Category: San Francisco

“It was at these times that he began to understand… the nature of magic. The magician seemed to promise that something torn to bits might be mended without a seam, that what had vanished might reappear, that a scattered handful of doves or dust might be reunited by a word, that a paper rose consumed by fire could be made to bloom from a pile of ash. But everyone knew that this was only an illusion. The true magic of this broken world lay in the ability of things it contained to vanish, to become so thoroughly lost, that they might never have existed in the first place.”

-Michael Chabon

now that i have tivo, i can totally keep up with all my reality tv shows. instead of before where i’d be stuck watching whatever may happen to be on tv when i get free time, now i can watch all reality tv, all the time, sans commercials. just yesterday i watched 2 episodes of real world, 2 episodes of road rules/real world challenge and an hour long episode of the apprentice all in a row. tonight i watched survivor followed by yet another episode of apprentice. sheez, if it wasn’t for reality shows, i dont think i’d watch any tv at all…

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last night i had dinner at my parents house. they were telling me some stories about what life was like in russia when they lived there that really made me realize just how lucky we are to be living here in america now. i guess in russia, a lot of people used to live in communal houses. these were large houses that had large rooms that connected to a kitchen and bathroom. but, instead of each large room being a bedroom used by one person, each of the rooms would actually be used for a whole family. so, basically, several families would all live together in one of these houses. there was no living rooms or bedrooms or whatnot… your family would just get *1* room to itself. the whole family would sleep in the same room (usually using rollout beds or cots for the kids). the same table that would be used for the kids homework etc, would also be the table that dinner and breakfast was eaten on. the whole family was just crammed together all the time.

how crazy is that?? but there’s more! basically, the government allotted 3 square meters (imagine a five foot by five foot square) of space per person. so you would live there as a family w/ your parents. when you got married, your wife would just have to move in and live w/ you and your parents. then you’d have kids, still in that same small room!! when the family was large enough that there was less than 3 square meters per person in that room, then you could put your name on a list and the government would find you a new room in another communal house where you could finally move out from your parents. unfortunately, it was a slow process. sometimes it would take up to 10 years for you to move out from the time you first got on the list.

i was so shocked when i heard all that!! sheesh, and i’m used to america, where most people can move out the second they turn 18 and afford to live on their own etc etc. all of it really made me realize just how amazing america must have seemed to my parents when they first moved here. it must really have been a magical place…

-v

saturday was valentines day. unfortunately, it started off not too well because i was feeling insanely ill from the night before. ugh! several hours later, after recovering, caryn and i headed out to golden gate park to check out the japanese tea gardens. they were pretty cool. we wanted to have tea there, but unfortunately, i think a lot of people also thought that japanese tea gardens on valentine’s day was a good idea, and so the place was too packed.

for valentines day, caryn made me a *ton* of tiny post it notes. each one of them had different little love notes on them written in different pens, and on different colored paper. she hid these notes all over our room: in my clothing, under books, in drawers, on the phone…. basically *everywhere*. throughout the whole weekend i kept finding more and more of these little notes. in fact, even several days later i’m *still* finding more notes! i think i’ve found around 40 different ones so far, and i bet there’s still more!! it’s really cool to get such a creative surprise…

at night, we went to dinner at this place called Destinos. it was a latin american tapas place and the food was BOMB. everything was super good. the only problem was that the main drinks they served there… had cachaca in them!! doh!

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brazillians are fucking hardcore. they’re hardcore because they drink this evil alcohol called Cachaca. this stuff is so horrible….. ok, maybe i’m exaggerating, it’s not *that* bad, but after spending all saturday morning yacking until i could throw up no more, i will never be able to look at that stuff in the same way again.

friday night, everything started out innocently enough. tom had brought me a bottle of cachaca from brazil and he, joey, li, caryn, and i were planning on hanging out and drinking it. fortunately (or so we thought at the time), tom brought a second bottle of cachaca over from home just in case we didnt have enough. so now we had about 2 liters of this clear tequila-tasting liquid to share between the five of us. we drank the stuff pretty much straight, with only some mashed up limes to fix the flavor up a bit. needless to say, we all were pretty drunk fairly soon.

at this point, i remembered that i had a ton of bottle rockets hidden in my room from last fourth of july. i got them out and we proceeded to shoot a bunch of them off of our balcony until a neighbor started yelling at us. when we went back inside, we realized we had no more alcohol, so we decided to walk to joey’s house to get some vodka. for some reason, we thought it would be a great idea to bring the fireworks with us and light them off while walking down irving street. minutes later, a cop car screeches to a halt next to us and a cop jumps out and yells at us to come over to him. uh-oh. he spends a bunch of time yelling at us and accusing us of blowing up firecrackers, but after a while, since he has no proof, he had to let us go. luckily tom had dropped the remaining fireworks in the street a little before the cop saw us. phew!

when we got back home, everything started winding down. oh, and then joey accidentally burned a hole in tom’s shirt. and then tom somehow fell asleep with some lobsters. anyways…. it was a really really fun night. i just wish i didnt have to pay the price for it the next day!!

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joey hooked up some free tickets to go see john kleese tonight. we went there not really knowing what to expect… stand up? skits? lecture? in the end it was kind of none of the above. they showed some clips from his work (monty python, faulty towers, fish called wanda, etc), and then he was interviewed for a bit. after that he proceeded to spent about 45 minutes talking about his views on religion. his talk was…. ok. some of the points he made about religion were actually really really interesting, but at the same time, other parts of his talk were pretty boring. he excessively quoted and read passages from books that were not very interesting. and then at the end, he started pushing this “Esalen Institute”, which is this place in big sur where they teach mysticism and other new age-ish sounding stuff.

so overall, i’m pretty glad i went, but wasn’t as impressed as i hoped to be. the talk did make me really wanna watch “life of brian”. i’ve never seen it!!

-v

sunday afternoon, caryn and i went indoor rock climbing w/ my brother. i’ve gone once before, but this was caryn’s first time. i hate heights. like a lot. like sooo much. rock climbing is really not the sport for me. most of the time, once i’d get halfway up, i’d start getting pretty freaked out and would wish that i had never gone climbing. but then i’d finish the climb and get all excited about being able to do it. i guess i’m glad i actually push myself to do things like this that i’m naturally very afraid of. it always ends up being worthwhile in the end. unlike me, caryn was not a wus at all… she totally loved it. she did hella good for her first time and is already totally amped to go try it again.

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Saturday:

saturday was the day of the chinese new years parade, so caryn and i kinda planned our day around that. i’ve only tried dim-sum twice, and she had never tried it so we decided to go to Chinatown and have at it. we went to this place called Yank Sing. it was kind of an upscale dimsum place, and everything we tried (except for peking duck, yuck!) was wayyy good! we definitely wanna have dimsum more often from now on…. but hopefully at cheaper dimsum places cause the meal at this one ended up being 80 bux!!

after lunch, we wandered around Chinatown for a bit. i’ve never really explored that area so it was interesting to check it out. there were tons of decorated balconies, interesting store fronts, and other neat stuff to check out. we go to see how fortune cookies are made. there’s an assembly line that brings out all these flat cooked dough discs, and a lady grabs them one at a time, puts a fortune on top, and then basically bends them in half on top of a stick to make the fortune cookie shape. weird eh? after wandering around some more, we still had time to kill so we wandered over to the ocean and chilled on one of the piers.

eventually it was time for the parade to start. the chinese new years parade in sf is the biggest one outside of asia and is considered one of the top 10 parades in the world. walking around near the parade route, we could feel the excitement building. people in costumes were rushing around everywhere, people were yelling, firecrackers were being set off. we were able to find a place right at the beginning of the parade route… but that ended up being a bad thing, since most of the marching band groups just marched in the beginning and didn’t play till later on. in fact, the beginning of the route was pretty disorganized, and people kept starting and stopping etc as they got ready. all in all the parade was pretty cool. some neat floats, cool lion dancers and dragons, all sort of monkey costumes… but i think we both agreed that we probably should have only stayed for like 30 minutes instead of the full 2 hours!!

by the end of the parade, we were exhausted but we had tickets to go see Atmosphere that night. at first we weren’t very excited to go to the show, but in the end we had a really good time. atmosphere was really good and Eyedea, who opened for them, was really good as well. the show was dope, but after standing on our feet all day long, standing up for another several hours was so tiring! after the concert all we wanted to do was go to sleep, but we had promised tom that we would stop by his 30th bday. we cruised by, but only stayed for a tiny bit.

finally, after a long day, we went to bed at 2:30am…. or so we thought. at 3am erica, kevin, brandon, and others came home totally drunk and yelling and screaming. they all stumbled into the kitchen yelling bout wanting more alcohol and rummaging around. other than the fact that it was impossible to sleep at that point, i thought “oh shit!! the bottle of cachaca tom brought from brazil is in the kitchen… they’re totally gonna open it and drink it all”. so i had to get dressed and rescue my bottle. after that brandon started banging on our door for caryn to come out, so now we’re both groggy and chilling in the kitchen. we ended up taking shots w/ them, and then randomly these two girls who it turns out are our new neighbors, come over to hang out. it was pretty crazy. john kept telling people that he could do a headslide, and then to prove that he could really do it… he actually did a headslide across our kitchen floor. it was nuts!!! finally at 6am.. we were able to get some sleep…

here are 2 short videos of the headslides…

Click 1 and Click 2

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caryn came home friday evening and i went with her, sage, and catherine to this gallery exhibit that featured robotic interactive art. it was really cool. a bunch of small animated robots that turned on by the push of a button, or sound activated, or motion sensitive. you could try out each robot and they were all cool and artsy looking. the whole room was buzzing w/ robot sounds, whirring, and beeps. afterwards, sage suggested we go to a Senegalese restaurant. i’ve wanted to go to this place for a long long time, and so was pretty excited to finally try it out. the food was hella good!! i had been reading in my travel books that a lot of the food in africa is quite bland, but this was super flavorful and delicious. after that we dropped off sage and went to go hang out at the Fireside Lounge. it’s really nice having a cool bar less than a block from your house. that’s why i love Sf so much. you can do so much just within walking distance of your house. there are neighborhoods w/ local bars, local markets, coffee shops, etc. unlike the south bay where all you can do from your house is either stare at other similar houses or go visit the local strip mall.

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