Arctangential

A Vancouver travelogue, in food.

1) On the drive up, stopping at a Shari’s for dinner. There isn’t a lot of choice for where to eat between Seattle and Vancouver, and so Shari’s, which is a lot like a Denny’s, was about the best I could do. I ordered, with some trepidation, the salmon risotto, assuming that it would be some kind of horrific mess. It actually turned out mostly OK. The risotto was well-done, and the piece of salmon on top, while small, was reasonably done. The only problem was that someone had decided it would be a good idea to drown the entire thing in hollandaise sauce, which was entirely unnecessary.

2) Brunch Saturday morning at The White Spot, which turns out to be a pretty big chain in Vancouver and maybe Canada. I thought it was just a downtown restaurant at the time, but that’s OK. My main rule for traveling is to only eat at places where I could not eat at home, and while that usually means avoiding chains, chains which we don’t have in Seattle, like The White Spot, or Swiss Chalet, or Harvey’s are entirely OK. I had a chipotle chicken wrap, which was quite good but nothing amazing.

3) Dinner at Modern club, a Japanese restaurant, escorted by Dennis. He knows what’s good there and doesn’t steer me wrong. We start with pumpkin korroke, a wonderful dish consisting of large chunks of roasted pumpkin wrapped around cheese and deep-fried. I could probably eat nothing but this food for the rest of my life and be happy. I would probably die from some kind of vitamin deficiency, but it’d be worth it. We also had some nice warm mochi. As a main course I had a wonderful pork okonomiyaki, a food which I will not attempt to describe but simply suggest that all of my readership (both of you) should find and consume it as soon as possible. This was a very good dinner.

4) After a play (The Stone Face, quite good), some pie at Tom & Jerry’s diner. Seems like a nice enough place, but the waitress was very surly, and brought the wrong kind of pie. I know that lemon meringue looks roughly like banana cream, but please.

5) Lunch on Sunday at Burgoo. Burgoo is a common stew of the southeastern United States, usually made with squirrel meat, vegetables, okra, etc. Burgoo (the restaurant) does not have a southeastern US theme, however: their concept is that they serve comfort food from around the world. There’s Malaysian curry soup, Irish stew, Russian borscht, Moroccan tagine and of course the eponymous burgoo. I had the burgoo, as I thought it was fitting, and it was served over two of the best buttermilk biscuits I’ve ever had. It’s a good thing I don’t live near this place; I’d be going there all the time. ALL THE TIME.

6) Dinner on Sunday at Lalibela Ethiopian restaurant. Ethiopian food is served on a wonderfully sour spongy bread which serves as both plate and utensil, and the entrees are generally spicy melanges of vegetables and meat piled on the bread. Lalibela is a great little place, small and low-key, but clean and friendly. It’s not technically in Vancouver, but in the nearby suburb of Burnaby. Near the hotel, which was particularly convenient.

Not listed: A variety of Tim Horton’s donuts and muffins, an aero bar, some ice cream and a couple of McDonald’s chicken nuggets which I’d rather not go into detail about.

It was a good trip. I took some pictures.

So, what has been going on with me lately? Who cares? I don’t care who cares, I’m going to type it in anyways.

I moved groups at work, due to a few reasons. Some “personality clashes” with a new manager (this is code for “he is a jerk”, but we aren’t allowed to say that) along with my just being sort of tired of working on what that team works on, and being very tired of the team’s on-call schedule were just a few of these reasons. My new team is pretty cool, we’re having a few problems with focus right now but otherwise things are going well in that direction.

I took a trip out to Albany in late May for my sister’s wedding. The event itself wasn’t very exciting (massive, overblown and embarrassingly opulent, but not interesting), but the trip itself was not bad. I took a train from Seattle to Chicago, had 6 hours in Chicago, then a train from Chicago to Albany. The train to Albany was 6 hours late, and arrived after the rental company closed, so I had a kind of harrowing time getting to my hotel and then back to the rental car place the next day to get my car. Things were fine after that. After the wedding was a train back to Chicago (on time this time), 8 hours in Chicago and then the train back home.

I’ve come to enjoy rail travel. It’s expensive and slow, but the scenery is great and you have a lot of time to yourself. You’re also forced into conversation with strangers during meal times, which I found difficult at first but but appreciated as the trip went on, as a regular and short interval from my forced isolation. The train food isn’t bad, especially if you’ve paid for a sleeper car and you get to eat in the dining car for free. The dining car food is pretty good, but horribly overpriced. The only alternative is the lounge car, which is basically just pre-made sandwiches, microwaveable burritos, candy and other such garbage. Also, still overpriced.

Chicago was fun, but I did get a little bit lost on my first visit. Instead of heading east to Michigan Ave and the museums and everything, I accidentally headed south, with ended me up in what I can only describe as “The Post Office District”. Downtown Chicago has at least 4 full city blocks with nothing but post office buildings and facilities. I wandered around there for a while and eventually figured out where I was, but by the time I made it back to the train station, I was no longer in the mood to walk around, so I just sat around the station and waited for my train. On my second visit to Chicago, I wisely took a cab to the Aquarium. However, upon arrival, I discovered that it was “Kids Under 4 Get In Free” day. This is a hell day. I of course didn’t entirely realize what was going on until after I’d bought my ticket, so I did wander around for a little while, but had to vacate the premises fairly quickly. I took a cab back to the area near the train station and looked for somewhere to eat. I discovered, much to my chagrin, that there is nowhere interesting to eat in that area of the city, and ended up having a semi-OK reuben in a little bar, served by the world’s surliest waitress.

And now I am back in Seattle. It took me almost 2 weeks to write this post. I hope the next one doesn’t take as long.

We left San Francisco Thursday morning, first thing. Instead of driving back on the I-5, we decided to drive north on the 101, the more scenic route. First, of course, we crossed the Golden Gate Bridge, which wasn’t nearly as exciting as I’d hoped. I mean, it’s a nice bridge, quite big, pleasingly shaped, and in a pleasant color, but I guess I was expecting something really amazing, like Godzilla would come smash it down, or a blimp would careen into the center tower.

Driving through Marin was nice, very pretty. Our first goal was to eat at an In-n-Out Burger, which I haven’t done for many years. We were going to stop at the one in Petaluma, but due to poor planning on my part, we didn’t have a map or any directions to the actual place. I assumed I’d be able to see it from the highway, but I either missed it or pulled off too soon. This precipitated a long and aimless drive around the city in question, eventually ending when we luckily found a way back on to the highway again. We decided not to head back and try again, and luckily we DID see an In-n-Out from the highway on our way through Rohnert Park, and stopped there. I had an “animal style” burger, which was not nearly as exciting as I had expected, but was quite good. The hidden message on the bottom of the cup is a little bit disturbing, though.

Back on the 101, we pretty much drove straight through, winding lazily around the foothills, remarking often on the suffusion of cows We stopped… well, somewhere. I’m not really sure the name of the town, if it was a town; it was more of a widening in the road, really. The 101 had turned into a small two-lane highway by that time, so there was no exit name to tell us where we were, and we just stopped because I needed gas and there was a gas station. While I gassed up, Meg ran in to use the bathroom and came out with a story of great woe, which I’ll allow her to relate at a future date, should she feel the need.

After this pit stop, we enter the redwood forest. These trees, they are big. Really, really big. And there’s a lot of them. They’re really everywhere out there, and the road got (once again) all twisty and uppy and downy, and the farther north we went, the snowier it got. It wasn’t a super fun drive, especially as we started losing light. We made a quick stop in Eureka (not Yreka) to grab a tour book from a AAA office, and then off again. We drove the rest of the way up the coast to a town called Crescent City, where we spent the night. There are some really gorgeous coastal views on the section of the 101 between Eureka and Crescent City, but increasing fatigue and failing light forced up to just fly past them. Some other day.

We ate dinner at the restaurant attached to our motel; it was pretty amazingly bad. Partly it was because we were used to eating at all these extra swanky SF places, but it was also partly that the food was just terrible. I ordered halibut in what was described to me as a “shrimp and Grand Marnier sauce”, but it was just a badly overcooked piece of unidentifiable whitefish swimming (NPI) in a flavorless béchamel, with maybe a cup of undercooked bay shrimp dumped over top. Meg had a steak, which she pronounced passable, and some sea scallops, which she took one small bite of and then placed as far away from herself as possible. After choking down the food, we retired to our room and watched a Good Eats DVD before bed.

The next morning, we went for breakfast at the same restaurant. We weren’t really looking forward to it, but a free breakfast buffet came with the room, and we thought to ourselves, how badly can you mess up breakfast? It turns out, you can mess it up really pretty badly. The meats were all limp, the scrambled eggs had been overdone and were all runny, and I am pretty sure the waffles were the frozen, toaster variety. The only thing that was even kind of good were the biscuits, but the country gravy had no flavor at all. Come to think of it, the country gravy was probably just the same nasty ass béchamel from my fish, but with a tiny bit of pepper added, instead of a vanishingly small amount of Grand Marnier.

Now that I’m done complaining about the Northwoods Restaurant in Crescent City, CA, I can relate how we set out eastwards from there, on the 199. This is a very skinny road, very windy, going through a lot of mountains and alongside a lot of canyons. Add in the snowfall, which in some places had collected on the roads, and you have yet another fairly unpleasant drive. At least this time it was light out, which helped, and after about 2 hours we made it back to the I-5, and well out of the snowy area. The rest of the trip was quite uneventful; we stopped somewhere in northern California (or maybe southern Oregon) for lunch at Carl’s Jr., later got gas at another full service station in Oregon, and then onwards. We hit some kind of weird pre-rush-hour traffic on our way through Portland, and were delayed by about 40 minutes because of an accident near the Tacoma Dome. Then, we arrived back home, and collapsed.

Because I don’t fly (wings not strong enough), we drove to and from San Francisco. It’s between 14 and 16 hours each way, depending on the route and the driver. We got up around 9am on Friday, and were out of the house before 10. Stopped at Burger King for a quick breakfast, and then onto the open road.

Let me stop for a second and talk about fast food breakfast. Now, I’m a big fan of fast food burgers. They are good. I would eat them every day if I didn’t think it would kill me. But the breakfasts — they’ve felt like a bolt-on since the first time I tried them. The meats never come out quite right, the ersatz eggs are unpleasant at best, the constant attempt to have the bun represent some other kind of breakfast food never works… they’re just almost always horrible. Maybe it isn’t possible given the constraint of the American fast food restaurant, but I think if one could come up with a truly palatable fast food breakfast, one could make a good amount of money.

Anyhow, crappy food in hand, we hit the I-5 southbound and didn’t stop until Keizer, Oregon, where we got some lunch (a disappointing sandwich at Shari’s) and some gas.

In another aside, I discovered on this trip that gas stations in Oregon all seem to be full service. I haven’t seen, much less visited, a full service gas station in probably 10 years, so I was a little bit confused at first. I pulled up to the wrong pump, and I tipped the gas pumping lady, which I guess isn’t normally done; it’s not that she didn’t take the extra money, but she did seem very surprised by it. I’m not sure why Oregon has full service stations, but it’s weird and I don’t really like it.

So, gas tanks and stomachs full, we got back on the road. Oregon was mostly pretty nice, until we got into the more southern part of the state. It turns out, and I had not been aware of this, but it turns out that southern Oregon and northern California are populated by an embarrassment of mountains. And of course, where there are mountains, there are windy roads, even major interstates like the I-5. The fact that we hit this section of roadway at nightfall didn’t help any, and I was really not enjoying driving up and around and down and around and up again and around some more. However, we’d picked out a good town to stay the night, and there wasn’t anywhere between where we were at that point and our destination, so we just pressed on.

In order to take a little break, we stopped in a town called Yreka for gas and food. We ate at a “wonderful” restaurant called Grandma’s House. We thought it might have some good home cooking, but in fact it was just a cheesy dive, filled to overflowing with ugly knick-knacks (all for sale at absurd prices), and food that reminded me more of a college cafeteria than anything else. We did pick up a recipe book from there, which I plan on sharing in part with my loyal readership, later on. After leaving Yreka, we pressed on through the night and mountains to a town called Redding, where we stayed the night at a wholly unremarkable Holiday Inn.

The next morning, breakfast in Redding at a wonderful diner called simply “Lumberjack’s”. the whole place was done up like a log cabin, with tree-felling hardware festooning the walls. More importantly, the food was excellent. I had what was described as an “egg tostada”; basically a thin round omelette, cooked with onions and jalapenos, topped with beans, ground beef, salsa, sour cream and guacamole. Yum! We left Redding, and 5 or so hours later, we were in San Francisco!

This turned out longer than I thought. I’ll write up the trip back in a later entry.

A belated update to my trip story. I think when I last left off, it was Sunday night. On Monday we went down to Mountain View to see my parents. With them, we visited some book stores, got some coffee, looked around the Stanford Art Museum and then had a very good Indian dinner. I have some pictures, to be posted later, of one of the sculptures there.

On Tuesday we took a boat to Alcatraz and walked around there for a few hours. Pictures also of that to come. After we got back to the hotel, I was pretty tired from spending the past 4 days on my feet pretty much non-stop, so we just sat around the hotel and watched DVDs. Later in the afternoon, Meg went out and picked up some food for dinner, while I just laid in bed feeling tired.

We were both a lot more energized on Wednesday, so we first walked down to this historic pier with a bunch of old ships on it, although we just looked at the ships from the outside since it cost money to go on them, and there were a bunch of oddly-dressed children running around them carrying a big length of rope. We then walked over to Ghirardelli Square, which is mostly just overpriced restaurants and tourist shops, like everywhere else we’d been in the city. The factory tour was closed for some reason, so that was a no-go. We decided to walk from there to Lombard St. (the really twisty one). This turned out to involve walking up a really long and steep hill, but we did end up at the top of the twisty street, which we then walked down, and then back to the hotel. All of this had used up whatever energy we’d regained, so we spent about an hour resting in the hotel, and then we decided to go driving and see the rest of the sights on our checklist.

This did not go as well as it could have. First on the list was Rainbow Coop, where an lj-friend works, but we couldn’t figure out where to park to go in, so we just kind of drove past slowly. Next was Fantastico, a store we saw on a recent episode of Mythbusters. Once again, there didn’t seem to be anywhere to park, and the place actually didn’t look even half as cool as it did on TV, so we went on. Our last stop was to be in the area near SFMoMA, where we planned to visit that museum, and the Metreon, and the Cartoon Art Museum. However, we couldn’t find anywhere to park there either; the difference was that in this part of town there are plenty of parking garages, but they were all full. Then I realized — Macworld! So not only was all the parking gone, but the streets were absolutely thronged with people, and I’m sure the museums were all just packed, so we just gave up and drove back to the hotel. We went back to Scoma's for dinner on Wednesday night, because that place really is awesome.

We left Thursday morning. I’m going to make another post a little bit later, talking more about the drive there and back, so that’s it for now.

It’s almost the end of our second full day in San Francisco. We’re having a good time so far: we got into the city around 2pm yesterday, the drive was fine apart from some horrible traffic at the Oakland Bay Bridge. We met my folks near our hotel for lunch (Alioto’s) and walked around the Wharf for a little while. They left to go home and then for dinner we went to a kind of out-of-the-way place called Scoma’s, which was very good.

Today, we first went to the SF Zoo, which is a pretty good zoo, and we enjoyed the visit. I might write more a more detailed zoo entry later, once I see how the pictures turn out. After the zoo, and sore feet from walking, we went over to Chinatown, had some mediocre and touristy dimsum, and then back to the hotel for some rest. Episode I was on HBO, so I explained in detail to Meg (never having seen it) why exactly it was so very bad. After this, a very nice dinner at Bistro Boudin and now, sleep.

One observation from today; either San Francisco is just a particularly beautiful city, or I got very lucky today in my choice of driving, be we got to see some very pretty sights during our drives around the city. On the way to the zoo, we drove along Great Highway, which just follows the shoreline and provides a wonderful view of the beach and ocean. After the zoo, we took Portola down the hill, which allows for an incredible view over the whole city. We must have passed half a dozen people taking pictures from the side of the road. Portola turned into Market, which took us across the very interesting Castro St, and then after Chinatown, a scene in its own right, we drove down Broadway St at night, which boasts a truly amazing array of strip clubs, each having its own multi-story neon sign, many animated.

I hope the rest of our trip is this fun.

Meg and I went to Portland a few weeks ago. I’ve been incredibly lazy about posting about it, but now I am doing so, so there you go.

We arrived Saturday night and basically went straight to bed once we got into the hotel, although not until discovering that there is nowhere open to eat in Portland after 10pm.

Sunday morning we got up and went to the zoo. I took pictures at the zoo. They are in a Flickr set.

Some amusing zoo anecdotes — in the petting zoo area there was a goat who I guess was having a bad day — he kept going around to all the other goats, rearing up on his hind legs, and then bapping them with his head. He did it over and over again and eventually the other goats got tired of it and started turning around when he got near to them. Eventually he gave up on the head-banging game and jumped up onto a barrel and started bleating. It was cute.

A little bit before that, we were over by the elephants, where two older female elephants were hanging around together. One of them was sniffing around on the ground for food and came across a pile of elephant poop. Everybody was yelling at her not to sniff the poop (because poop smells bad), but she didn’t listen, and not only did she sniff the poop, she jammed her trunk right into it. She immediately stepped back and tried to shake the poop off of her trunk, but to no avail. Then, she turned and wiped the poop on the other elephant’s leg, then she walked away. The other elephant didn’t seem to notice, but everybody else thought it was pretty funny.

Anyways, after the zoo we went to Powell’s and I spent quite a bit too much money on books. I actually wasn’t super-impressed with Powell’s — it’s ok, it’s certainly big, but it doesn’t really have any kind of transcendentally spectacular selection, and the prices weren’t anything to write home about. I think the kind of bookstore I like are big rambling shops like The Strand or the late, great Avenue Victor Hugo, full of wonderfully musty old book smell and books double- and triple-stacked on shelves with barely enough room to stand between them. Powell’s was just like a big Border’s with some used books in it.

The next day we looked around the Pearl District, a kind of bohemian neighborhood in northern downtown, with lots of ultra-modern furniture galleries, some cool cooking shops and other stuff like that. Afterward we walked around the Pioneer Square area in the middle of downtown, almost saw a movie, and then decided we were tired from too much walking.

The next morning we drove home and chilled out. It was a good vacation.

So, I’m here. I’m going to do a little combined book/travel update here and it’s gonna be real long and super dull, so nobody will read it and I will put it behind a cut.

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I finished Moonlight and Vines this weekend, while on vacation in Canada. It was OK, I guess, although I find de Lint’s writing to be repetitive in a cloyingly nonspecific way, and reading a collection of short stories really intensified that for me.

Meg and I spent the weekend in Canada, Saturday in Toronto and Sunday in Niagara Falls. Some highlights:

• We went to see the CN Tower, from the top of which I took three typical pictures.
• We went to the Ontario Science Center, which was pretty cool.
• I finally got to have poutine, at this place called Harvey’s. It was real real good.
• Of course we went to see Niagara Falls, and once again I took the typical picture.
• And finally, we spent some time at Casino Niagara, where I won a not inconsiderable amount of money.

Overall, it was a pretty fun trip.

I am now reading the 5th (and final!) book in Thomas Easton’s Organic Future series, Seeds of Destiny. It’s not really all that good.

I finished Greenhouse on Thursday or so. It was OK, although stupid in a kind of incredibly blatant and unimportant way that only Easton seems able to manage. I didn’t post about it earlier because I was out of town on vacation — specifically, in New York City.

We had a good time there. Some highlights:

• Saw Fiddler on the Roof on Broadway, starring Harvey Fierstein and Andrea Martin. Very awesome.
• Attended a screening of that Conan O’Brien show. This was also quite awesome. I learned some interesting things:
  • HDTV cameras are very distinctive.
  • Zooey Deschanel is pretty stupid.
  • That desk he sits at? It’s fucking tiny.
• Went to The American Museum of Natural History. I took a picture of some caribou.
• Visited The Strand Bookstore, which is continually awesome. They put in air conditioning too, which is pretty amazing.

Also other assorted seeings of things and walkings about and eatings of wonderful foods. It was a good vacation, made better by good company. I’m glad to be home now.

I am now reading Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser. It’s good.