our way up, so when we got to Keck I (there are two Keck observatories), we had to bang on the door to get them to let us in. (They did.)

The tour guides showed us the telescope and talked about a lot of the new techniques used to optimize the images, such as adaptive optics using deformable mirrors.

We then went outside and they talked about the different organizations/countries which had funded each of the telescopes, and even a little bit about the history and geology of Mauna Kea. Towards the end I got really cold and retreated inside the car, but even then I enjoyed the view.

After the tour we slowly descended back to the visitor center at 9,000 feet. We kept stopping along the way to take photos, and we noticed other tourists copying us, too. The scenery was really spectacular:

Back down at the visitor center, we attended a talk given by a lecturer from the University of Hawaii (Hilo) about his work with adaptive optics. It was fascinating, but sadly half of the audience left early. On the bright side, the other half of the audience was super-engaged, asked a lot of really informed questions, and a few had brought their own telescopes (!!). As the talk ended, we were directed outside to where a bunch of telescopes had been set up to look at various astronomical objects. I was most impressed by the four visible moons of Jupiter, since I've seen a lot of the constellations before.

We spent our last morning at the Pu'uhonua o Honaunau Place of Refuge. Apparently back in the old days, if a Hawaiian broke a "kapu" (law), he/she could avoid punishment by running/swimming to the nearest place of refuge. An offender who managed to reach such a place would be purified and officially forgiven by a priest. Hmm.

Anyway, Pu'uhonua o Honaunau was one of the most sacred of these places of refuge, and today it's been made into a kind of outdoor museum to teach visitors about ancient Hawaiian culture. I'm not sure we learned all that much there, but it's a pretty place and is a good deal (like everything else in Hawaii) at $5:

From there we were off to the airport. When we got to the rental car return, the Budget rep actually asked us for a gas receipt! That was a first for me. Luckily we actually had filled up just a few miles away, so we didn't have to pay any penalty charges. Whew!

first time in Maui

2011-01-11T08:07:00.000-08:00

After Christmas, D and I flew to Maui to meet up with my sister and her husband, who were coming from Taiwan. None of us had ever been to Maui before, so we did quite a few touristy things.

D and I didn't arrive until early afternoon on the first day (due to Alaska Airlines jacking us and rescheduling our flight for three hours later), so we only really had a few hours of daylight after stopping by Costco to pick up food supplies, including my favorite sweet potato and taro chips.

We decided to drive up the coast past Kapalua, and made it to the Nakalele Blowhole before turning back:

The next day we drove up to the Haleakela Crater and hiked the Sliding Sands trail:

It was pretty and not strenuous, but very very windy, so we were glad we'd brought our windbreakers.

We were all hungry by the time we started heading home, so we stopped by Da Kitchen on the way home. Their specials board was covered with different variations of "moco", and in the end I went with "chili moco" (with beef chili) and D ordered "katsu moco" (with chicken cutlet). We topped that off with an appetizer of fried spam musubi. Initially we'd ordered four dishes for the four of us, but luckily the waitress forgot one, as each order was probably enough to feed three regular people (or two Hawaiians).

On day three, we drove the famous "Road to Hana". It was very lush and beautiful with lots of waterfalls and other sights to admire. However, one of our favorite parts of the drive was all the little food stands selling tasty snacks like coconut candy, homemade beef jerky, and really good banana bread. We decided Twin Falls had the best taste (not too sweet) but Halfway to Hana had the best texture, with big chunks of gooey banana. Yum.

We were going at a pretty leisurely pace so we didn't make it past Hana, but we did get to hang out for awhile at the Waianapanapa black sand beach. We were completely fascinated by the sand, which varied between black pebbles and very very fine black sand:

We also amused ourselves watching people jumping off rocks. It seems to be a common pastime in Hawaii:

For dinner we went to Lahaina Grill, which is one of the nicest restaurants in Maui, but of course there were still people in flip-flops. Ah, Hawaii. The food was pretty good but not super impressive, and the noise level was quite high, especially by the bar area, but the Mai Tais were delicious.

D and I went on a whale watching trip with Pacific Whale Foundation on the morning of on the fourth day. It was an amazing trip; in addition to several whales, we also spotted a 10 or 12-foot long tiger shark:

One of the whales got so close (within 100 meters) that the captain had to cut power to the boat:

We met up with the other two for lunch at the nearby Pacific'O Restaurant, where the food was again fine but not spectacular, but the view was very nice; we could even watch the beginning surf classes as we ate.

The rest of the day was pretty lazy; we had planned to go to a beach to hang out, but it was really hot outside and really comfy in our condo, so we mostly just sat around snacking on pounds of Foodland poke, occasionally venturing out to downtown Lahaina to check out the art galleries or to eat shave ice. D had two large orders of shave ice from Ululani's that afternoon, and he paid for it by having a terrible sugar crash afterwards.

We were all leaving around noon on the last day, so we only really had time to have brunch. I chose the Gazebo Restaurant, which is a tiny place inside the Napili Shores condo complex that has a fabulous view overlooking the water:

I was actually quite impressed with the food too; my sister and I split pancakes with bananas, mac nuts, and white chocolate chips (yummy), plus a "half portion" of fried rice (again, enough to feed two), her husband had a burger, and D had a crab melt (delicious!).

Afterwards we hung out on the shore, and discovered the water was teeming with sea turtles! We watched them riding up and down on the waves for quite some time, before we were forced to leave for the airport.

small steps

2011-01-09T09:54:00.000-08:00

This probably impresses no one but me, but I finally managed to bolt our safe to the floor this week.

This required:
- drilling 1/2-inch diameter holes through the bottom of the safe
- drilling 3/8-inch holes in the carpeted floor for the mounting hardware
- successfully lining up the holes and screwing in the (extremely long) screws

Now I can give everyone their drill bits back.

almost full recovery

2011-01-06T09:06:00.000-08:00

Two days ago, we were eating dinner at home when D got this funny look on his face.

me:	What?
D:	I just realized I accidentally deleted half of my Hawaii photos from the SD card when I was deleting older photos.
me:	::speechless for a couple of seconds::
me:	Um, okay. Let me see what I can do.

I spent the next 2-3 hours looking at free file recovery programs. First I tried Undelete Plus, which was able to successfully recover deleted .JPG files, but all of the extracted .NEF files were corrupted. It was the same story with Pandora Recovery. Finally I discovered PC Inspector Smart Recovery. "Quick Scan" failed, so I had to run "Thorough Scan", which took over 18 hours on the 16GB SD card. In the end it recovered over 1000 files, only about 10 of which are unusable. Vacation photos saved!

short-term crowd

2011-01-05T18:02:00.000-08:00

Yesterday night I went to Trader Joe's to pick up some groceries. They were out of everything! I got the last box of Roma tomatoes and the second-to-last loaf of sour batard, and the bagged salad section was completely empty. The checkout guy explained that "this happens every year" because people make New Year's resolutions to be healthy and then go grocery shopping. He said everything would be back to normal well before February. I laughed and told him that it's the same story at the gym; lots of people wearing jeans and/or shiny new gym clothes show up for two, maybe three weeks every January, and then promptly disappear. Let the countdown begin?

spreading the word

2011-01-04T11:38:00.001-08:00

Last year at my family's Christmas party, D and I taught my siblings and cousins how to play Settlers of Catan. We all had a great time despite a small mishap where D got excited and spilled someone's red wine all over the game.

This year, we played at Thanksgiving, after which my cousins tried to find the game at Target and Walmart, but gave up because they could only find it online and wanted it "right away". We (of course) had brought our set to Christmas dinner, so we obligingly broke it out after we finished eating. After two games, D and I went to sleep; it was nearly 1:30am and we had an early morning flight to Maui from SJC. We left the game with them during the week we were gone. Later we discovered that they played another three games that night, and then my brother played again during the week with our mom and his girlfriend.

We'd also taught the game to D's cousins last year, so they were able to participate in the Thanksgiving festivities as well. For Christmas, instead of playing more Settlers (which they've been playing online all year), we decided to teach them Puerto Rico. I think we may have at least one PR convert; we caught him reading online strategy guides during the game. Craziness!

now you tell me

2010-12-16T10:31:00.000-08:00

I went to the dentist this morning. After looking at the x-ray, the dentist told me that I had two new cavities. We then had a conversation that went something like this:

her:	How's your flossing going?
me:	Good! I floss almost every day now.
her:	Hmm. <long pause> Do you use Glide floss?
me:	Huh? Yes...why?
her:	Oh. Yeah, it really doesn't work very well. Switch to something else.

Apparently Glide, although really easy to use, is not actually effective, partially because it slides over your teeth so easily that it doesn't catch much food and/or plaque. She said she'd had another patient a few months ago who had a similar problem, despite flossing every day with his children.

Anyway, she prescribed new floss, new high-fluoride toothpaste, and a fluoride varnish. Then, as I was leaving the office, I was given a standard freebie bag. Inside was a toothbrush, toothpaste, and Glide. When I pointed that out, the dentist laughed apologetically and told me it was not an endorsement. Sigh.

worst division ever?

2010-12-14T12:05:00.000-08:00

D and I went to the Niners vs Seahawks game with some friends on Sunday. On the way there, I preemptively apologized to our friends in case the Niners sucked it up again. Instead, they forced five turnovers and won in a 40-21 blowout. It was fun to watch, and the win means it's still possible for the Niners to make the playoffs, but how sad is it that that's true of a 5-8 team?

I'm still bitter that the Niners didn't make the playoffs in 1991, when they went 10-6 but the Saints went 11-5, and the Falcons went 10-6 and won the head-to-head tiebreaker. The Niners were a good team that year and I think they could have made a run at the Super Bowl.

This year, I'm fairly confident that whatever team comes out of the NFC West will get destroyed by the lucky wild card team they play in the first round, despite being awarded home-field advantage because NFL playoff rules are stupid. (As an aside, I bet the home-field rule gets changed next season.) If the Niners manage to eke out a division win, they'll just be a subject of ridicule for the rest of the league/country. I'm not much opposed to letting the Rams or Seahawks play that role.

Fun facts that I accumulated while reading NFL blogs this week:
- The NFC West has a 3-17 record against teams that currently have a winning record.
- The NFC West has a 12-22 record against non-division opponents.
- The NFC West has had more starting quarterbacks (8) than road wins (6) this season.
- Among NFC West quarterbacks, the highest rated quarterback this season is Rams rookie Sam Bradford (20th overall).
- It is mathematically possible for a 7-9 team to win the NFC West. This would be an NFL first, making the 2010 NFC West officially the worst division in the history of football.
- The Niners have both the "best" offense and the best defense in the NFC West, ranking 24th on offense and 11th on defense. The co-division-leading Seahawks rank 28th on offense and 30th on defense.
- NFC West teams have been outscored by a combined 236 points this season. In comparison, the super awesome Bills, Lions, Browns and Bengals have been outscored by a combined 141 points. (Yes, that was sarcasm.)

lunch at Hostellerie du Chapeau Rouge

2010-12-07T20:52:00.000-08:00

During my week in Zurich, I went with some coworkers to Dijon for the weekend. Another coworker had recommended several restaurants in Burgundy, and it turned out that one of them was in Dijon, so we called them up on Friday and managed to get a lunch reservation for Saturday.

As an aside, we actually asked a French coworker to make that call, since none of the four of us had any confidence in our French-speaking abilities. I grew up speaking English, Taiwanese, and Chinese, so French is perhaps my fourth-best language, just edging out Japanese. Of the other three, one is an American living in Switzerland whose second-best language is now Swiss German, one is a Swede living in the US who probably speaks four or five languages not including French, and the last is a German living in Switzerland (I bet his French is the best).

Anyway, we got off of the train, dumped our bags at our hotel, and were off to lunch at the Hostellerie du Chapeau Rouge. Interestingly, the hotel itself is poorly reviewed, but the restaurant was recently awarded a Michelin star. I was certainly not impressed with the exterior facade:

The interior was surprisingly nice and modern, though, and soon after being seated, we were served a set of four amuse bouches:

I just realized that it's been several weeks and I've started to forget a lot of the details about the food. Also, most of the explanations were in French, so my comprehension was shaky to begin with. Oops. Anyway, I believe the first one was a falafel-like fritter, the second was a veal dumpling, the third a fairly bland sushi roll, and the last was a veggie spring roll. The dumpling was by far the best.

The wine menu was very extensive and way beyond me, but luckily we had a wine expert at the table, so he ordered us some champagne to start, and later on tried out several local reds:

We chose the tasting menu (of course), so the wine consumption was spread over the next four hours.

There were four or five varieties of fresh bread, all of which were tasty, but my favorite was this olive bread:

I was amused when the waiter offered us a second piece of bread after a few courses, and he seemed shocked and/or offended when one of my dining companions refused. The next time he came back we all obediently made additional selections.

The first real course was a foie gras au torchon with potatoes and champignons. Everyone else liked the foie gras very much. I liked the mushrooms very much.

Next was a shrimp tempura paired with (I think) rabbit, with giant capers:

The shrimp tempura was very, very good; it may have been one of my favorite things on the menu. Whatever the meat was, I did not enjoy it at all; it was very gamey (and I typically like game) and very fatty.

This interesting presentation is of a sea scallop, served with corn puree and more champignons:

It was quite good but interestingly I liked the accompaniments more than the scallop itself.

The fish course was next; I believe it was some kind of sea bass, with shaved black truffle and some assorted vegetables:

I had this veal shortbread dish instead, with fresh pasta underneath. The shortbread was pretty good but very crispy and salty, so I couldn't finish it. The pasta was fresh and delicious and I ate every bite.

The poultry course was a duck breast with some vegetables. I don't remember much about this dish so I guess it wasn't particularly memorable.

I do remember this beef. I was quite surprised to find it very overcooked; I gave up after only a few bites. It compared very poorly to the sous vide beef that I'd had at Baume last month.

There were four "dessert" courses, the first of which was this cheese mousse, served with prunes and honey, with mesclun salad and a black pepper tuile:

This was my favorite dessert, and possibly my favorite dish overall, since the gamey rabbit offset the delicious shrimp. The cheese mousse looked like it should be sweet, but it was not sweet at all. It was extremely cheese-flavored, but not cheesy. I thought it was very creative, unusual, and very delicious.

Next we had a pear-themed dessert. I think the pear was prepared three different ways; there were chunks of cooked pear, there was pear flavor in the cream/foam, and there was some kind of sugary syrup as well. It was tasty but not as impressive as the previous course.

I liked the next dessert better; it was a trio with passionfruit souffle, pineapple sorbet, and pineapple rum. The sorbet and the rum were not that interesting, but the souffle was amazing; the texture was perfect and it was tart enough even for my taste.

I was a bit surprised that the last real course was the lightest of the desserts; it was a very simple grape sorbet served on a toffee crisp with some citrus-y sauce. Again, yummy but not that interesting.

Finally, we were served four types of petit fours. I believe the pink one was a raspberry meringue, the macaron was chestnut flavored, and the tartlette was apricot. The fancy one in the back was pistachio on fruit gelee on top of a piece of chocolate with financier underneath. It was also my favorite of the four.

Overall it was a very satisfying meal. The service was outstanding, despite the occasional language difficulties, and the decor and the tablescape were impressive. The food was a bit uneven; it seemed like some of the courses were much more ambitious than others, and I was especially disappointed in the overcooked beef, but the shrimp tempura, the shortbread pasta, and the cheese mousse were all creative and memorable. The foie gras and the passionfruit souffle were very well executed as well.

It was after 4:30pm by the time we left the restaurant, so despite walking around for several hours after eating, none of us were interested in dinner. Instead, we caught a showing of Orlando at L'Opera de Dijon, and then went straight to bed.

Zurich wrap-up

2010-12-06T10:07:00.000-08:00

I've been back from Zurich for several weeks now, but what with hosting Thanksgiving and and then having houseguests last weekend I hadn't got around to writing about it until now...

I really enjoy visiting our other offices; instead of feeling like a tourist the entire time, you start to feel a little bit like you belong, when you take the tram to the office or buy groceries or go out for dinner or drinks with coworkers after work.

Some random thoughts:
- Everything was at least 25% more expensive there. I discovered upon arrival that I was short two pairs of socks, so I went out to try to buy some. Despite the store being located in the basement of a train station and the socks being regular black cotton socks, it cost me 15 CHF ($15.25) for two pairs. Ouch.
- I love European breakfast. I could eat just the bread and cheese for weeks. At our office they also had delicious cold cuts, a fresh OJ machine where you can watch the oranges being squashed, fresh yogurt, muesli (of course), granola, and other yummy things.
- It seemed like there was chocolate everywhere. Just in our office, I think there were like 20 kinds of chocolate lying around, if you counted the mini-kitchens, cafes, and the random boxes sitting on people's desks. I became addicted to Sprungli Lilliput truffles and bought nearly $100 worth of Sprungli on the day I flew home.
- Every time I leave suburbia and live in a real city for a week, I rediscover the fact that I like being close to restaurants and shops and cafes and people, and being able to walk or take public transit everywhere. Then I go home and realize that my house is really comfortable, my yard full of trees is quite pretty, and oh, I like driving. Obviously the solution is to have two homes! Yeah, I'll get cracking on that.
- Switzerland is really pretty. The mountains and the lakes combine for some spectacular scenery. On our TGV to Dijon, we stopped by Bern. We were only there for about 15 minutes, but even from the train I was impressed by the sight of the bridges over the Aare river. Maybe I just like hills because I grew up around San Francisco.
- I already knew this, but being able to take a weekend trip to France just reinforced for me the fact that Europe is really small. (Photos from our lunch at Hostellerie du Chapeau Rouge to come.) I was thinking, if I lived in Zurich for say, several months, I'd be able to go all over the place! I could go skiing in Zermatt, hiking in Lugano, wine-tasting in Tuscany, and castle-hopping in Bavaria. (D's company opened an office in Zurich this year, so we've been hoping he'll get sent there at some point. Fingers crossed.)

moving pains

2010-12-03T17:07:00.000-08:00

It's been about a month since D and I moved back into our remodelled house. One would think that moving back into a house that we'd already lived in would be easier, but we're having to do a lot of things again.

Honestly, I hate moving. Every time I move I swear I'll never do it again. This time I think maybe it'll actually stick for a good while.

Anyway, I was thinking over all of the issues that we've been handling and are still handling, and I was amazed by the length of the list.

before moving in:
- walk-through with contractors to create punchlist
- HVAC cleaning appointment
- tree removal service (quotes & final appointment)
- moving day coordination

right after moving:
- satellite TV appointment (DISH this time)
- re-cabling of family room TV setup since the DISH box requires an open shelf
- new garage door installation
- new blinds for new windows
- selection & installation of new front door locks (required patching existing door)

during the past few weeks:
- delivery of new sectional for family room
- delivery & assembly of new desk for study
- special trash pickup scheduling
- pest control appointments
- new sheets and towels
- new items for punchlist after heavy rain
- garage cleanup

still pending, blocked on other people:
- installation of new blinds
- remaining old furniture donation/disposal
- remaining contractor punchlist items
- installation of new wireless doorbell

still to do, haven't got around to these yet:
- redo networking setup to incorporate the new CAT6 cabling
- bolt down safe
- debug powermeter setup
- finish hanging photos and artwork
- finish garage cleanup

This list doesn't include the non-trivial number of remaining boxes that still need to be unpacked. Argh.

two down

2010-12-03T09:11:00.000-08:00

Last week, D and I hosted Thanksgiving dinner!

I flew back from Zurich on Tuesday, arriving just before 7pm. D's parents arrived around the same time; his mom coming from Houston and his dad from Taipei. On Tuesday night, I cooked the brine for our Google-sourced Heritage turkey.

On Wednesday, I made cranberry sauce (with port and orange juice), started the homemade bread, and D made his scrumptious key lime pie.

On Thursday, we made candied sweet potatoes (with bourbon and marshmallows), sourdough sausage stuffing, and sauteed green beans. D's mom helped us roll some maki sushi, and both the turkey and ham (with brown sugar and pineapple) went into the oven for several hours. We timed things pretty well, finishing around 3:30pm.

The guests started to arrive about 15 minutes later, and they brought a ton of food too. In addition to everything that we made, I vaguely remember eating papaya salad, shrimp salad, "oily rice" (aka you fan), glass noodles with pork, bacon mashed potatoes, saltine toffee, and way too many Baked by Melissa mini-cupcakes (fresh from NYC).

Anyway, that's two down for my 35-before-35 list! I declare #5 (cook something for longer than two hours) and #20 (host Thanksgiving dinner) complete. The 17 of us even finished off all 13 lbs of turkey that night, which I think must be a first for an Asian Thanksgiving party. I also made progress on #25 (master a bread-from-scratch recipe), but although the bread was much improved from the last time, it still did not rise as much as expected. I think the kitchen was too cold during the rise phase...will have to try again over Christmas.

Next up, #28 (put up holiday decorations)! Due to allergies, we've decided on an artificial tree, so I guess we'll be shopping for one this weekend...

fire drill

2010-11-21T13:19:00.000-08:00

I took a train earlier today from Dijon (France) back to Zurich. After a 5-hour ride, I went to dinner with some coworkers. I got back to my hotel after that and checked my email at 9pm CET. I had a 15-minute-old Google Voice transcript from the guys who were supposed to deliver our furniture. I checked the timezones, and it was 12pm PST. They were supposed to come between 1-4pm, and they were going to arrive at 12:15pm. Plus, I had called earlier in the week and specifically told them to call D on his cell, not me on mine. WTF?

I quickly dashed off an email to D hoping that he would check his phone even though he was supposed to be at basketball until 12:30pm. I then tried calling him using the "call" function inside of Gmail for the first time ever...straight to voicemail. I must have tried ten times before I realized it was useless and called the delivery people instead. They seemed very confused. "Where are you? Belmont?" "No, Switzerland!" Finally I told them that D would be there at 1pm, even though I couldn't confirm that because I had no way to reach him. Unfortunately the furniture delivery company and the furniture making company are not the same company, and according to the delivery guys, they were not told to come between 1-4pm, they were merely told to deliver today. ARGH.

I was really afraid they weren't going to wait, so I called our friend up the street who has a key to our house. No dice. I randomly complained to another friend online, but she lives over 30 minutes away and doesn't have a key. Finally I tried again and got the first friend, and he said he'd head over. I took a quick shower to rinse the train smell off, got back online, and found out that he had gone down there only to find no one there. I then asked his wife to call the delivery guys and figure out what was up. They had gone to lunch. Of course.

I heard that in the end they came back and D met them there, but I'm still in Switzerland and I still have no idea what happened. Anyway, this whole episode just stressed me out to a stupid degree. I know delivery guys are always late, but since when do they show up EARLY? I hate the service industry.

Zurich 1, Mountain View 0

2010-11-17T10:37:00.000-08:00

In Mountain View we have a slide that goes from the 4th floor to the 3rd floor.

Here in Zurich, they have a fireman's pole that goes from the 2nd floor to the 1st floor, and then a slide that starts on the the 1st floor and ends right in the middle of the ground floor cafeteria. The slide is curved in a tighter spiral than in Mountain View, and isn't covered the whole way, so you kind of get the feeling that if you weighed a little more and went a little faster, you might be able to jump the side while sliding down. Also, they correctly 0-index their floors here.

(Tip on using a fireman's pole: brake with your legs!)

high school...not totally useless

2010-11-17T07:43:00.000-08:00

I'm spending a week in our Zurich engineering office, visiting some engineers that I've worked with for years, but many of whom I've never actually met face-to-face. It's been fun; everyone's really friendly and I've gotten lots of invitations for lunch, dinner, coffee, drinks, and even foosball.

Anyway, I flew Swiss Air nonstop from SFO on the way over, and all the announcements were done first in German, then in French, and finally in English. It was the same at the Zurich airport, and again on the rail (6 CHF from the airport to the "Hauptbahnhof" main station). I was a bit surprised to discover that my high school French is good enough that I usually understand what's happening without having to wait for the English translation.

(As an aside, there are like twenty kinds of Swiss chocolates in the various kitchens and cafes on the seven floors of this office. It might be deadly to stay here too long.)