March 2018

I had a free Sunday so I biked around.

Now that I have a car again, I've been driving most days. Instead of having to cycle every day, I get to bike for fun.

It's fun.

Downtown Oakland is really vibrant these days.

There's really great art all around. Little shops and delicious restaurants and cool cafes.

My favorite bars are all in Oakland.

What I love most about Oakland though is how much its been doing to improve its community.

There's First Fridays on Telegraph Avenue where vendors hawk art and handmade goods and food trucks come by the dozen and musicians fill the streets with song and all the bars throw their doors wide open for people to drink and be merry.

Friday Nights as the Oakland Museum are always lively too. Admission to the museum is half off, and they have live music and food trucks. A wholesome place for families to gather, especially now that the days are long.

On certain weekday afternoons, they set up street lights and seating in this little section of Broadway where they play salsa music and people dance in the street.

There's also this secret little park I love. It's not really a secret, but not many people know about it since it's a few blocks away from the main streets.

It's really cute.

English is really amazing. So many people speak it in some capacity and there are so many different types of accents, and each accent carries its own connotations.

In the States, a British or French accent is considered panty-dropping sexy and smart. Even German or Spanish accents are considered attractive, even if the person speaking doesn't have full English fluency.

But throw in a Chinese or Korean or any Asian accent, and the person is perceived as low class and bumbling. In most forms of American media, the immigrant Asian character is the butt of the joke, eating fried lice and being 'so soh-rry'.

It'd be a lie to say I wasn't embarrassed of my parents' awkwardness with English growing up. It was like a giant label on our foreheads that marked us as 'others' in this country.

It wasn't until I lived in Korea that I think I was able to really shake off a lot of these biases. Now here I was, a college graduate, being the stupid, poorly-spoken foreigner trying to spit out nonsensical sentences in Korean while the Koreans stared at me in confusion. Training with Captain at the gym, where we'd have these crazy but incredibly profound half-English, half-Korean, full-broken conversations about climbing-- honestly, I learned more from Captain about climbing and life than I have from most others in full fluent conversations ("Tammy, you every day training! Every day you thinking, I can do it!' Really, very important." Thanks, Captain. I forget this a lot, but you're right, even years later).

But without this experience, it would have been really hard for me to get past a lifetime of societal preconceptions.

One of my favorite things about Vietgone is the way it plays with language. The way the Vietnamese characters speak perfect, slang-filled sentences and the way they act so modern, because to each other, they are just people, not one-dimensional caricatures. Even if their English is broken and even if fluent English speakers may judge them as sub-human, they know each other to be complex and real.

We went snowshoeing and played and drank cheap beer.

I'd never snowshoed before. It's actually really fun. It's so satisfying how the snow just crunches down under you. Satisfying and also super exhausting.

I love the colors we wear. So bright and so fun!

I wish people in the city wore brighter colors.

I didn't take these pictures though. Another friend did. I left my camera at home.

It was super rainy this month, which was really good for California because we're still in a drought, but not so great for climbing outdoors.

But that's okay. It was a good excuse to play with friends more.

And also eat delicious things.

This wine bar on Polk Street has an amazing deal on Tuesdays. $25 for a bottle of okay wine and a cheese platter. What in the world.

This probably only sounds like a deal if you live in the Bay Area.

I was reading on Reddit earlier this week, and people were commenting about the cost of a dozen eggs.

Here, a dozen eggs easily costs $2.50 to $3.00, and that's for regular eggs. If you get free range eggs, that price jumps up to about $5.00.

Meanwhile, people from other states claimed they could buy a dozen eggs for a dollar or less. One guy was claiming prices of 85 cents.

What. How.

So maybe $25 for a bottle of wine and a cheese platter isn't a great deal in other states. But on the plus side, anytime I leave California, it's like the whole world is having a sale just for me.

Our oven didn't work for a long time because my landlord is a jerk so I couldn't really bake anything fancy. Anything I baked in the past year and half has been in a toaster oven, which is doable but not really great.

But now the oven works again so I can finally bake real things!

This month I baked whole wheat walnut blondies and a walnut-crust cheesecake. Not pictured, I also made a blueberry topping to go with the cheesecake.

I can't wait to become a trophy wife owning a hobby cafe where I can just bake hipster pastries and desserts made with flax seed, honey and whole wheat flour.

Just kidding.

Becoming a trophy wife requires certain qualities and right now my greatest quality is being able to do a pull-up, so I'm not sure that's going to work out so good.