Showing posts with label california. Show all posts

12 September 2011

summer snapshots


... all from my cell phone, because I am lazy that way. This summer was spent in LA, the East Bay and Seattle - though mostly LA, where I worked odd jobs and hung out with my dad. Though it was a bit sad being away from Iain for so long, I was never lonely for long with all my family and friends around:


The grandparents...


...my best best friend Lauren...


...even Teiko was in town! 



There are many things to love about being in California, but the food is definitely high on the list.


above: Maggie and Dad vie for the last of the salad. 


Weekends were spent waitressing at a Vietnamese restaurant. Free pho + getting to talk about Vietnamese food all day long = awesome. 


Also I love Venice Beach :) 




In mid-August, I went up to Seattle to meet up with my mom and see most of the extended Tokuda family. 


Manhole covers like the ones in Japan! 


Cleaning out my grandmother's basement yielded some strange finds. Big League Liniment! No medicine cabinet is complete without it. 


And then Iain finally arrived! Not on a giant slide, as this photo might lead you to believe, but heroically nonetheless on an airplane. Hooray for Iain! 


After Iain got here, we spent a whirlwind few days in LA saying hello and goodbye to family before flying up to the Bay Area...
 


You have to love a city where Howard Zinn is painted on the walls.


Graffiti in the S.F. Mission district.



In San Francisco, we rang in my sister's birthday with a sophisticated and contemplative night of pizza, beer, and Deep Blue Sea. That's Samuel L. Jackson getting eaten, above, obviously. (Happy birthday, Maggie!)


All in all, it was a great summer (especially since, thanks to Hanoi's weather, it felt like it started ages ago, back in April!) I loved getting to spend so much time with my family and reconnecting with life in California while getting excited and gearing up for this: 


Which - finally - brings this very belated blog back into real time, because we leave for Peru on Wednesday. We'll be volunteering for just short of three months at an NGO in the Andes, so the next update will hopefully be from South America. 

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15 January 2011

how to get thrown out of a japanese gym


As you can see from the photos, Iain and I decided to commemorate our time in California by getting tattoos. Or not. Thanks, Candy, for the awesome Christmas presents! 

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10 January 2010

lost angeles




... is what my sister always used to call this city when she was a baby, which I've always liked. At any rate, hello from disturbingly sunny Los Angeles, where I am having lots of fun with Lauren and my dad's family, and playing lots of robot games with Joey, the world's cutest 5 year old stepbrother. It's so sunny here that, in between mouthfuls of Mexican food, I feel almost guilty thinking about Iain, who is buried in 3 feet of snow back in Aberdeenshire. Almost.

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06 January 2010

happy twenty-ten!


Happy 2010! 2009 began for me on a random side street in Hanoi with Iain, listening to the sounds of the giddy motorbike traffic, and ended Princes Street Bridge in Ediburgh, amongst men in kilts, fireworks, and people drunkenly making up the words to Auld Lang Synge. It was a nice, laid back way to say goodbye to what had been a really wonderful year: we travelled around Vietam by motorbike (twice!) and spent three months with my mom and John in California and I saw almost all of my family; I drove Iain all around the states (on highways! without crashing or crying!); we went to China, where I almost fainted on the Great Wall, and Amsterdam (for 5 hours); I met Iain's awesome family in Scotland; we worked our butts off in Tokyo and studied a lot of Japanese. I took way too many photographs and knit a lot. I got to do all of this with an amazing boyfriend who makes feel me like I'm home no matter where in the world we are; I feel so lucky to be doing what I'm doing right now, and I'm so excited for whatever 2010 brings.


I left Aberdeen early in the morning on Monday and - after more airport drama than is worth recounting -  managed to hop the first standby flight back to San Francisco on Tuesday morning. So now I'm home, without Iain for the first time in over a year and a half, where my room is filled with the contents of my old Brooklyn storage unit (long story, more on it later possibly) and where it is unseasonably warm after the snow and cold of Aberdeen. So things are good, if jet-lagged and I'll write more later, but for now just wanted to wish you all a wonderful 2010 -  I hope this is your best year yet!

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18 June 2009

the road from the sea to the sky




We said goodbye to LA this morning and - after an amazing pancake breakfast graciously cooked by my eleven year old cousin - set off North towards Monterey along the Pacific Coast Highway, a drive I've never done before and which is even more beautiful than I'd imagined. 



For all my worries about driving out of LA (after the two hours spent inching along the 10 when we arrived), the drive was actually a lot of fun, and was accompanied by two CDs made explicitly for use along the PCH, which Iain's former boss made for him before we left Hanoi. (So if you think it's lame that I quoted the Red Hot Chili Peppers in my subject heading, you should just be relieved I didn't say anything about long strange trips or being a goddess on the highway. All hot-linking aside, the CDs are great company, so, thanks, Iain's old boss!).


(This is my favorite kind of scenery in the whole world.) 

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12 May 2009

You, me, and about sixty cyclists in spandex



This last Sunday marks a year since the night Iain and I met; it was also, weirdly, the day I was supposed to leave Hanoi according to my original ticket, so yay for changed plans and dumb luck. To celebrate, we took a day off from the job hunt and Japanese studying to go into San Francisco, where we rented bicycles and - alongside a herd of bewildered-looking tourists on identical bikes with their identical tourists maps stuck to their handlebars and a fleet of humorless, spandexed cyclists who did not enjoy sharing the road anymore than the cars - rode along the piers, across the Golden Gate bridge, and into Sauselito. Biking in the States is a far cry from riding my bicycle in Hanoi (the bad: seriously? you have to obey the traffic signals? the good: so does everyone else, which makes the likelihood of bus-inflicted death significantly lower)  but we had lots of fun and, as ever, I still don't quite know how I was ever lucky enough to meet such an wonderful, smart, sweet and funny person with whom I can have all these adventures, but I am grateful for him every day, no matter where in the world we end up. 

 


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02 May 2009

VIP moss, 日本語を and other california things




A break from the never-ending photos of the Northern mountains to post a few of Kyoto that I never got around to posting last year, because endless photos of beautiful mountain views get monotonous, and reading and thinking endlessly about Japan has made me even more easily distracted than usual. All of these are from my massive day of shin-splint-inducing temple hopping last February, though I can't remember which temple was which anymore.




The sign (in English) says: Special Moss, like VIP! Do not touch.

I don't have any photos of being home yet, mostly because my camera and lens are both at the camera hospital, being cleaned (the camera) and massively repaired (the much-abused lens) after more than a year of being rattled all over South East Asia, and because they served put up with so much abuse at my hands, I am trying not to resent them for the horrific cost of the repairs and resign myself to being a grown-up by taking care of my nice things. At any rate, being here means mostly looking for work and studying Japanese, with varying levels of success; not many of the larger schools are willing to accommodate couples looking for work together, which has been frustrating, as we want to live if not work together - but we have a few leads and also some backup plans if those should fall through.



Branches reflected in a pond.


It is weird how distant Hanoi feels after only a month away, even if I still feel like I know the roads there better than the roads here; still, it's been guiltily easy to settle into a routine of whiling away every afternoon in a cafe (we rotate so that no one gets too mad at us for ordering one cup of tea and as much hot water as it takes to get through three hours of studying). My spoken Japanese is still pretty hopeless, though I can read both the kana alphabets now and am picking up a little kanji. So that's here, and what our plans are, for the moment; once we have our Japan plans settled, we'll hopefully do a little travelling (and I will hopefully get better at driving freeways, to make said travelling possible); more photos of the Vietnamese mountains to follow and maybe some of home, when I get my delinquent camera back. 

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04 April 2009

...and then we came to the end.


View from our beach shack/hotel on Phu Quoc island; as you can imagine, the last few days in Vietnam were pretty grueling.

Back in Oakland (!) - California is sunny and cold and quiet after a few last days spent on Phu Quoc, and I miss Hanoi but am happy to be home for now. I would write more but it would all be about food (oh my god I missed a lot of food) and so will post more photos soon, I promise. 

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16 February 2008

Last Day



Not pictured: the couple trying to enjoy their romantic evening about three feet to my left; me, being an annoying, anonymous third wheel on about seven different dates.







From the parking lot at the Rockridge Long's Drugs.

A few last images of the Bay Area to last me till I get back; on Valentine's Day I drove up to Grizzly Peaks to take photos of the sunset, not realizing that the cliffs would be overpopulated with scads of couples trying to have a nice evening without me and my camera wandering around them. Because I'm a) scattered on the best of days and b) thoroughly braindead after the last not-awesome month and a half, I locked my keys in my rental car (left them dangling in the ignition, actually, right after congratulating myself on remembering to lock the non-automatic doors) and spent a few panicked moments thinking I'd be marooned somewhere on Grizzly Peaks in the dark and the cold all alone. Fortunately, because I am a) scattered and b) braindead, I did not, in fact, lock *all* the doors to the car, and so skirted extreme pathos by crawling in the backseat. I bet everyone is really glad I'm about to go wander all over the planet now all by myself, right?

I started writing this at the Rockridge Starbucks yesterday in the midst of running a flurry of last minute errands (extra memory card! advil! groceries for a gigantic dinner I decided to cook for everyone!) but the wireless kept flaking out, so I'm actually writing this in the international terminal at SFO (where I have about 2 hours left on my Starbucks-purchased T-Mobile access!), where I am drinking overpriced tea and trying not to get all panicky at the thought of being somewhere utterly unfamiliar for quite so long after spending a nice, soothing week at home with puppies and family and way too many excursions along Skyline. But it's okay, because in 12 hours I will be in Japan (Oh my god, I'll be in Japan!) and then I promise to start writing more coherently (ha) and not overusing astericks, "awesome" or parentheticals. Right.

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14 February 2008

Countdown: two days to go!

Driving on Grizzly Peaks.

In Starbucks yet again, as there is no internet to be had at my mom's place; am becomming quite the Starbucks Wireless connoissuer - Solano has the best outlet-availabilty; Rockridge has better parking but is unreliable. Running out of time here and feeling a bit frantic; stocking up on used books for my eleven hour flight (any recommendations are welcome; right now I've got the Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki, in the Miso Soup by R. Murakami, Persuasion by Jane Austen, the Cleft by Doris Lessing, and the Quiet American by Graham Greene) and enjoying my second-to-last day of (bad) driving and trying to pick up and re-learn a few Japanese phrases ("Hi, do you speak English? Lovely weather, isn't it? I am bad at Japanese.")

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13 February 2008

Berkeley (countdown: three more days!)



Lucy the new puppy!

Probably I need to start being more creative with my blog title posts; at any rate, I'm back home(ish) in Berkeley for about ten more minutes before I head to Japan for a few days before landing in Ho Chi Min City on February 23rd. In my short time here, I have already managed to fry my mother's computer into oblivion (I swear I just restarted it and now everything is gone. I should not be allowed to touch ANYTHING), get bitten by a teething labrador puppy, make my usual aimless drive up and around Skyline (and now Grizzly Peaks!) and spend way too much time at Starbucks milking the 24 hours of overpriced wireless access I bought in a fit of internet-deprived desperation. My last week in Brooklyn was cold and sleep deprived and nerve-racking, and it was surprisingly easy to leave it behind after a 24 hour stretch of frantic packing, painting, moving, cleaning, landlord-finagling and plodding through the abruptly freezing cold all over two bouroughs taking care of last minute detritis (yay, hepatitis vaccines).

Goodbye, best kitchen in the whole wide world.

So that's it, then; the Brooklyn existence is all packed up and painted over or, at the very least, languishing in a storage facility. I am slightly burned out and brain-dead right now, and prone to telling my entire life story whenever people make the innocent mistake of asking simple things that SHOULD be answerable, and probably are, for most reasonable people, such as: Where do you live? Oh, you're going to Vietnam? For how long? Probably this is why I got detained at Immigration when I arrived in London last fall, which I never wrote about because it was just that embarrassing, but it totally happened and it was actually kind of hilarious.

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02 October 2007

home



Berkeley BART!


I was home(ish) in the Bay Area for about two seconds this weekend where I mostly stayed in totally new places (my stepdad's house in the Berkeley Hills - with its corresponding fancy looking and equally unfamiliar BART station - and my sister's cool San Francisco apartment with its view of Alcatraz). I didn't do too much due to time constraints, though I did manage to do what I always end up doing when I go home, which is get lost driving around the mountains on Skyline and now - thanks to John's North Berkeley location - Grizzly Peaks) and wandering around the ginormous Longs Drugs in Rockridge that I swear sells everything ever made ever and where I have probably spent several months worth of my life, though this time I actually had the legitimate excuse of getting travel provisions (hooray for shower flipflops and cold-eeze!)

Anyway, I need to clean the apartment before running a bunch of last minute errands before jumping on a train to New Haven tonight, so here are some more photos of why I love the Bay Area.





View from Skyline (taken in December with the fog rolling in over the lights of the East Bay, as I was too busy being lost this time around to take many photos)- Wouldn't you want to spend all your time up there too?


you will never lack for anything ever again.



I haven't seen the Golden Gate Bridge in too many years to count, so please forgive my total touristiness right now.

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