Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
A Weekend in Japantown...
A post I started a month ago and never finished...
A few weeks ago I finally got around to reading "Of Mice and Men", which I enjoyed quite a bit, even if it was depressing as hell. I mention that b/c Keiko came out this past weekend, and we had big plans in store: go clubbing, maybe take a dinner cruise on the Bay, etc. Sadly, all our big plans came to naught...
It started Saturday morning. I had to work 830-130, so after flying cross-country Keiko had to wake up at 7am to go into the office with me, so we could head up to the city from there. I had to give an SAT at 830, and then a GRE at 10. The GRE was going to be my very first meeting with the student, and since the SAT kid was in the office, I figured I would set up the GRE student down at the end of the hallway. This office is an empty wasteland on weekends, so I figured she'd be undisturbed. I've done this same thing before on several occasions with my other GRE student and not had a problem.
So the GRE student shows up, I set her up at the end of the hall, and start her on the first section, which goes fine. About 5 minutes into the second section, a small army of cleaning guys shows up. I've never seen them before; the usual weekend cleaning happens on Sunday afternoon.
Upon questioning them, it turns out that they're here to steam vacuum the carpets. In the hallways. And, this building is just one of several they have to do on a pretty tight schedule, so they have to do it now. Apparently this happens monthly, and of course today is the day. After some discussion, they agree to start at the opposite end of the floor. Whereupon, they begin steam cleaning the carpets using a cleaner apparently powered by a Saturn IV liquid-oxygen booster rocket. It is, in a word, deafening.
Not good.
Never one to surrender to adversity, [side note: I first typed this sentence: "Never one to surrender to diversity". It was almost worth leaving it.] I quickly cast about for a solution. There's a 3rd floor to the building, which I had never gone to, so I went up there and discovered that although most of it was controlled-access, there was a single long corridor that had a quiet nook at the end of it.
Now, the building is in the middle of having the elevators replaced, and the 3rd-floor lobby had a ton of construction equipment, but there were no people and the construction seems to happen during the week, so I figured I had my solution.
When the GRE student finished the section she was working on, I apologized for the presence of the 3 million decibel cleaning crew, and said I'd move her up to the 3rd floor, where I assured her it would be quiet. Keiko helped me execute the maneuver, and in no time we had her working in a nice, quiet, somewhat creepily dark empty hallway.
Problem solved.
Having solved this problem, I now moved to solve another problem. Since Keiko and I were going to be up in the city the next 2 days, I wasn't going to be around to let my Bio tutor in the next day to teach the lesson he needed to teach. My tutor attends Stanford business school, which is only 10 minutes away, so I left Keiko with the timers for the GRE student and the SAT student in my office, figuring at worst she would have to give the 5 minute warnings, and then dashed out to go drop off the office key to my bio tutor. Round trip: 20 minutes tops.
Well, despite missing my turn on the way to drop off the key, with some aggressive driving I managed to make it back in precisely 20 minutes, only to discover the following:
Apparently, the reason I hadn't seen anyone when I went up to check the 3rd floor was that the elevator construction crew just happened to be on lunch break. They came back approximately 5 minutes after I left, and proceeded to begin running compressed air machinery, banging on things, and yelling at each other in Spanish. Which, it turns out, was more distracting for the GRE student than the constant drone of the 747 engine that the cleaning crew on the 2nd floor was using.
So, the GRE student had come down to ask to be moved back to the 2nd floor. So Keiko did an emergency search and found an office on the floor that had its door unlocked, and put her in there. But, in the transfer of the mobile table with the GRE student's test and stuff, Keiko had put the student's chair upside down on the table, covering the scratch paper I'd left her.
So, when the student started up her section again in the office, she was now without scratch paper for the math sections, causing her to come back out and ask Keiko for scratch paper. Since Keiko didn't have any, she told the student to just write on the test. A simple solution, except it contradicted what I'd gone out of my way to instruct the student before she began the test. Of course, there was no way Keiko would have known that, but it annoyed the student. Keiko ended up finding my physics notebook in the kitchen and ripping pages out of that. So the GRE student finally got her situation straightened out, but in the course of dealing with all this, Keiko neglected to give the SAT student her 5 minute warning, which made her run out of time on one of her sections.
And all of this happened in the 20 minutes I was away. Poor Keiko was stressed out when I got back. Not a good morning.
Eventually both students finished their tests, and the GRE student I had a long talk with. I told her I wouldn't charge her for the test, and after talking a while she seemed fine. But we ended up leaving the office at nearly 4, versus at 1, so by the time we got to SF we were exhausted, and our big plans for hitting the town became dinner and "Pineapple Express". Which, it must be said, was pretty funny.
Dinner was at a restaurant called Kappa. It's virtually impossible to find- it's a tiny place that seats only ten at a wooden bar. There's no sign outside at all; when you find the outer door, on the upper level of an outdoor shopping area, which primarily leads to a much larger restaurant that has lots of big, obvious signage, there is a secret side inner side door that has a tiny (palm-sized) sign that says Kappa on it.
Going through that door you pass through a narrow curtain into a space barely big enough for me and Keiko to stand in simultaneously, and are immediately faced with two other curtains right next to each other at a V-shaped angle. Pass through the one on the left and you end up in a tiny kitchen. Pass through the one on the right and you find the tiny eating area.
There's one cook, and one waitress. She's dressed in a formal kimono, and she'll warn you right off the bat that they don't serve sushi here, and ask if you're OK with that. What they serve is very traditional Japanese cooking, like what you might find in someone's house. Some of the stuff we had Keiko said her mom makes. The food was quite good overall; I even tried a bunch of new stuff, and enjoyed it. If anyone's ever thinking about going, let me know and I'll explain how to find the secret door.
We stayed at the Kabuki Hotel in Japantown, which is quite nice. I got a deal on a suite which was, well, sweet. A huge room- tatami mats, a japanese futon, a japanese soaking tub, a rock garden with bamboo. In the room. Very nice.
Sunday began as you might expect- by the time we emerged into the light of day it was already afternoon. After a light lunch, we handed the car off to Joel, who met us in the city, and then went for a lo-o-o-o-o-o-o-ng walk. We went down through Cow Hollow, went into an open house of a condo with a spectacular view of the Bay, continued down into the Marina, Municipal pier, Fisherman's Wharf, Ghiradelli square, then Columbus Ave, Lombard St, Russian Hill, and then back into Japantown.
When you factor in all the hills, plus a stop for margaritas (don't get drinks on the Wharf- they suck ass), our walk turned out to be about 5 hours long, up and down a lot of steep hills. So, by the time we got back we were exhausted and starving, and another night in which we had big plans to hit the town became dinner, crepes, crazy Japanese photo booth, and then long bath in the soaking tub.
There is nothing more Japanese than the crazy photo booth. It is a riot of bright colors, Japanese pop, and high-pitched Japanese girl voices shrieking instructions at you. Also, all the directions on the screen are in Japanese. It really helps to have a Japanese person with you when you use the booth. The pictures get taken inside the booth, and then you come back outside and around to the side of the thing where there is a screen where you pick which photos you like, pick a background, and decorate the living shit out of the pictures.
Being a Japanese creation, the picture-taking happens with ruthless efficiency, whether you're ready or not, and each booth has a decorating screen on each side of it, so the total machine can be processing 3 different groups of people simultaneously: the people inside doing the picture-taking, and 1 group of people on each side of the booth doing the manic decorating. And all the while crazy Japan-pop is playing and Japanese schoolgirls are shrieking instructions at you.
Here is the result of our turn in the machine:
Monday, we managed to get out of the room by check-out time, and then went and had breakfast at New Minny's Restaurant. A bit risky, ordering my favorite trailer-park breakfast items from an Asian restaurant, but I was satisfied. And, while I'll eat Asian food for lunch and dinner every day, I can't eat Asian food for breakfast. The white half of me dominates until lunchtime.
After that, we just went for a walk (a much shorter one). It was a beautiful weekend in SF- 75 degrees and totally sunny. I'm coming to the conclusion that the best times to visit SF are mid April-mid June, and mid September-mid November. Which just happen to be the busiest times of the year for tutoring. Sigh.
For dinner, we picked up super-fancy cupcakes from Sprinkles (highly recommended to those who like cupcakes), and headed over to Laura and Dmitri's. Kate and Max, my godchildren, get really excited to see Keiko. Well, technically, Kate gets really excited to see Keiko, and Max gets really excited about anything Kate gets really excited about, but either way it means a wild time of running, throwing, catching, and then watching Thomas the Train. We take Thomas the Train VERY seriously. And woe betide the godfather who mistakes James (the red one, I think) for Percy (the green one, I think). Such gauche behavior merits the sternest admonishment a 2 year old can give.
After dinner, it was off to the airport, after a weekend both more, and less, whirlwind than planned. Best laid plans, and all that. BTW, I never knew "Of Mice and Men" was so depressing. I loved it, and highly recommend it to everyone else who never had to read it in high school...
A few weeks ago I finally got around to reading "Of Mice and Men", which I enjoyed quite a bit, even if it was depressing as hell. I mention that b/c Keiko came out this past weekend, and we had big plans in store: go clubbing, maybe take a dinner cruise on the Bay, etc. Sadly, all our big plans came to naught...
It started Saturday morning. I had to work 830-130, so after flying cross-country Keiko had to wake up at 7am to go into the office with me, so we could head up to the city from there. I had to give an SAT at 830, and then a GRE at 10. The GRE was going to be my very first meeting with the student, and since the SAT kid was in the office, I figured I would set up the GRE student down at the end of the hallway. This office is an empty wasteland on weekends, so I figured she'd be undisturbed. I've done this same thing before on several occasions with my other GRE student and not had a problem.
So the GRE student shows up, I set her up at the end of the hall, and start her on the first section, which goes fine. About 5 minutes into the second section, a small army of cleaning guys shows up. I've never seen them before; the usual weekend cleaning happens on Sunday afternoon.
Upon questioning them, it turns out that they're here to steam vacuum the carpets. In the hallways. And, this building is just one of several they have to do on a pretty tight schedule, so they have to do it now. Apparently this happens monthly, and of course today is the day. After some discussion, they agree to start at the opposite end of the floor. Whereupon, they begin steam cleaning the carpets using a cleaner apparently powered by a Saturn IV liquid-oxygen booster rocket. It is, in a word, deafening.
Not good.
Never one to surrender to adversity, [side note: I first typed this sentence: "Never one to surrender to diversity". It was almost worth leaving it.] I quickly cast about for a solution. There's a 3rd floor to the building, which I had never gone to, so I went up there and discovered that although most of it was controlled-access, there was a single long corridor that had a quiet nook at the end of it.
Now, the building is in the middle of having the elevators replaced, and the 3rd-floor lobby had a ton of construction equipment, but there were no people and the construction seems to happen during the week, so I figured I had my solution.
When the GRE student finished the section she was working on, I apologized for the presence of the 3 million decibel cleaning crew, and said I'd move her up to the 3rd floor, where I assured her it would be quiet. Keiko helped me execute the maneuver, and in no time we had her working in a nice, quiet, somewhat creepily dark empty hallway.
Problem solved.
Having solved this problem, I now moved to solve another problem. Since Keiko and I were going to be up in the city the next 2 days, I wasn't going to be around to let my Bio tutor in the next day to teach the lesson he needed to teach. My tutor attends Stanford business school, which is only 10 minutes away, so I left Keiko with the timers for the GRE student and the SAT student in my office, figuring at worst she would have to give the 5 minute warnings, and then dashed out to go drop off the office key to my bio tutor. Round trip: 20 minutes tops.
Well, despite missing my turn on the way to drop off the key, with some aggressive driving I managed to make it back in precisely 20 minutes, only to discover the following:
Apparently, the reason I hadn't seen anyone when I went up to check the 3rd floor was that the elevator construction crew just happened to be on lunch break. They came back approximately 5 minutes after I left, and proceeded to begin running compressed air machinery, banging on things, and yelling at each other in Spanish. Which, it turns out, was more distracting for the GRE student than the constant drone of the 747 engine that the cleaning crew on the 2nd floor was using.
So, the GRE student had come down to ask to be moved back to the 2nd floor. So Keiko did an emergency search and found an office on the floor that had its door unlocked, and put her in there. But, in the transfer of the mobile table with the GRE student's test and stuff, Keiko had put the student's chair upside down on the table, covering the scratch paper I'd left her.
So, when the student started up her section again in the office, she was now without scratch paper for the math sections, causing her to come back out and ask Keiko for scratch paper. Since Keiko didn't have any, she told the student to just write on the test. A simple solution, except it contradicted what I'd gone out of my way to instruct the student before she began the test. Of course, there was no way Keiko would have known that, but it annoyed the student. Keiko ended up finding my physics notebook in the kitchen and ripping pages out of that. So the GRE student finally got her situation straightened out, but in the course of dealing with all this, Keiko neglected to give the SAT student her 5 minute warning, which made her run out of time on one of her sections.
And all of this happened in the 20 minutes I was away. Poor Keiko was stressed out when I got back. Not a good morning.
Eventually both students finished their tests, and the GRE student I had a long talk with. I told her I wouldn't charge her for the test, and after talking a while she seemed fine. But we ended up leaving the office at nearly 4, versus at 1, so by the time we got to SF we were exhausted, and our big plans for hitting the town became dinner and "Pineapple Express". Which, it must be said, was pretty funny.
Dinner was at a restaurant called Kappa. It's virtually impossible to find- it's a tiny place that seats only ten at a wooden bar. There's no sign outside at all; when you find the outer door, on the upper level of an outdoor shopping area, which primarily leads to a much larger restaurant that has lots of big, obvious signage, there is a secret side inner side door that has a tiny (palm-sized) sign that says Kappa on it.
Going through that door you pass through a narrow curtain into a space barely big enough for me and Keiko to stand in simultaneously, and are immediately faced with two other curtains right next to each other at a V-shaped angle. Pass through the one on the left and you end up in a tiny kitchen. Pass through the one on the right and you find the tiny eating area.
There's one cook, and one waitress. She's dressed in a formal kimono, and she'll warn you right off the bat that they don't serve sushi here, and ask if you're OK with that. What they serve is very traditional Japanese cooking, like what you might find in someone's house. Some of the stuff we had Keiko said her mom makes. The food was quite good overall; I even tried a bunch of new stuff, and enjoyed it. If anyone's ever thinking about going, let me know and I'll explain how to find the secret door.
We stayed at the Kabuki Hotel in Japantown, which is quite nice. I got a deal on a suite which was, well, sweet. A huge room- tatami mats, a japanese futon, a japanese soaking tub, a rock garden with bamboo. In the room. Very nice.
Sunday began as you might expect- by the time we emerged into the light of day it was already afternoon. After a light lunch, we handed the car off to Joel, who met us in the city, and then went for a lo-o-o-o-o-o-o-ng walk. We went down through Cow Hollow, went into an open house of a condo with a spectacular view of the Bay, continued down into the Marina, Municipal pier, Fisherman's Wharf, Ghiradelli square, then Columbus Ave, Lombard St, Russian Hill, and then back into Japantown.
When you factor in all the hills, plus a stop for margaritas (don't get drinks on the Wharf- they suck ass), our walk turned out to be about 5 hours long, up and down a lot of steep hills. So, by the time we got back we were exhausted and starving, and another night in which we had big plans to hit the town became dinner, crepes, crazy Japanese photo booth, and then long bath in the soaking tub.
There is nothing more Japanese than the crazy photo booth. It is a riot of bright colors, Japanese pop, and high-pitched Japanese girl voices shrieking instructions at you. Also, all the directions on the screen are in Japanese. It really helps to have a Japanese person with you when you use the booth. The pictures get taken inside the booth, and then you come back outside and around to the side of the thing where there is a screen where you pick which photos you like, pick a background, and decorate the living shit out of the pictures.
Being a Japanese creation, the picture-taking happens with ruthless efficiency, whether you're ready or not, and each booth has a decorating screen on each side of it, so the total machine can be processing 3 different groups of people simultaneously: the people inside doing the picture-taking, and 1 group of people on each side of the booth doing the manic decorating. And all the while crazy Japan-pop is playing and Japanese schoolgirls are shrieking instructions at you.
Here is the result of our turn in the machine:
Monday, we managed to get out of the room by check-out time, and then went and had breakfast at New Minny's Restaurant. A bit risky, ordering my favorite trailer-park breakfast items from an Asian restaurant, but I was satisfied. And, while I'll eat Asian food for lunch and dinner every day, I can't eat Asian food for breakfast. The white half of me dominates until lunchtime.
After that, we just went for a walk (a much shorter one). It was a beautiful weekend in SF- 75 degrees and totally sunny. I'm coming to the conclusion that the best times to visit SF are mid April-mid June, and mid September-mid November. Which just happen to be the busiest times of the year for tutoring. Sigh.
For dinner, we picked up super-fancy cupcakes from Sprinkles (highly recommended to those who like cupcakes), and headed over to Laura and Dmitri's. Kate and Max, my godchildren, get really excited to see Keiko. Well, technically, Kate gets really excited to see Keiko, and Max gets really excited about anything Kate gets really excited about, but either way it means a wild time of running, throwing, catching, and then watching Thomas the Train. We take Thomas the Train VERY seriously. And woe betide the godfather who mistakes James (the red one, I think) for Percy (the green one, I think). Such gauche behavior merits the sternest admonishment a 2 year old can give.
After dinner, it was off to the airport, after a weekend both more, and less, whirlwind than planned. Best laid plans, and all that. BTW, I never knew "Of Mice and Men" was so depressing. I loved it, and highly recommend it to everyone else who never had to read it in high school...
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