tuftears | Out and About: Food, Festival, and Fun (Reply)

dracosphynx was anxious to prise me out of the house (in which I had immured myself for a week while resisting a mild cold) so I headed over to his place early in the morning and we caravanned up to Oakland, first to eat at a diner with the curious name Rudy's Can't Fail Cafe, then to visit the Oakland Lunar New Year celebration.

Here's my breakfast! I had the "Popeye's Eyedoho", which consists of hash browns with melted cheddar cheese, and scrambled eggs with baby spinach, with a chaser of orange juice on the side. Maybe it's the long wait we had, but the food was pretty darn tasty. Dracosphynx evidenced surprise that the place was so busy; I'm guessing that whenever he and

chipotle visited it last, it wasn't so busy. It's a block from the Pixar campus. Surprisingly, the I in the logo over their gate is not a giant metal lamp.

The festival itself was a bit cramped due to the rain forcing the normally outside events to move under the roof, but there were some interesting bits like a 'Make your own spring roll' art class. (I didn't participate, still being full from lunch) We got more enjoyment, I suspect, out of wandering through the Oakland Museum of California, where the festival was being held. It was quite a smorgasbord of science, art, and culture, ranging from wildlife and plants and geology of the local area to the ecology of the bay (I had no idea that imported Asian overbite clams had taken over so much of the seafloor) to history and an exploration of culture from Alcatraz to Angel Island to the nearby Indian shell mound that had gotten built over by industries and become toxically contaminated, to art and photos... The stained glass windows impressed me with their joyful luminosity.

Here, have a picture of taxidermy cougar and kittens! The exhibits used forced-perspective backdrops that looked really good.

Around three,

dracosphynx was feeling hungry. We determined there was a regrettable lack of actual Asian beverages, so we abandoned the festival and headed over to Teance in Berkeley. It turns out to be at the confluence of quite a few nifty little shops, most of which succeeded in claiming some of

dracosphynx's money: the Builders bookstore (a small but dense book describing church architecture), Chocolatier Blue (we both had some of the Valrhona ice cream; I didn't care for the sea salt sprinkled on it but it was decent ice cream otherwise), Teance itself (I would have liked to sample the genmaicha tea but alas, all they had were oolong and gojiberry herbal tea), and the Pasta Shop nearby, which offered an impressive range of gourmet foods including olive oil in a variety of labels, aged balsamic vinegar, cheese and crackers, and of course, a big display case of chocolate, which claimed yet more of Dracosphynx's money. I was bemused to see a selection of salami and sausages right next to the cash register on the way out-- not hard-wrapped but loosely wrapped, and possibly subject to all sorts of germs from passersby. eek!

Anyway, I was tempted by various items but I managed to resist the urge to buy fancy tea that I would probably not actually get around to using before it went stale. -_- Thereafter, we headed out through pouring rain and made the hour-long drive back home.

Whew! Pretty good day in all, I have been duly exposed to the outside world per

dracosphynx's orders.