A California Wedding in LA for Teddy and Chris and a Visit to Daniel and Kelsey in San Fran

On Thursday afternoon I take the dogs to Doggiedoo in Shakopee, MN. They spent an afternoon there a month ago and I’ve had a tour and it seems nice and gets good reviews. But it’s not Diane, or even Free Dog and I can’t help but worry about my babies. But we’re going to my cousin Mark’s son Teddy’s wedding in LA, Teddy and Chris. I’m excited because I will get to see lots of my cousins.

It’s much better flying from Minnesota to California, only 4 hours instead of 7, a 2 hour time difference instead of 3. We get to LAX at noon pacific time and we’re at our hotel by 2. We’re staying at the Miyako hotel in Little Tokyo, practically in downtown LA. We’ve never been to downtown LA, or Little Tokyo. Downtown LA isn’t very big, but the heart of it could be Manhattan, tall tall buildings, busy streets, hotels, restaurants, diversity. Who knew!

Little Tokyo is nice, a little taste of Japan. We drop off our bags and head right across the street for ramen, pretty good too. Then we settle down in the room for a nap.

The rehearsal dinner is at something called the Ahmanson Senior Center, an airy room with an attached garden. They have name tags for everyone and it’s a good thing because there are a lot of people there all with complicated relationships with the bride and groom. Chris belongs to a large Mexican family and there are people there that are primarily Spanish speakers. Everything is being conducted bilingually, including the trivia game we play after dinner.

Dinner is tacos with all the fixings. There is beer, wine, water and soda to drink, and some fruit punch as well. Since it is Friday night, there is also a little challah at each table. Pretty cute.

We barely make it through trivia and the amazing ice cream sandwiches for dessert before we have to say goodbye for the evening and go back to the hotel. Even a 2 hour time change is hard for us old people.

In the morning I manage to sleep until 6 and then go for a 6 mile run. I head west for a couple miles until things start to seem a little sketchy. Then I backtrack, but turn towards downtown and run about a mile through the heart of the city before I head back to the hotel.

I’m hot and sweaty but even though it’s close to 80 it’s not that bad because the humidity is very low. I’m ready for some coffee and a breakfast sandwich so I head to Starbucks, and there are Michael, Lisa and Jim! So I text Lee and we sit in the shade and have fun chatting.

After a shower we walk through the shops nearby, then pick a bento box place for lunch. Very good! Then we check out the Japanese American History Museum across the street. Very interesting with lots of information about the internment camps during WW II. Shameful American history. All I could think, considering the current climate in this country is that some things never change.

Back to the hotel for another nap. Around 3:45 we head to Millbank for the wedding, a venue only a few blocks from the hotel. The ceremony is in an open courtyard, half sun, half shade. The sun is sunny and hot so everyone hides on the shady side, except a few of us that try to be nice and balance things out and therefore sweat like crazy through the entire ceremony. The ceremony is a creative blend of Jewish and Mexican-Catholic traditions. There is a chuppah, a lasso, the breaking of the glass. There are the Hebrew blessings, the Lord’s Prayer. Very unique and different.

After the ceremony we hang out and wait for the room to be ready for the reception, drinking margaritas and beer. We sit at a table with my cousin Barbie and her sons, my aunts and uncles, some friends of Mark and Amy from Newton. Later there’s lots of dancing, fun and charming toasts in English and Spanish, film clips of dancing from famous movies. It’s Hollywood after all!

We leave around 10 and make our way back to the hotel.

Barbie!

In the morning we get to the airport easily for a short flight to San Francisco where Dan and Kelsey pick us up at the airport. The weather is cool and sunny, radically different from LA. We go to a park with food trunks in the Presidio, eat mini donuts, then walk down to Chrissy field and watch the wind and kite surfers. The wind is brisk and some of them are just flying across the water.

Then we make a dinner reservation at Central Market. We hang out at the bar next door, Trick Dog, which specializes in very esoteric cocktails. I get one with scotch and lemon and other weirder ingredients that is good, strong but good. Lee just gets his standard martini, Daniel gets something simple with vodka, but Kelsey gets one of the weirder tasting cocktails I have ever experienced. It tasted like something a bit rotten frankly. She drank it, and I was impressed!

Central Market was yummy. We got fry bread with burrata, and various pastas. Everyone had good stuff, but I thought my squid ink pasta was pretty awesome.

On Monday I got up around 5:30 and by 7 I was out the door for my run. So nice to run in the 50’s, foggy and cool. I run for 60 minutes using a 30/30 run/walk interval. Then I'm supposed to run 2 minutes at a 10k pace and then 2 minutes at a marathon pace, 8 times. But I miscalculated and thought 24 minutes was 8 repetitions when it was actually it was only 6. Fucking math! But no biggie, it was actually plenty, 8 miles total, a good workout, and we did lots and lots of walking later on.

After an avocado toast snack and a shower we are out the door and off to get dim sum at Hong Kong Lounge. We’re going back to our old favorite after experimenting with Oakland dim sum last year . Maybe next time we’ll try Din Tai Fung however. Daniel says they’ve got their dumplings down so it’s worth a shot.

Afterwards, crazy stuffed as usual, we make our way over to the Embaradero and stoll around. First we look at the mushroom shop. Lee stares longingly but doesn’t think he can get them home in one piece so no. We look at bread, cheese, touristy this and that. Then we decide to climb up the steps to Hoyt tower. It’s very beautiful and a lot of steps too. It sunny but windy at the top with gorgeous views of the bay and the Golden Gate bridge.

Back down the step we go to get some coffee. We sit by the Ferry Building for a bit, boat and people watching, and then get some wine, beer and oysters for an afternoon snack at Hog Island. The oysters are good, west coast varieties, large and briny. I get a glass of Sauvignon Blanc to go with it. They include loaves of yummy French baguettes and keep bringing them out until we finally have to tell them to stop. 

Then its back to Daniel’s where we relax for awhile. Lee opens a bottle of the party favor beer from the wedding. It’s a porter so I like it, but I only have a few sips. I think Lee has a lot of it and gets a bit drunk.

Around 7 we head up the hill to the great little french restaurant a couple of blocks from Daniel’s apartment. We have to wait a little for a table. I get a glass of cab franc that’s pretty darn good. I’m just a wine girl at heart what can I say? We are seated outside. It’s chilly so I ask them to turn on the heater and then we are toasty. The street is very steep but somehow they adjust the table legs so our food and drinks don’t go sliding down the hill and after awhile we forget that we’re sitting on an incline.

I get the mussels, and frites of course. It’s very good. Another glass of the cab as well. And dessert! I get the chocolate mousse, but Kelsey gets an apple tart with ice cream and caramel sauce that is totally out of this world. 

Tuesday morning I go for another run, this time with 7 hill repeats. I pick a street that’s not too steep, but it’s not long enough so I continue up around the corner and have to march rapidly up the last part of the hill instead of running it. It’s gets my heart rate up so I guess it’s ok. Then for the two mile cool down I run around Potrero Hill, which is so crazy steep in spots I can’t run either up OR down. 

Then it’s pho for brunch. Kelsey and Dan like a place in the tenderloin. It’s simple but excellent pho. It comes in small, medium, and large bowls. I get a medium but I think a small would have been fine. Kelsey and Daniel get their meat on the side so it doesn’t cook as much, an interesting choice I may try sometime in the future.

Afterwards we go to Baker Beach but it’s pretty foggy and windy so we don’t stay long. Then we stop for some Four Barrel Coffee in the Mission. Then we go buy Pliny the Elder beer from the Russian River for Lee to take back to Minnesota, and then go back to Dan’s apartment to chill for awhile. I’m tired today.

For dinner we go to a Thai restaurant called Kin Khau that Kelsey and Daniel discovered by accident one day. It’s got a Michelin Star but they just walked in and got a seat. Its Thai all right but special. We get nice cocktails, a mushroom mousse with rice crackers, pork belly with sticky rice, massaman curry.

That’s about it for our very nice trip to Cally. It’s exciting that Daniel and Kelsey are coming for a visit in September. It’s also very exciting that Kelsey has a new job so I can finally post pictures of her too!

Goodbye Austin

Here I sit in another service apartment, almost 8 months after we returned to the US from Hong Kong. This apartment is even more temporary for me than the last one (although Lee has been living in it for almost 2 months). In two days we close on our house in New Hampshire; in three days we start moving in.

I’m going to change the title of this blog. I don’t know WHAT I’m changing it to yet, however! But I’d rather just change the title than start an entirely new blog. This transition, from one place to another, and yet another, has gotten fairly tiresome in the past year. I’m ready to settle down in one place for awhile, make a house into a home, plant a garden, and get a dog and a cat.

But in the meantime I feel like I owe Austin more than just a fleeting “seeya!” before I plunge headlong into the end of a New England fall and straight into a snow bank! Austin has been part of my life in one fashion or another for almost 30 years. My sister and her husband moved here in the early eighties so that he could go to engineering school at UT. I know I visited them in Austin before I had Sarah, but a lot of those visits are kind of jumbled up in my mind. I remember a student apartment that must have been somewhere close to UT. I remember their very-long-lived cat, Otis. I remember going to 6th street and wandering in and out of various bars, listening to the music change and trying not to get lost in the crowds. I remember going to Amy’s Ice Cream, when “smushing” mix-ins into ice creams was a new and delicious idea.  I remember going to Las Manitas for breakfast, somewhere way out in the country for a family-style meal, Central Market for groceries.

Then we both had children and I started taking turns with each child. One year Sarah would come with me, the next year it would be Daniel. One time Sarah and I had to run through the Dallas airport to make our connection (this must have been pre-Sky Train!). I had her grasped like a football under my arm, a fellow passenger had me by the hand, and we FLEW through that airport, all the time Sarah quietly insisting “put me down, Mama, I can walk!” I didn’t even bother to argue with her. We made that plane, too!

Then my sister and her husband moved out to Pflugerville in the late 80’s. I got a whole different perspective on Austin. There were highways springing up all over the place, and the traffic was terrible. Suburban Austin didn’t have near the charm of the older parts of the city, but I think part of the problem was that this one visit I came in October. The weather was hot and miserable, and the baby Jessica saga was on TV (remember the child that fell down the well? That happened in Texas). Every other time, I came in the spring, which is when Texas is at its very best.

In the early 90’s my sister moved to the neighborhood near 35th Street and Jefferson. It was a beautiful neighborhood. Her kids went to Briker Woods Elementary School. We went for walks on Schoal Creek, went shopping at the Arboretum, and visited the State Capitol.

Until the mid-90’s my memories of Austin are all happy ones. I don’t want to get into it here, but the late 90’s were not a happy time for my sister and her family. I have very sad and horrible memories of this time. Although it is not fair to somehow blame Austin for my sister’s problems, it’s only too true that my perception of this city is forever altered by the events that took place back then. So, when we found out that we would be moving here, my feelings were inevitably mixed. I was happy, because it was the start of a new chapter in our lives, one that we hoped would lead to new challenges for Lee and new adventures for the both of us. But I was worried as well, because of the unhappy events that had occurred here. Eventually the opportunities for Lee and the adventures for me all came to pass. We lived in Austin for almost 2 years before we moved to Hong Kong, and Hong Kong never would have been possible if we had not moved to Austin first.

During this period of time our house was burglarized. This experience left me shaken. I learned once again that my judgment was sometimes flawed and someone close to me was not trustworthy. It left a lasting feeling of being unsafe in my own home that lingered even after we returned to Austin from Hong Kong.

What will I NOT miss about Austin? I will not miss the endless summers. I won’t miss day after day of 100 degree plus heat. I won’t miss the giant cockroaches, or the scorpions, or the mosquitoes. I won’t miss the feeling that my liberal-leaning vote was irrelevant in such a conservative state. I won’t miss feeling like I live somewhere that I don’t really belong.

What WILL I miss about Austin? I will miss the wildflowers in the spring. I will miss the mild, pleasant winters. I will miss the friends I made. I’ll miss some of the great restaurants we found. I’ll miss the uniquely Austin music scene. I miss running on Town Lake. I’ll miss getting to go to ACL, mud, heat, dust and all.

When it’s all said and done, am I glad I lived in Austin, Texas for a time? I have to say ultimately – yes. Texas and I may have never meshed all that well, but that’s okay. Austin is part of who I am, and it seems like it was necessary for me to live there to complete a portion of my life. I’m glad I lived there and I’m glad to be moving on. I’m not sure what I’m going to do when I get a craving for Tex-Mex though…

Web images courtesy of http://static.howstuffworks.com/gif/austin-city-guide-ga-13.jpg (Amy's Ice Cream), http://perceptivetravel.com/blog/wp-content/las-manitas-front-resized-to-600.jpg (Las Manitas), http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/32/Texas45.jpg (Texas road construction). The blue bonnets are mine.