Hello, Paris

On 3/18 I arrived in the City of Lights around lunchtime, ordered a prosciutto sandwich from a roadside cafe, checked into my opera neighborhood hotel, and promptly passed out until nighttime.

I say it too often, but there's something sublime about seeing a new place for the first time at night. Time feels different in the dark -- almost like it halts. And I get to wander pathways rendered otherworldly by light and shadow and step out of my own life for a while, overwhelmed only by this newness.   

First evening look at the Opera Garnier in all its wedding cake-y glory.

3 Days in the Bay Area

For the long Presidents' Day weekend, I took a short 3-day trip back to a place I hadn't been since stretch chokers were a thing and I was only just beginning to outgrow Limited Too: the San Francisco Bay Area. 

The Way In

I flew in just as the sun was setting and there was a lovely gradated golden light retreating over layered mountains along the way. The light became colder as the sun dipped lower, and cotton candy pinks and blues emerged. Roads leading out of SF have now redefined my expectations re: what constitutes a beautiful highway.

Stanford University

It was full-on night by the time I had a chance to stroll the paths of Stanford University, but I prefer to see a new place in the dark first. There's a magical appeal to it. Seeing things in the dark, time slows down and things fade out, and all you're left with are vast expanses of darkness and your own assumptions and approximations. Come morning, you get to compare the detail of daytime against the dreamlike world you saw the night before and marvel at the difference. 

Palo Alto

Speaking of the magical, there is a wondrous place called Sushirrito in downtown Palo Alto that serves mash-ups of sushi and burritos -- essentially scaled-up versions of sushi rolls, additionally punched up with soy mayo, unexpected vegetables (mine contained corn), and other sauces. If giving this place a whirl, one would do best to arrive before the doors open at 11 am. Any later and you'll have to brave the one-hour line snaking out its door. 

And I am, predictably, nothing if not a macaron fiend. My friend and I stopped by Chantal Guillon downtown for a box of sugary almond-based darlings and faced our fears of the uncanny as we sat opposite their wall of disembodied plaster hands. (Gotta get me one of those for my apartment.) I am a sucker for anything fragrantly rose flavored, and Chantal Guillon makes a lovely, subtle and nuanced rendition of the rose macaron. 

Palo Alto is certainly specific, and by specific I mean it is stylish in a way that is very deliberate and processed and very upper-middle-class. Its main avenues are dotted with names like Restoration Hardware and West Elm, and one wonders what funds the town's expensive tastes until you realize -- oh, tech money. Of course. 

San Francisco

SF -- lively, diverse and full of history -- is the Bay Area's crowning glory, but the marks of heavy gentrification figure everywhere. The Mission San Francisco de Asís sits nestled among hipster coffee joints and a sprawling shopping district featuring everything from secondhand clothing for as low as $1 a piece to designer dresses worth hundreds.

With so many self-consciously and deliberately quirky coffee places within a stone's throw from each other, it's hard to imagine anyone having a "usual" or a particular place they connect with and keep returning to. Do these hipster coffee bars have turf wars? Do beanied baristas have loyal devotees? Which cafes are frequented by locals, if any, and why? Just a few of the questions that high cafe density makes me ask.  

Stanza Coffee Bar, 16th Street

But I can't talk. I love it all: I love the pretense, the strained manipulation of aesthetic, the lack of self-consciousness and the pride in creating another kind of Very Specific Space.

That said, can we take a minute to laugh, please? Can we do that -- just laugh a little at how contrived and useless some of these hipster offerings are, even if they are also a tiny bit cute. After a while one does grow frustrated at the notion of "patterned circle scarves," "curiosities," "edited clothes collections," "global textiles," and "eclectic, up-market home design" (all phrases sampled from actual business summaries on Valencia Street).

no., a vintage clothing store on Valencia

Samovar Tea Bar, Valencia Street

Four Barrel Coffee, Valencia Street

Flowers for sale in the Castro District.

Takoyaki at Ramen Izakaya Goku

The beautiful consumables of San Francisco do come at an ugly price: the destruction of established communities to make way for trendy stores, cute cafes, and quirky bars. Forced eviction and skyrocketing prices are massive problems here, and it is in large part thanks to Silicon Valley industries. A bit of tech can be helpful, as it can make life more convenient…but whose lives?  The politics of technology -- who gets to use it, who profits from it, who sees their livelihood destroyed because of it -- is fraught and complex and skews in favor of the secure and comfortable and phenomenally rich.

I think we often become too easily impressed with companies like Facebook and Apple for making, say, a slimmer phone or a faster browser experience. But I think we would do well to save our amazement for a day when Silicon Valley tech giants finally take a good, hard look at their less-than-rosy impact upon anyone who isn't an exec, investor, or engineer, and care enough about that impact to implement changes…if that day ever comes. Still waiting.

Street Art, Mission District

The Edge of the Earth [2/2]

After leaving the coast, Nathan & I headed east along the winding Route 101 -- easily the most beautiful highway I have traveled -- to the inland forests and lakes of the Olympic Peninsula.

RAINFORESTS

Cold light filtering through Sol Duc trees.

Leaf-strewn paths of the Hoh Rainforest.

Sol Duc trailhead.

Dewy, feathery trees of Sol Duc.

Long-exposure Sol Duc Falls.

The Hoh Rainforest is a sprawling thing, dense and atmospheric and, on brighter and warmer afternoons, suffused with an otherworldly golden light. You half expect to become surrounded by fairies and nymphs while you crush brittle fallen leaves underfoot. Northeast of the Hoh region are the dewy, deep and eerie Sol Duc (or Soleduck) forests, chilly and silent and full to the brim with mist. Nestled in its canyon depths are the Sol Duc Falls, which rush over mossy rocks shimmering in the dampness. Sol Duc leaves you breathless. It is a pocket out of time.  

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LAKE CRESCENT & ENVIRONS

Fog over Lake Crescent.

Storm King Ranger Station.

A gray shroud for majestic firs.

The dock at Lake Crescent.

I thought Lake Quinaut was vast and mirror-like until we arrived at Lake Crescent on a cloudy day. The glacial lake emerges suddenly from between overlapping mountains and draws the eye forward like an arrow to the horizon. As time ticked by, fog rolled down nearby Storm King and blanketed the towering sentinel firs around us in gray. On a clear day, the waters are so clear you can see dropped coins and sunken boat tethers at the bottom. On this drizzly morning, all we saw were shifting pinpricks of rain breaking the tension of the lake.  

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HURRICANE RIDGE

Windswept along the south (?) side of Hurricane Ridge outlook.

The Mustang on the ridge.

Misty mountain road.

Rolling blue peaks.

Nathan the photographer, hard at work.

And lastly, the mountains called. We took the steep and nerve-wracking road up to the lookout on Hurricane Ridge, made a little easier by the low center of gravity and the stability of our rental Mustang. There was little snow covering the peaks this time, as it was a drier, warmer October, so we were greeted by an unobstructed view of the ridge's gently gradated blue peaks rolling like waves into the distance.  

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As tough as it is to tear oneself away from a place like the Olympic Peninsula, a reluctant departure is inevitable for the itinerant traveler. And when it happens, the only consolation is the knowledge that the visitor has ideally perhaps developed a humbled awareness of their smallness in the universe. These forests are ancient. The lakes are prehistoric. Older still are the mountains that once cradled glaciers that came to fill their deep valleys. Older are the rocks that punctuate miles of wild coast, and even older are the pinpoints of brightness that spin above the land in the night, a dome of diffuse starlight. But for me this is enough. No grand changes, no earth-shaking discoveries necessary. Maybe to know such extraordinary and liberating insignificance before the foundations of the Earth is never to leave the great Northwest.