Adrift in Japan

More SF Goodbyes

Days till Departure: 11
Days till Movers Empty Condo: 7

Our boxes were delivered yesterday, and we started packing up our books today. In the meantime, things we've done, places we've gone and restaurants we've hit in the last week or so:

• Hulu House Vegetarian Restaurant - Vegan Chinese/Singaporean/Malaysian food in the Inner Sunset. Pretty good, and a great bargain. Always fun to eat vegan BBQ pork, fake fish, and good old regular veggie food. Lots of food for the money.
  
• Luna Park - Good deal for the money too. Tasty & fun. Thank goodness we had a reservation; otherwise the wait would have been too long. Got to see one of Matt's good friends who's in town for about 10 days, which was cool.
  
• L'amour Dans le Four - Neighboorhood French Bistro close to the house, at Lombard and Gough. Good food, friendly service, reasonable prices. Saw it listed at SF Bay Guardian.
  
• Gary Danko - What can I say? What a great way to spend our anniversary. We sat at the bar, where you can sit without a reservation. We ate and drank and celebrated.
  
• Extreme Pizza - Maybe it's not gourmet, but it's a great SF place to get a pizza. I like their slices, personally.
  
• Local Burrito Place - I'm thinking burritos won't be available in Japan. Matt had the Chile Verde burrito, and I had a Carnitas burrito. Both "Super"-ized.
  
• Chrissy Field - A nice walk on the beach watching the dogs run, play, swim and catch.
  
• SFMOMA's Chagall Exhibit - The headset audio tour is a must-get. Plus we did a quick walk through the rest of the exhibits as well. I always love the design exhibits.
  
• Kate's Kitchen - Huge huge huge breakfasts.
  

We're off to Thirsty Bear now to eat, drink and be merry with Kaetchen, and then we'll have dinner tomorrow night at Suppenkuche and dinner Thursday night at Delfina. I love San Francisco's abundance of good restaurants.

Shedding Old Clothes

Last year when Matt and I got married I cleaned out a whole bunch of stuff from the house and hauled it down to Goodwill to make room for him in the closet. This year I figured that since we are moving to Japan I'd do another purge and rid myself of all the things I thought, "Well, I haven't worn this in a while, but maybe I'll wear it again," or "Well, this is too small for me now but maybe some day it'll fit again." Some of the clothes are really great but are of the "I'm probably never going to be that size again" variety, and others are just not my style anymore. So among our many errands today ("Official Business" entry coming later), we went to Crossroads Trading Company on Fillmore Street to try to get a little money out of our (mostly my) clothes.

In case you haven't been there, Crossroads Trading Company buys, sells and trades "fashionable" clothing. On Fillmore St. they price your clothing and then pay you in cash 35% of what they can sell it for, or you can take trade in value of 50% of what they can sell it for. We took in a huge suitcase full of clothing, plus a number of items, mostly suits, on hangers. We signed in to sell and waited our turn. When I was browsing I realized I should have been shopping there before. They have an okay selection although some things they consider fashionable I just consider tacky, but the prices are pretty reasonable. I didn't find anything I wanted today though. After waiting there for nearly an hour while other people had their stuff sorted through, we finally got called up to the counter. The woman went through out stuff efficiently. The best stuff we had was first - and it was interesting to see what made it and didn't. A beautiful suede and stretch jacket and vest was rejected. A Tahari suit was taken, as well as an Ann Taylor suit and an Anne Klein suit. A beautiful Jones of New York petite suit that was actually more "fashionable" than the Anne Klein was rejected. Oh yes, I forgot to mention that brand names are extremely important in their determination of what will sell. So, Jones of New York is too stuffy, Tahari is probably cool. Plenty of other nice things, both with and without brand names, was rejected. A great men's Banana Republic button down shirt was turned down, along with some nice J. Crew pieces. Apparently Matt and I just don't have very trendy clothing. Some silk sweaters from Ann Taylor and J. Crew were rejected, possibly because it's not the right season. Even a great little royal blue lacy Nicole Miller number was a pass. The only thing in the suitcase that she took that I remember is a BCBG dress. Good label I guess. I never even really liked that thing.

We left with a full suitcase of rejected items and our $61.35. For anyone who's keeping track, that means that from the sale of our used books and the sale of our used clothes we have earned a combined $126.35. All in all the whole process of taking your belongings to have someone else tell you their value is very disheartening. Especially for clothes, some of which I really liked but just can't wear anymore. As for the stuff that didn't get chosen by Green Apple or Crossroads, I might give them one more shot at another used bookstore or clothes store. Or, if not, I'll donate the books to Community Thrift as recommended by Kurt and the clothes to Goodwill.

Shedding Those Old Books

Matt and I went down to the Richmond for lunch and to sell some of our used books at Green Apple Books. First stop, the bookstore, where we carted two boxes full of books ranging from science fiction series to Camille Paglia and received $65 in return. Surprisingly, Green Apple rejected nearly half the books, including books in excellent condition like Snow Falling On Cedars and two books by Nancy Kress, Beggars in Spain and Beggars & Choosers. I have no idea what criteria they use to decide what books they will pay for and how much they are worth, but apparently noone is interested in my books. We ended up bringing home nearly a whole box full of books. They did mention we could leave them out front in the "free book" area, which means someone could have had great luck picking up essentially new books. Instead we hauled them home with us, either to try to sell these books to a different used bookstore or give them away or even keep them.

We had a tasty lunch at Burma Superstar. The lunch, delicious. The service, not so good. Maybe it was because it was lunch time, but we just didn't have very attentive service. Water came late, wrong appetizer, various beverage mix-ups and confusion... but the food, the food was good. Thumbs up, the restaurant is recommended, and I hope you get better service.

Speaking of lunch restaurants, we also went to Desirée this week, a little café in the Presidio run by Anne Gingrass. It's a tiny, somewhat difficult to find place tucked away in a hallway, but it was inviting and the sandwiches were both yummy and inexpensive. We didn't have enough cash to get the box lunch with chips and a bag of homemade cookies, but we did get the strawberry lemonade. Another restaurant checked off the list!

TypePad Official Launch

TypePad has officially launched! It's open for everyone to join, and if you're a friend of mine and you'd like to join, send me an e-mail (remove the "NOSPAM_" from the e-mail address) and I'll send you a discount code. You'll get a free 30 day trial, plus a 20% discount for life. Matt and I have decided to keep using it for this blog even though we have our own webhost. It's a great service - thumbs up to Mena and Ben! I could go over all the details of how great it is, but just go there yourself and see. It makes making a weblog and photolog click-click-click easy and adding lists of links, people, books and music practically automatic.

Since the TypePad service has launched, it's no longer closed to non-beta tester types like Matt. As of today, he's officially signed up as a free guest author here. So, instead of signing each of our posts, they'll just be labeled at the bottom with who posted it.

Food, Food and More Food

Matt's still trying to work out the details of our visas and our travels, and I've recently started to organize in preparation for our move (more about that later). In the meantime, we tried to spend the weekend taking advantage of our time in San Francisco.

Friday evening after yoga, we cleaned up and headed out to the Marina, where we ate at Mezes. It was without a doubt the best Greek meal I have had in San Francisco. We didn't have dessert there though - afterwards we walked down to Ben & Jerry's where I ate Brownie Batter ice cream on a cone (my favorite Ben & Jerry's flavor).

On Saturday morning, we went to the Farmer's Market at the Ferry Plaza on the Embarcadero. It was our first time there, but it was a blast. Matt was a little startled that it was kind of a "designer" farmer's market, but once he got over the shock, we were both able to relax and have a good time. I got to knock a few more things off of my SF list (some of which I didn't type in the other day), such as to try Recchiuti chocolates (scrumptious) and hang out at the market. We picked up an assortment of great things, including very good fruit and cheese. We also noticed a stall selling raw food - raw sushi and raw soups, but we didn't buy anything because it seemed over-priced. Later in the afternoon, we headed out to a yarn store I like, although I didn't really buy anything, and to Comix Experience where we picked up the comic "Y: The Last Man," which I've been dying to read since I read a review of it at Salon.com. We cooked dinner with the great ingredients we picked up at the fair - duck breast with fingerling potatoes and broccoli rabe.

Today, after morning yoga, we knocked another "must-eat" restaurant off the list by going to Zuni Cafe and scarfing down (among other things) what really was the best burger I've had in recent memory. The bottom piece of foccacia could have been a little more toasty as it got a slightly soggy due to the juicy burger but overall I was left with a big "yum" feeling. We followed up the restaurant visit with a trip to the Container Store for some boxes and then saw Tombraider 2 (much better than the original) at The Metreon. On the way home, we made quick pitstops at Urban Knitting and Whole Foods. The weekend was capped off with a home-made tomato tart (delicious, despite worry it might not turn out) and an evening watching a little TV (lots of HGTV and a little Queer Eye for the Straight Guy). That's right, I'm catching up on my TV watching now since we probably won't watch much in Japan!

We thought we might go to a museum this weekend, but we decided not to. We're thinking that as a break from packing, we'll go to the museums, which means we'll probably be able to go during the week at a much less busy time. Crowd avoidance!

- Michelle

Saying Goodbye to San Francisco

In about 4 weeks, Matt and I will move to Japan. The exact date is not set yet, but since we're planning on leaving our condo by the end of the August, I suspect we'll be flying off to Sapporo darn close to a month from now. We'll only be living in Japan for a year, but when we get back to the US, we won't be living in San Francisco. Since Matt will be researching at UCSD, we're planning on finding a place to live down there rather than continuing Matt's commute between San Diego and San Francisco (which he did for the past academic year). After that, who knows where we'll go when he looks for professorships around the country. Most likely, we won't be back in the Bay Area. So, the next four weeks are dedicated to doing fun San Francisco things. Some involve sights. Most of them revolve around eating.

• Visit the Asian Art Museum
  
• Dine at Gary Danko - right now in the plan to go on our anniversary and eat at the bar (no reservation)
  
• See the Marc Chagall exhibit at SF MOMA
  
• Chow down a great burger at Zuni Cafe, or a little less upscale at Clown Alley or Burger Joint
  
• Have a romantic soufflé dinner at Cafe Jacqueline
  
• Try unusual dim sum at Koi Palace
  
• Enjoy American food at Luna Park
  
• Eat at a litany of other restaurants, perhaps including The Last Supper Club, Delfina, and others (I'll add to this list later)
  
• Find the Wave Organ
  

- Michelle

It's All Me

Well, Matt did receive his invitation to be an author, but since TypePad is still in beta, additional authors is still a "feature in development." So, it's just me for now, with Matt occasionally dropping in to write things under my account until he's able to sign up, probably in a later stage of beta-testing.
- Michelle

And We're Off!

Well, not quite. Matt and I are moving to Sapporo for about a year sometime at the end of August or the beginning of September. If I sound vague, it's because we haven't actually gotten our visas yet or bought our plane tickets. It's all in motion, but not complete. Assuming all goes well, we'll pack up our condo here in San Francisco, store almost all of our stuff, drop off the car we borrowed from my parents in Vail, and fly off to Sapporo where we'll move into our university-subsidized housing at Hokkaido University. More details on all of this later, as Matt signs up to be an author. If we drag it out more, we'll have more entries. But at least we're off and running on our blog!
- Michelle