back in the bay area...

i'm sorry i've been neglecting you. blame the winter. i blame everything on this winter. it takes all my will just to go outside, so obviously, these are not optimal conditions for generating new material. just wait til spring - you won't know what hit you! there will be blog posts every day! (well, don't hold me to that.) 

it seems as good time as any to go back a few months to warmer times. in december, i was in the bay area for about 10 days. the goal of the trip was for hhh to clean out his childhood room (a gargantuan task then documented in this talk at the museum of chinese in america),  but we managed to go up to berkeley, oakland, and san francisco twice. (the rest of the time was spent sifting through mountains of records, 20-year-old pez dispensers, gum, old homework, shoes, and gifts from ex-girlfriends....) we visited some new places and an old favorite. 

first up, umami mart. it's a super cute shop (both  brick-and-mortar and online) opened by kayoko akabori and yoko kumano a few years back. they carry all kinds of japanese kitchen and barware, and have a selection of grocery/pantry goods in the back. they recently opened up their bottle shop as well. it is the first japanese beer shop in the u.s.! check it out if you're in oakland. 

a view of the back grocery/pantry corner. 

adorable prints and some of their kitchenware selection. 

hhh and i also made it to the ferry building, which neither of us had visited before. it reminded me of chelsea market - i love these kinds of big indoor markets. my first experience with this type of shopping was probably the food court levels of department stores in taiwan. those places were amazing - you could eat to your heart's content, and then buy specialty snacks, chocolates, or fancy teas to take with you. so i always love these kinds of places. since we were at the ferry building in the middle of the afternoon, we just grabbed a couple snacks (hhh headed for boccalone for a meat cone (sounds gross, hhh claimed it was delicious), while I headed for the sweets at the pastry stand outside bouli bar. there was also plenty to see in the non-edible category: heath ceramics, and a garden shop where i picked up some paperwhite bulbs. 

it's a long skinny space lit by a skylight that runs the length of the building. and you can actually catch ferries there. 

bright bulb vases at heath ceramics...love these! 

all kinds of fungi. 

some cookies and biscuits from bouli bar. 

a look into the kitchen at bouli bar. 

boccalone, home of the meat cone. 

and we also returned to chez panisse, an old favorite. we always go here with hhh's parents when we visit - once we met them there straight from sfo. it's always so good. we eat in the cafe upstairs, since it's so impossible to get a reservation in the formal dining room. 

the entrance to the arts and crafts house that is chez panisse.

a poster in the entry featuring alice waters' foundation, edible schoolyard.

and of course, no visit to san francisco is complete without a visit to the home of good friends. maybe one of these days, they will let me do a home tour of their place! 

ps. wnyc just told me it feels like -11F in central park. i am not going outside today. 

taiwan series: another look at eslite spectrum

on this, the first day of the great blizzard of 2015*, i'm going to go back to sunny taiwan. want to come?

when i was in taipei a few months ago, i had to go back to eslite spectrum for a second look, since it was such a good time when i went in 2013. (it's since been featured on afar's taiwan travel guide.) again, i failed to stay at the eslite hotel, but it is looking amazing. there is so much to see and do and eat in that complex! there is, of course, a big bookstore (eslite's original source of fame), locally- and regionally-made clothing, and enough kitchen goods to stock ten downton abbey kitchens. (although i guess the style of the kitchen goods would be slightly out of place in edwardian england. there is a lot of enamelware though..but i think that is more downstairs than upstairs. anyway, i digress.) this time, i also noticed a custom leather shop called hsu & daughters. it looks like they make wallets, bags, and belts on the spot. and if you get thirsty or hungry, there are a whole row of fancy tea shops to choose from, as well as a decent food court in the basement. there is also a large section featuring taiwanese specialty snacks, like 100 kinds of dried fruit - my favorite are the wild mangos (these are different from regular old domesticated mangos, i suppose) - and jerky and pork floss and edamame.  yum.

anyway, check it out: 

the entrance to the home goods section.

one of the independent clothing and textile vendors on the first level.

a glimpse of some hasami porcelain from above. definitely on my wish list.

some of those kitchen goods i was talking about. very japanese-brooklyn, if you know what i mean.

i love these two-toned pieces!

the leather-maker's shop.

a selection of the dried taiwanese goods.

more yummy things. 

all of those photos have successfully distracted me from the fact that everything is gusty and swirling outside, and that we're in for some thundersnow tonight. now i'm going to have some lemon-ginger tea with the last of those dried wild mangos i brought home, while rejoicing at the fact that the first day of the semester has just been canceled. (does that make me a bad teacher?)  

anyway. stay cozy, folks. xoxo

*mayor di blasio says that "this will mostly likely be one of the largest blizzards in the history of new york city." all the reporters on msnbc are positively gleeful about all the terrible weather that is to come. i bet dante is glad he isn't responsible for shoveling the snow this year.

snow day

i was going totally stir crazy today indoors. it snowed last night, but it's quickly turning into that special brand of yellow-ish brown new york city slush that you want to avoid at all costs. everything is dead and sad (by everything i just mean my outdoor plants, not people or anything). and on monday, the semester starts and i have to (i mean...get to) teach, so i can't just sit around watching my paperwhites grow anymore.  i've been propagating some jade plant cuttings too, but recently realized that i was doing it all wrong. this seems to be a theme with my gardening...i really should research then cut, rather than the other way around. anyway, we'll see if i was able to save them...stay tuned. 

my sad dead yard.

how i wished my yard looked. (this is actually a garden near the river cafe and brooklyn bridge park in the summer of 2014.)

so instead, for some insta-plant gratification,  i went up fifth avenue to zuzu's petals. zuzu's is the neighborhood florist (it's weirdly also the name of the ramen shop in the neighborhood, but there's no relation that i can see), and i'm always tempted to submit a job application when i go in there so i can be surrounded by beautiful flowers all day long. everyone in there is living the dream, if you ask me. 

so i trudged through the said slush and got myself some snow day plants. this is what i came home with: 

the green leafy thing with purple undersides is a calathea, and the pinky-green plant is a chinese evergreen.

a close-up of the bright pink edges of the chinese evergreen. it went perfectly into the crinkle planter from cb2. 

i instantly felt 1,000 times better. aren't those lovely? the google gods say that they are both low-light plants, and the calathea is from the tropics. the "siam aurora" chinese evergreen is apparently a new hybrid - they don't all have the variegated pink coloring. anyway, now that i have these plants, i suppose i can go on living until spring comes. but i may need another new houseplant or two if this miserable weather keeps up. (hhh, don't say i didn't warn you.) 

new orleans! (the green edition)

last week, i spent three days in new orleans. it was timed perfectly to avoid the sub-freezing temperatures in new york, but sadly, the polar vortex (or whatever they are calling the latest cold front) reached even louisiana. it was in the 30s and 40s though, so that's something. it doesn't really look that cold in these photos, since the plant life seems to be thriving, but all i can tell you is that maybe even sub-tropical plants can survive a night or two of frost. 

as i noted on my recent trip to taiwan, the greenery in new places is now one of the highlights of travel for me. so in an attempt to counteract the effects of eating five times a day (so. much. eating.), we walked for hours through several different neighborhoods as well as the new orleans botanical gardens and lafayette no. 1 cemetery.     

the cemetery, it turns out, is the oldest municipal cemetery in new orleans. at a single city block, it's not as big as some of the others, but it was the perfect antidote to all the butter and oil we ingested at commander's palace (hhh had a crock of chowder and oysters; i had shrimp and grits). i was especially taken by all the ferns bursting out of the brick and rock. there was also this - hugh grant's (and his family's) tomb. funny how there are no dates on the stone. or maybe this is typical? i am no antebellum cemetery expert.

the cemetery sits between washington, coliseum, prytania, and sixth streets. it's in the garden district, which is full of lovely old homes i could spend all day looking at. (you could try this self-guided walking tour.) if you get tired, there is coffee and a bathroom, a bookshop, and a shop of turkish cotton textiles worth checking out at 2727 prytania street.

on our second day in new orleans, we ventured into mid-city. between meals, we did more exploring and ended up at the botanical gardens. despite the low temperatures, the plants generally seemed pretty happy. there were also several enclosed areas housing tropical and desert varieties. outdoors, there was an edible section with raised beds. i recognized rosemary, rainbow chard, and several types of lettuce. there was also something that hhh thought looked like giant purple basil, but i think it must have been an entirely different kind of plant...right?

all this botany gets me excited about spring planting! i've already gotten a bunch of paperwhites that i'm forcing indoors, and i came home from california with clippings from the heirloom jade plant in hhh's mom's garden. (more on that later.) i also got a dozen air plants! (hhh: why do you need so many air plants?) 

anyway, all this is to say that i am ready for this ridiculous frigid weather to be done already. okay, a few more green shots to tide us over until it's really springtime.... 

stay warm!! xoxo

a new year

between the autumns of 2012 and 2013, i lived in china. although I've been back for a long time now, i still think about time in relation to that year i spent away from new york. i think that i thought that i would have accomplished a lot more than I have during the year+ that i have been home, but maybe i am being too hard on myself. or maybe not. (it's a common complaint among those writing dissertations, no doubt.) at any rate, it's now 2015, and time again to think about the expectations that i want to set for myself. i'm going to be teaching and writing, and also thinking about whether or not this scholarly life is one that i will pursue. after all, i have a lot of other interests that have nothing to do with academia or ngos, as this blog so clearly shows.

anyone who knows me knows that tidying is one of these interests. i was always very particular about keeping a clean house, but this book really took it to the next level for me. i've already made it the topic of far too many conversations. but it seems like an apt topic for the threshold of a new year, doesn't it?

yesterday, i packed up the holiday decorations and tucked them back under the stairs. the living room feels tidier without them, but i am itching to cull away a bit more. maybe it's sarah's influence, or all those minimalist rooms i've been seeing on remodelista. god knows hhh and i love our tchotchkes, but i'm hoping somehow that 2015 will be the year we decluttered our lives. we're off to a good start, i think - hhh spent the better part of our holiday break in california sorting through the debris of his childhood (although i think he would say "treasures"). have you ever sorted through an entire lifetime's worth of mementos? i wouldn't recommend it. (i have never seen such so many pez dispensers in one place before. nor snapple caps from the 1990s.) to prevent this fate, i'm going to be more deliberate and mindful of the things i buy and keep. the housing works up the street should also expect to see me hauling bags to their door with increasing frequency.

some of the holiday trimmings.

but hhh's great purge also unearthed some delights. among them: pencil sketches by his grandfather (including this incredible likeness of queen elizabeth), his first book (written when he was 13 in 1990, about a father who goes off to war in iraq), and a misshapen wooden carving of his adolescent hand made in shop class, which i insisted on bringing back. after all, home wouldn't be home without the things that remind us of those we love.

so, with that in mind, it's back to decluttering - but remembering that there is room for the most precious of tokens. (but you really gotta be careful here.)

have a wonderful 2015! xoxo