Vandy Girls Forever

When you move to a different city every year, it’s really hard to make new friends, especially if you’re not in school anymore. And if you actually do make new friends, it’s even harder to be really good friends and stay in touch once you leave again.

I’m really lucky to have a group of girlfriends that will visit me no matter what city/country/continent I’m in. My college roommates from Vandy, after one very short year of living together, are one of the best things that have ever happened to me.

They visited me while I was living in Taiwan (making pit stops during honeymoons and family vacations!), and this past weekend, they flew to San Francisco for another amazing reunion. We spent the entire weekend catching up, eating, exploring SF, eating, sleepovers, eating, biking, oh and did I mention eating?

Let me tell (and show) you how much four tiny Asian girls can eat.

Friday night -

  • Dinner at Akiko’s – amazing sushi
  • Muka, a dessert lounge – pitcher of sangria and four desserts
Saturday - 
  • Japanese Sweets – pre-breakfast snack
  • Farmer’s Market – brunch
  • Polk St. Festival – street food
  • Mooncakes – snack
  • Dinner at Limon – peruvian food, amazing chicken and ceviche
  • Bi-Rite Ice Cream – dessert
Sunday - 
  • City View Dim Sum – brunch
  • Sweetheart Cafe (before bike ride) - bubble tea
  • Sweetheart Cafe (after bike ride) - bubble tea, popcorn chicken, mango shaved ice
  • Mission Chinese Food – dinner
  • Tres Leches birthday cake – dessert

Moving to a different city is always terrifying and daunting as much as it is exhilarating and adventurous, but to have a sense of familiarity and stability among all the change and newness is really comforting. Seeing these beautiful faces in my new city makes SF feel a bit more like home.

Labor Day Weekend

My brother visited me (and brought me the rest of my stuff) for Labor Day Weekend. We spent most of the time eating at good places and biking around the city.

We rented bikes for $36 apiece a day. (Side note: I went again the next weekend with a female co-worker, rented from the same company and for the same amount of time, and was only charged $14 each. Just girls definitely has its perks.)

But I digress. We biked from the Ferry building along the northern coast to the Golden Gate Bridge (which was covered in fog so we could barely see it!), over the bridge and into Sausalito, where it was really 10 degrees warmer. It was about an 8-mile bike ride with lots of stops to catch the scenery and to walk the bikes up the hills.

In Sausalito, we saw a boy catch a stingray by the side of the road and ate yummy burgers at the Napa Valley Burger Co., then we took a ferry back into San Francisco to return the bikes.

It’s always nice to hang out with the little brother, especially now that he’s a working man and picks up the check now!

La gente está muy loca

As fate would have it, there was a bank holiday while I was in London so I booked a last-minute ticket to Spain for the three-day weekend. I majored in Spanish in college. I love the culture (both European and Latin American) and the language, and I’ve NEVER been to a Spanish-speaking country.

Have you ever wanted to do something so bad for a really long time, and then the stars align, and then it just happens, with no warning or precedence? Can you imagine my excitement?? Visiting Barcelona was literally a dream come true.

I luckily had a friend in this city as well, so after stepping off the plane, we spent the afternoon laying out by her rooftop pool in sunny 80-degree weather. Then dinnertime at 10pm, which is totally a normal Spanish thing to do, at a lovely restaurant, Agua, in ocean-side Barceloneta.

When in Spain, gotta try the ham.

We finished dinner around 1am, again which is totally a normal Spanish occurrence. And since it was close by, we were going to just walk by and check out the strip of bars and clubs at Port Olympic before we headed home since I was pretty tired from getting over my recent illness and still a bit jet-lagged.

Alas, when in Barcelona, do as the barcelonés do.. and go bar-hopping. (Well, not so much the natives, in this area, it was mostly the tourists, but you get the point.) We ended up just stopping in at all the different bars and clubs – Techno, Hip-hop, Pop, Electronica, Irish bars, Salsa, Naughty nurses and doctors-themed… you name it, they had it, we saw it.

European men are very in-your-face and grabby. They grab arms, waists, touch your face, there are no limits. It’s constant ducking and dodging and slipping through grasps while using your girlfriends as bodyguards. One guy, as he was walking by, put his hand on my cheek, and goes “Chinitaaaa” accompanied by a big grin. In my head, I automatically translated it as little Chinese person, which it technically is. But my Spanish friend immediately saw my wheels turning and exclaimed, Don’t worry! It’s a term of endearment!

Basically, anything with -ita (little/smallness) at the end of it in Spanish is a term of endearment. Gordita. (little fattie) Mamacita. (little mama). Chiquita. (little woman). A chinese person would be chino in Spanish, therefore chinita. So if you’re ever in a Spanish-speaking country, and someone calls you something that you may think is racial or offensive, but there’s an -ita at the end of it, it’s ok! They’re just calling you what it is because there’s no need to sugar-coat or PC it, but they really do mean it with love and affection.

Anyways, the normal Spanish thing in 24-hour all day, all night Barcelona is to stay up til the next day and go straight to brunch. But as a tourist, I waved my white flag at 5am and went to bed.

But brunch was definitely had the next day (at 2pm)

at this place in the neighborhood Gràcia

Then we went to the beach club Mac Arena Mar and drank piña coladas on cabana beds while a DJ pulsed techno music until the sun went down.

P.S. The title is from a song that kept playing at the clubs. I think it sums up weekends in Barcelona for most people, including this one.

London

I moved to San Fran at the end of July, but I’ve actually been in the city only a total of 12 days so far. During my second week in New York on a Wednesday, I was told I was flying to London on Friday instead of flying back to SF. Surprise!

London! That’s in Europe, you know.
All expenses paid! It was for work.
Two weeks! Yes, most of it would be spent working, but I still get two weekends.

London was everything I imagined it to be. Double decker buses. European buildings. Small roads. And oh, the British accents.

The weather was fabulous the weekend I arrived. It was sunny and warm, and not at all the gloomy and rainy London I was expecting. And the British people were all perfectly nice and helpful, re: the below.

(Seriously though, if it weren’t for these signs, I probably would’ve been hit by one of those double decker buses driven by a guy with a British accent on those small roads full of European buildings within the first hour.)

It also happened to be my cousin’s last week in London, since he’d been studying English there for the past year, so I had a friend in the city to show me all the touristy sites and how Londoners party. I met his friends, and they were all Asians with British accents.. how cool is that?!

Unfortunately, I got really sick during that first week, most likely from all the partying travelling, jet-lag, wonky sleep schedules, and just being in a foreign land. I had to go to the emergency room, was told the wait was 3 hours because it’s NHS (National Health Service which is free for UK residents), actually waited the 3 hours until 3 in the morning, saw a really nice doctor who prescribed some antibiotics, and then walked away without paying a pence. (Because it’s NHS – travellers get free emergency treatment. Did I mention they were a really nice and helpful country?)

I ended up taking a day off work to sleep for 24 hours, got better, and spent the rest of the trip working and eating. 

Throwback Hawaii: Eternity Beach

There’s a cove that’s kind of hidden down to the side of the Halona Blowhole, if you’re driving along the coast to get to Sandy’s. It’s one my favorite mini-beaches. There aren’t that many people there, even on weekends, and the water makes a nice wave pool if the currents aren’t too strong. And if you’re lucky, you’ll get to see a honu or two (sea turtles) or even monk seals.The cove has a couple of names: Eternity Beach (because it was in the movie, From Here to Eternity) or Cockroach Cove (because down in that wall under the road, there’s a lava tube that goes through to the other side, that is home to lots of those you-know-whats).

It’s also a beach with a spectator gallery. Up there is the parking lot/the area to see the blowhole. You can actually climb the rocks around to the left to get to the blowhole, but you also risk getting sucked into the ocean by the big waves that hammer up against that wall.

It’s a nice, secluded area but the sun is gone by 4 or 5pm once it drops behind that wall.

And you can even do jumps off the wall on the right, especially if you’re not brave enough to do the big ones yet.

Picture taken by Adair Hill