PICKS:
Sufficient Grounds in Berkeley
A GPS is a useful gadget, but its utility is greatly limited by the fact that the world (and especially infrastructure) is continually changing, while the GPS’s maps are not. Let’s say, for example, the Bay Bridge is closed, but your GPS doesn’t know about this and is assuredly leading you through rush hour and towards the closed bridge. Once you get to the closed bridge, you realize the error of your GPS’s ways, but are so thoroughly discouraged by the mounting throngs of rush hour traffic that you can’t face the possibility of alternate routes and so you look for the nearest coffee shop to wait out the traffic and you end up in Berkeley.
Once the great Bay Bridge/GPS/rush hour debacle had resolved itself, we headed into San Francisco to hang out with our friend Dan and his superfun girlfriend, Tina. We met up at the Elbo Room, where Dan’s friend’s band, Ikebe Shakedown, was playing. Sean and I were still on Yosemite time (early morning hikes leading to bedtime somewhere around 9 o’clock), so we didn’t make it to the headliner, but we hung in there long enough to enjoy our return to city life, some live afrobeat and seeing old friends.
As we often do when we get to another new city, we spent our first full day in San Francisco just walking around, trying to get a feel for the place. While on our pedestrian expedition, we found Charlie’s, a neighborhood cafe near Precita Park where the coffee is good, the wi-fi is free and the exceedingly friendly owner knows the names of all the regulars, their kids and their dogs and seems genuinely happy to see everyone who comes in the door.
By the time we walked in the door at Rainbow Grocery, we had truly arrived in San Francisco. We had just parked the van a couple of blocks away (amidst a neighborhood notably filled with RVs, campers and vans) and in that very short walk we met two fellow van inhabitants, saw their painting, got their tips on where to get cheap Chinese food and free water and then got a call from a friend of a friend inviting us to go to a Critical Mass pre-party that night and a Halloween party the next night…so when we actually got to the vegetarian food co-op and were perusing their organic veggies and extensive cheese selection we were riding high on the goodwill waves of San Francisco.
Critical Mass, San Francisco
Sean says: Critical Mass is a bicycling event commonly held on the last Friday of every month in over 300 cities around the world conceived with the idea of drawing attention to how unfriendly the cities are to cyclists. We were pretty excited to be in San Francisco, the city that founded Critical Mass in 1992, for the Halloween Mass, an exceptionally boisterous event where costumes and eccentricities abound.
Critical Mass is an imperfect organization with a strategic lack of leadership to avoid being targeted, but with an important message: bikes need a place in our cities especially as our obesity rates and health care costs skyrocket and our “free lunch” era of energy comes to an end. The standard “ride with traffic” answer to biking in cities is somewhere between unpleasant and a death sentence that ignores the fact that cars move more than twice as fast as bikes, weigh 10 times as much, and if either the car or the cyclist makes a mistake, the cyclist’s life and not the driver’s life is on the line. A rather unsatisfactory use of cyclist’s tax dollars. The result is a frustration driven parade called Critical Mass that at its best receives supportive honks and waves from onlookers and at its worst can turn into a showdown between angry cyclists and the least sympathetic apostles of the combustion engine.
Some cities like Portland, OR, where 10% of commuters now do so by bicycle, have heard the call and have brilliantly engineered a city in which cars and bikes can safely coexist. Other cities like NYC have decided that the anarchistic elements of Critical Mass must be crushed with an iron fist and commonly chase down the group with dozens of police scooters, numerous paddy wagons, and often a helicopter or two. San Francisco is somewhere in between. Police close local streets to car traffic and provide a sanctioned escort for the parade, but despite the city government’s support for Critical Mass, there appears to be somewhat less support for routine biking, with sporadic bike lanes, usually on busy streets and with no barriers to traffic (as there are in Montreal and other cities around the world where bikes ride between parked cars and the sidewalk). To add insult to injury, the renovation of the Bay Bridge was just completed this month and the city failed to support the addition of a bike lane that would connect Oakland/Berkeley to San Francisco… A truly egregious missed opportunity in my mind that would have gone a long way to draw our professional talents into the fold of the city’s economy. In the end, I would prefer that the anarchic tendencies of Critical Mass could be usurped by a more productive democratic process, but it does raise an important questions about how our democracies can manage to serve a more diverse collection of transportation constituents and progress as we face many transportation and changing infrastructure obstacles in the coming decades.
Conveniently located near our parking spot in SOMA, the Sage Lounge is a good neighborhood coffee shop masterfully disguised as a slick metal and glass adorned night lounge. I have to say the interior design concept was convoluted (not sure if they’re a wannabe lounge waiting for a liquor license, or what) but it did the job. If you can get past the cheesy techno and the preponderance of white leather furniture, the breakfast sandwich bagel was yummy enough and pretty cheap, the staff was accommodating, and the wi-fi was free. That said, if there had been a less Zoolander-ish option, I would have taken it.
In another case of things coming together in uncanny ways, we landed at the Queens Nails Project because it was at the intersection of two seemingly unrelated paths. We first heard about the gallery because, while we were at Sufficient Grounds waiting for traffic to clear, Sean was looking up one of his favorite SF based DJs, Sutekh, and found that he was playing at a Queens Nails Project gallery opening. It was too late for us to get to the city in time to hear Sutekh but the exhibit looked cool so we planned to stop by later during our time in SF. Then, the next day when asking a new friend for gallery suggestions, she mentioned Queens Nails Project…so obviously, we went to check it out. Jacqueline Gordon‘s “Our Best Machines are Made of Sunshine” streams sound recorded directly outside the gallery and alters them slightly creating a familiar, yet slightly unsettling acoustic environment.
Halloween at Cellspace
Cellspace usually functions as a communal space for creating collaborative art, but on Halloween all that energy is put toward amazing costumes and a nonstop line-up of entertainment. We serendipitously re-connected with people we had met at Critical Mass the night before and met a whole host of other interesting folks, including a guy covered with LEDs, another guy with small video screens featuring live feeds from the tiny cameras in front of his eyes and mouth and another fellow with a googly eye suit and tie getup. All of this while listening to music ranging from an operatic soprano to a folksy banjo player to a Brazilian-style brass band. Happy Halloween, indeed!
Halloween at Langton Labs
At about 2am things started to wind down at Cellspace, so we walked over to Langton Labs to check out their party. While there were still DJs spinning, the mood was pretty down tempo, so we only stayed for a few hours, which was long enough to get into an involved discussion about the state of start-ups in the Bay Area, get harassed by an obnoxious harpie and hear a remix of Tchaikovsky’s Peter and the Wolf.
Thanks to a fortuitous tip, we shook off enough of our post-Halloween grogginess to venture out and eat a tasty Mexican breakfast at Los Jarritos. The place was packed when we got there, but before we were even done ogling all the steamy plates arriving at other patrons’ tables, we were seated and eating our own delicious tortilla, bean, egg and chorizo concoctions washed down by an icy glass of horchata (which I love, but Sean describes as a sickly sweet liquid approximation of baby powder).
Parking in Oakland
How do you know when you’ve crossed over the border from Berkeley to Oakland? Why the sudden availability of parking spots without time limits, of course. Seriously, even tiny dead end residential streets in Berkeley have 2 hour parking limits on them. At the risk of being in a non-“nuclear free zone“, we’ll take an Oakland parking spot any day.
Jump’n Java, Oakland
Located conveniently close to our favorite Oakland parking spot, Jump’n Java has plentiful outlets, good coffee and a friendly proprietor. The one downfall is that it’s so popular you may have to wait to get a table.
Great China in Berkeley
Although cheaper Chinese food could certainly be had in the Bay Area, I would challenge anyone to find tastier Chinese food than that served at Great China. We joined our friend Zack for some seriously good tea-smoked duck, Szechuan green beans, spicy chicken and sizzling rice soup. It was really good to see Zack, especially since it was combined with a good meal. Friends and food are a satisfying combination indeed.
PANS:
Precita Park
This pan should be preceded by the caveat that it is for non-dog owners only, so read accordingly. Precita Park is a long expanse of beautiful grassy field marred with friendly, frolicking dogs willing to share all their bodily excretions and accompanying odors with you. We thought we might hang out on the lawn, but ended up sitting on the curb at the edge of the park in order to escape the slobber and distinct smell of active territory marking behavior.
Nomad Cafe
Also located close to our Oakland parking spot, we thought that, given its name, the Nomad Cafe might be just what we were looking for, but apparently the only types of nomads welcome there are the ones that don’t need to charge their laptops because the only outlet available was buried in the middle of kids’ play area.
Thanks for the link to Ikebe Shakedown. It’s great music for doing house chores on a Saturday morning. They’re easier to do to good music; not more fun, but easier!
Fun photos of Halloween in SF. I don’t recall ever seeing anyone wear their wedding clothes for Halloween, but yours we certainly appropriate!
We thought of you two when we saw all the folks with their lap tops in the lodge at Curry Village. Being without ours, we settled for jig saw puzzles and card games. What a wonderful park. We gave thanks to the men and women 100 years ago who had the wisdom to preserve it for us.
We didn’t make it as far as you did, but we did the hike to Vernal and Nevada Falls and basked in the sunshine and colorful trees. We didn’t encounter any bears, but we expect that some of our fellow travelers with their cars full of dead Starbucks cups and candy wrappers (and who couldn’t/didn’t read the zillions of warning signs) may have had visitors in the night.
It’s been a beautiful fall here and now that we’ve had some rain it feels great. Perfect for hikes and bike riding.
Did you get a chance to touch base with Nemo Gould while you were in Berkeley?
I see you’re heading south. Let me know if you want a place to stay in North Hollywood (the east end of the San Fernando Valley). Also, do you expect to be in the LA area over Thanksgiving? If so, maybe we can see each other either at my Mom’s or ?
In the meantime, take care and happy trails.
Michael
Thanks Michael.
Yosemite is amazing for sure!.. to bad we missed y’all.
Unfortunately we didn’t find the time to meet up with Nemo… our 2 blog posts chocked full of activities will have to do for this pass through the Bay area…
Thanksgiving with you guys would be super fun! We cook a mean turkey, stuffing, and mashed potatoes.
Hopefully see you there!