a restaurant review and a beach review

On Friday I went out with Anna and Leigh, two of my American friends from Sweden. We all live in the Bay Area, but we've only managed to get together a handful of times in the two years since we've all been back from Sweden.

Anna and Leigh had hatched a plan to go to an Indian place called Vic's, but it turned out that Vic's is only open for lunch. Consequently we diverted ourselves to Cafe de La Paz, an Argentinian restaurant in Berkeley's Gormet Ghetto, around the corner from Barney's and lofted above some vegan organic crepes place.

Cafe de La Paz is supposed to be a moderately fancy and very yummy place. Main courses are in the $15 range and when we entered we were asked whether we had reservations; we did not, but we were in luck, as a party of three with reservations hadn't showed up. We opted to share an order of fried plantains in creme sauce from the tapas menu, and I ordered some kind of chicken with almonds in a coconut milk sauce, "without almonds." The waiter asked each of us whether we preferred our meal mild, medium, or spicy. Leigh and I asked for "medium," and Anna asked for "spicy."

When the food came, the waiter announced "chicken something-something without almonds" as he set down my dish. However, there was very clearly a pile of almonds on top. "Excuse me, my chicken something-something without almonds seems to have quite a few almonds!" Waiter: "Oh, I thought you said without olives!. I thought that was a litte weird, because it doesn't have olives anyway!" Anna, to me: "He definitely said almonds the first time." Anyway, they whipped up another place of chicken something-somethind without almonds.

It turned out that none of the food was very good, ranging from "not good" to "good but definitely not spectacular." Another weird thing is that none of the food was at all spicy, despite the whole protocol of asking us how spicy we preferred our food. Quite disappointing overall, considering that Cafe de La Paz had a much better reputation than that.

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Whenever Leigh, Anna, and I meet, it seems to turn into a post-Sweden support group. It really was quite an experience, one that's difficult to communicate to anyone who wasn't there, but that's understood by anyone who was, yet still there's little to actually talk about (other than descend into unlimited nostalgia) and even less to "do about it." Nonetheless it's fun to get together every once in a while and say, "ah, Sweden..." and also to catch up with what each of us is doing. Leigh is currently working in the UC Berkeley Graduate Admissions Office (She tells me she checked in on my application from time to time, and that it's still listed as "pending..." and in the AS&T group's court, i.e. indefinitely waitlisted.) and she's waiting to hear her PeaceCorps assignment. She hopes to spend the next two years somewhere in Africa. Meanwhile Anna finished up an AmeriCorps assignment in San Leandro and is now working for a Center for Environmental Justice in the bay area. Amusingly she's on vacation this week, and will be spending it at Canon de Guadalupe --- the hot springs oasis in baja where Diane and I went for New Years! I told her to say hello to Juanita and Lobos for us.

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Yesterday Diane and I decided to go to the beach, so we drove down to Alameda Beach, having heard Kenny2000 mention it a few times (as a venue for kiteboarding). It's easy to get there, and you don't even have to get on the freeway. You can take the number 51 bus to the Park Street Business District in Alameda and then the beach is just a few blocks away, or you can take 8th Ave or the Webster Street Tube to the Alameda (which is an island separated from Oakland by a shipping channel -- there are draw bridges!) and then head towards where you think the beach should be.

The beach there is pretty nice. The bay laps quietly against the shore (nothing like the breakers out on the Pacific proper), and there is sand, although calling it a "white sand" beach is a bit of a lie. Nonetheless it really is a beach, with some small dune-like features and the requisite shore plants. It's much warmer than the "real" beach and also much closer.

After napping on the beach for an hour or two we head back to the Park Street Business District in Alameda, about four blocks of restaurants and antique stores that have retained some 1950's charm. Weirdly the restaurants seem to be cleanly divided into a few groups (1) white-trash sports bars (2) apparently authentic taquerias (2) chinese restaurants (3) sushi bars (of which there were two?). There were a few cafes but they were all closed; there was also a certifiable greasy-spoon place called Waffle House (or something to that effect) and a hot dog stand (where I ate after taking the GRE). However, most exciting of all, there is an ice cream parlor called Tucker's. Tucker's dishes up sundaes and other delights in home-made waffle cones until 11pm.

In order to properly patronize Tucker's parlor, we first had to get some kind of dinner. We chose one of the chinese restaurants (which were all completely empty) and it turned out to be quite good. We were the only customers in the whole place, although a few dropped by while we were there for take-out. The food was quite good and well priced (about $6.00/dish). Diane remarked that it was authentically chinese. Having had a scrumptious dinner, we were able to properly enjoy butterscotch-vanilla swirl ice cream with hot fudge sauce, whipped cream, and a cherry on a freshly made waffle cone at Tucker's. mmmm.

While the Alameda is full of historical charm (from the business districts to the quaint old suburbia), adjacent Bay Farm Island seems to have nothing of the kind, being dominated instead by modern tract homes, a giant golf course, and various syndicated megaplex shopping centers. There is, however, a ferry terminal for transit to San Francisco, which could be fun.

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The Wiki Project seems to be off to a brilliant start (thanks specially to eigenvalue and probablevacancy). Come join us in building a web of information about Berkeley in particular and nifty places in the Bay Area in general. I'm pretty curious to hear the rest of the Color Story.

I wrote to Pawel (who I worked for at CERN) to mention that, lo and behold, I was going to University of Rochester for grad school... and he responded by asking if I wanted to come back and work at CERN again this year! wouldn't that be fun! But I'm already signed up to work at UCSD anyway.

Kenny2000 (kennyjensen) spent at least part of the weekend in the City for some kind of futuristic-technology exposition, that I only learned about by picking up the paper at Cafe Strada and looking at the photos and being prompted to say "wouldn't it have been cool to have gone to that!" Maybe K2K will at least tell us about it afterwards. S-:

(no subject)

I came across a stash of the Berkeley Path Wanderers Assocation's map of Berkeley paths at Moe's today. It's quite a bonanza of hidden places in Berkeley! If you want to get one, they're on the table with travel books just up the stairs and to the right after you walk in.

late nights at the lab

So, sometime a few weeks ago, we heard that our big grant proposal was not approved. All of the projects are in one big basket, so this is "somewhat problematic" to apply some understatement.

A Last Best Hope alternative proposal was identified. The grant proposal deadline is Wednesday. They are working around the clock to meet it, which requires some promising preliminary results.

My part in this is kind of as a "short order programmer":

Chuck: "I need a program to do X."
Tobin: "Give me 20 minutes."

It's kind of fun. I like a sense of urgency. But I'm also glad that I don't have to join them for the all-nighter. But I do have to remember the Win32 synchronization primitives before I leave...