Sad to be leaving, but happy to go

I have to say that while being in San Francisco for a week and a half, I'm quite happy to be leaving. I went for a walk up to North Beach two days ago to buy salami and I thought, "Hey, I won't see this place for awhile, let's have a stroll." That was a rather tremendous mistake as shop upon shop is closed. It was just sad. This city is a husk of what it was and it goes to show how intangibly debt-driven the economy is here. Although, it did make me anxious to leave.

So, that's it. A total month and a half back in the US and now I'm off again. Why am I off again? Because economically, things are really still quite down. I knew that this would be the case though as January-March in any year are a hard time to find work. Of course, I had a sunnier disposition about things this time last year, which ended up burning me. But, given the fact that my rent wasn't increased for the first time in five years and a quick perusal of Craigslist shows that yes, things are not turning around, I am tossing in the towel and leaving the country.

Heading off to Europe again? No, not this time. As much as my in-laws would probably like to have me grilling meat and watching the puppy, I'm going a bit more adventurous this time; I'm heading to Côte d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast) for five months. Yes that is in Africa (West, not South) and yes, they do speak French there. And yes, it is quite hot there. So, why on earth am I doing this?

First off, I've wanted to actually live outside the US for an extended period of time. I've only really traveled outside for a maximum of maybe three months through a variety of countries. The closest I've come to living was staying in Figueres with my in-laws and that didn't really count as I wasn't paying rent, mom-in-law did the shopping, and I was there on the three moth tourist visa which I damn near went over on. Really need to use the other passport more...

So, this will be not only the longest time outside the US, but also the first actual living in another country. It just took until I was 33 to actually pull this off (I'm a late bloomer.) This is all being made possible by #1 Fan having a temporary contract there that was will take care of basic living expenses. Seeing how the economy was heading, she did something very smart last Fall and found this position which will not only allow us to hopefully weather this economic storm, but also work on that other project that I spend so much time on, Maneno. Also, I am hoping to come back speaking decent, as opposed to chicken-scratch, French by the end of this as well. Even though it's not my favorite language in the world (the multiple 'u' sounds and the numbers kill me) it is an incredibly useful one.

Most people who read this blog probably don't read Subsaharska that much as it's about Africa and African technology primarily. This one is a bit more fun, dealing with such things as food, tea, airport frustration, and of course, toilets. Speaking of which, there should be an article forthcoming about that last item. Otherwise, if you want to see some of the more cool things I'll be doing and the people I'll be working with, take a look at that blog.

If I didn't get a chance to meet up, I'll make sure to do so in July and will be happy to see a lot of folks again after so much time away, although I will be online just as much as here in the US and I have a SkypeIn number for those wishing to call as well. Au revoir!

27 01 2010      0 comments

Tags: california, in to africa, san francisco, us america

The State of Dry

It's been raining for about the last week in San Francisco, which is a rather rare thing given that the weather actually has the nerve to rain during the day. Usually we are blessed here in Baghdad by the Bay that when it rains, it rains during the night, clears for the day, and then rains again at night. My mom keeps quoting that it is like Camelot in that way, although I'm sure she's misquoting this somehow. Although her generalization about some ethnicity or another not liking boats as whole will always be the paramount misquote from mom.

But, speaking of family, I spent a rather large chunk of time up in the hometown of Oroville. While I was there, I went up to the lake, because really, you either go the lake or eating fast food. Oh, and shopping at the Walmart. These are the highlights of Oroville: boatin', fishin', eatin', and cheap shoppin'. We lost our use of the letter G in a freak industrial accident at the end of the 19th century.

But the lake, is really not a lake currently. The fact that there has been a drought for the last three years in California was never so readily apparent. And this isn't just some temporary thing as you can see the progressive lowering of the boat launch ramps that they've had to create year after year. I'd say it's down a solid 150 if not 200 meters from what should be considered full. Where I took the shot below is almost always underwater and is the spillway that is used to vent the flow of the water when there is the possibility of flooding. As you can see, this possibility is not anywhere within the realm of reality at the moment.

It will be curious to see how these rains change things in California. If they continue longer, I'm sure it will just be a matter of another week when all the Drought! Drought! people turn in to the Flood! Flood! people. This time around, flooding in the Sacramento Valley floor will be really freaky given all the empty homes that sit there due to the economic crisis. Although, this matters little to me at the moment as I'm getting prepared to get out of dodge for quite some time next week, but more on that soon...

23 01 2010      0 comments

Tags: california, drought

The new homeless in my hometown

My hometown of Oroville, California is not a wealthy town. This is ironic given that it was the wealthiest town in Butte County in the 19th century and was thus granted the county seat. While a wise choice at the time, it has since led to a large amount of people living in the area on government assistance as by living in the town, they are close to the administrative offices of said assistance and overall, the cost of living is less than the majority of California.

The old town from the Gold Rush period in the mid 1800's is charming and the town overall could easily be a delightful place someday with sufficient planning. This of course has not arrived as not one, but two American Indian casinos opened in town several years ago. While there are the occasional big winners here and there who have their picture taken with the new 4x4 truck they bought with the money and then shown in the local paper, the casinos have been a drain on the town. Those who drive to them to try and win their rent money with their food money are often seen walking back in to the downtown area.

While this is bad, it's not as bad the current economy. No one really believes me, but I keep telling them that I was never confronted with homeless people until I moved to San Francisco. Sure, there were some around, but they would literally hide out in the woods at various camps. Sometimes they lived under bridges or in other odd and slightly mythological places. In a word, they were out of sight.

In see the town for the first time since last May, I'm quite terrified at what has happened. I see homeless everywhere. Some of them look spun out or drunk, but many just look like normal folks, down on the luck, beat up by their monetary state, and out on the streets. This is sobering. I've never seen this before in the three plus decades Oroville and I have had a relationship.

About the only think I can point a finger at is the economy. It's a lot deeper and worse than anyone wants to admit. I've seen three economic downturns in San Francisco and it generally looks unchanged, but seeing a change like this in my home town is a glaring sign that while maybe we've hit bottom, we still have yet to admit it and until we do that, we're just doing to see the sides of a very deep hole for awhile.

15 01 2010      0 comments

Tags: california, economy, oroville

Now and forever a fan of Catalan bulk wine

There's nothing sophisticated about it. You walk in to a winery like Empordàlia and go straight to the back of the place. There, you will find the massive 10,000 or 25,000 liter stainless steel tanks. At the bottom, a spigot. Nearby, your selection of large or small plastic bottles if you forgot your own.

In Spanish and Catalan it 'a granel' or 'bulk' wine. There is no big secret to it here though. You can find it anywhere in Europe where they make wine, although I'm of the opinion that the best versions of it are in countries along the Mediterranean. In 2007 I stayed with a Croat who owned a pension in Dubrovnik and every week he would lug in a 10L bottle of bulk Plavac Mali that he bought.

Naturally the assumption is that if you're paying €1 a liter instead of €10 for a 750ml bottle, then the quality is going to be less. In some wineries this may be the case, but for everything I've ever tasted that was bought in bulk, such as the wines I just picked up yesterday from Empordàlia, I taste no difference. Their bulk Criança and what you buy in the properly bottled and corked version are the exact same, although there may be a scratch less alcohol in the bulk version. Naturally the big difference is the staying power down the line as air is both your best friend and your worst enemy with wine.

If you buy the bulk wine and plan to keep it for more than a day or two, you need to a) put it in a glass container and b) keep as much air out of there as possible. Otherwise, it will oxidize quite fast and while this is desirable while one is drinking the wine, when one is storing it, it's going to produce something squalid. Given the difficultly in this, it's not a surprise that during the summer, the main bulk customers are fat Germans and French stocking up on cheap booze for the beach as Empordàlia is on the way to one of the closest beaches to the French border.

But all of this is a painful reminder as to how out of control the fancification of wine has become in California. If you can actually find wine to buy in bulk, it's typically of very low quality, which is most likely that way to keep people buying the bottles. I mean, even a wine like the namesake Rubicon from Coppola's winery has a cost-of-goods that is less than $4 per bottle, which includes the grapes, labor, bottle, label, and cork (one of the more expensive elements in wine production.) The wine retails for $110. It's ridiculous. I'm assuming that per liter, if one doesn't bottle the wine, the cost much be somewhere around $0.50 given what bulk sells for here in Spain and elsewhere in Europe, which is about €1 a liter. A 100% markup is pretty typical in business. So why is it not possible to get a bulk wine in California for even $4 a liter? That would be a massive markup, yet it just isn't done. And of course it isn't because of the same reason why we don't use the Metric system or have soccer as our national sport (like the rest of the world on both counts) in that wine, Metric, soccer, and hell, even cheese are seen as European and thus fancy. They're either to be avoided or priced to cost a great deal for the allure of being fancy.

I must now shrug this off and return to living up my cheap, delicious wines and weighing myself in kilograms, thank you.

24 10 2009      0 comments

Tags: better buying, california, the europe, wine

Ending the summer at Lake Del Valle

Lake Del Valle (more here) is pretty typical of the artificial bodies of water that we have in California. It's decent-sized, has good road access, good amenities (like all important BBQ grills), flat, somewhat shallow, rather popular with people, and there's even a path for the trashy cheapskates to walk down to avoid the meager $6 per car to use the place. It also happens to be the result of damming off a small creek called Arroyo del Valle, so the name, which means, "of the valley" can be taken as "Ha ha you stupid creek, we went and dammed you up! Where's your valley now? Suck on that nature!" Of course, I'm the only one who finds that even remotely funny.

For Europe, the end of summer is August 31st and if you try to go anywhere over there on that day, you might as well forget about it. For the US, the end of summer is Labor Day Weekend and as such, forget about going anywhere on the Monday following this weekend. So naturally, that meant heading out on Sunday with the Bosnians to tear up some of that lake with their 3hp boat. That's right. 3 Horse Power. And it's electric too. Obviously that makes it not screamingly fast, but at the same time, it saves your ass from having to do any real work like rowing, ewwww. But even though it's slow, tooling around and getting some end of the year tanning in makes for good times.

What also makes for good times is that those guys didn't tell me we were meeting up with a larger, super extreme group of Bosnian Nationalists. For an American this may sound scary, but in reality, it means that when they gather for their extremist gatherings, they cook their national food: meat. Unfortunately due to Ramadan being in full swing, it meant that I was one of the only guys drinking in the crowd. That's was okay as I can fly solo when surrounded by the deliciousness of the čevapčići. One could probably not be bothered if your foot was stuck in a bear trap as long as you had čevapčići, other than the fact it impedes your ability to get more čevapčići.

But here's the real rub in being the only Croat in the crowd; I felt terrible for not bringing the ajvar. Because, beyond religion and a slight dialectal language change, here's the key difference between Croats and Bosniaks: Croats eat čevapčići with ajvar and Bosniaks eat them with kajmak. Both the Bosnian čevapčići and kajmak as vastly superior to the Croatian version with ajvar, but seeing as how you can't find kajmak in the US short of making it yourself, you're often stuck with ajvar. It's no wonder everyone just assumed I was an American since all I showed up with was beer, chips, and peanut M&M's. The shame. I need to go wallow in a pljeskavica.

08 09 2009      0 comments

Tags: california, food, outdoors

Sad times for higher education

I just read today that it is quite possible that fees for the California State University system will go up to $4,872 a year. This hurts because when I was a student at UC Berkeley it was around $4,200 a year to go there. Now it's $8,720. This puts a college education out of the reach of great swaths of people as this is just tuition. Books, food, and most importantly, rent, are not included in this cost. Where did we go wrong?

I pretty much blame it on the fact that far too many of us are getting degrees these days. Take me for instance. Why did I go to a top-rated school in the US to get a degree in English Literature and then work as a web developer? I'm not alone. Everyone I meet works in a field that was not their area of study in college. Personally, I didn't need this degree. All it does for me is to put a line on my resume that says, "Yes, college graduate." This is pointless because nearly everyone is has this line these days. But yet, we all still keep going to college.

Now we're at a point where the system is pretty much broke and trying to balance it on the backs of students who in turn go in to debt for tens of thousands of dollars to get a degree that most don't use. We really need proper college exams here that make it a great deal tougher to get in to college. I guess to some degree the restrictions are indeed being put upon us, but not in a scholarly fashion, just a monetary. Long live the modern corporation approach to education.

18 07 2009      1 comment

Tags: california, education

Wow, Oroville in a good light

The Chron has featured my home town on a "Sunday Drive" listing. While there is no way that I'd recommend making that trip in a single day, it's a good drive and the wilderness is quite nice up there. Growing up around all of this, you do get spoiled. I realize now why a friend from back East said, "I hate you Californians". It is true, when it comes to easy to reach, great wilderness parks, we kick a rather large amount of ass.

06 07 2009      1 comment

Tags: california, cars, oroville

Mount Lassen: Hiking dumbly unprepared

There is a certain degree of glory in knowing that #1 Fan and I were some of the very first people to hike to the top of Mount Lassen this year. The road just opened last Friday and so we decided that Monday seemed like a great day to make the hour and a half drive up from my mom's house to enjoy all that our National Park system has to offer.

The only problem in all of this is that while the road to the peak was open, the trail was still about 2/3 covered in snow. They warned of us this going in, but we didn't think too much of it until we got to the parking lot and saw that it wasn't a little dusting of snow, but a serious snow pack that made it hard to even figure out where the trail was. Being ever so curious, we stepped up the first switchback on the trail. Then we went on the next one and then the next. Before we knew it, we were about halfway up the 600 meter incline and we decided to go the rest of the way, passing a CAL Fire inmate crew on the way up who were carving the first real trail of the year.

It didn't end up being that bad. Tiring yes, as walking 600 meters in 4km is pretty intense, but it's definitely much more of a hike and not a climb. Hell, I even did it as a kid when I was about eight, so it really isn't that bad. The only real catch is that we weren't expecting to make the climb. We just started and then kept going. Amazingly we had the camera with us, but just one lens. We also thought to bring sunscreen, but in an amazingly bout of stupidity, didn't put it on before the hike, which given the altitude and glare from the snow has made from some very fresh, wicked sunburns. I'm actually sunburned on the front of my neck and under my chin. I don't think I've ever even been able to tan there much less get burned there.

Oh yeah, we also did this hike in running shoes because again, we were expecting a dirt trail and not the Yukon Territory. In the end though, it was worth it. The views are quite magnificent from up top there from 3230 meters. It's just a shame that the lakes around the peak were snowed over and still frozen. You can see what should have been Emerald Lake below, but instead was more of a skating rink. Usually, it looks like this when not frozen.

It makes me realize as I reflect back on my Hawaii trip last year, that apparently one of my new hobbies is hiking in the wrong footwear. I don't really know what to tell you about this hobby, but it's edgy and it gets you some funny looks from the people with the expensive hiking boots and poles. Sure, you can feel like a rebel in this new (dare I say, "extreme") sport, but one of these days you'll end up getting frostbite and then you won't feel like such a rebel anymore.

Check out my Lassen Photo Album if you want all the good stuff.

10 06 2009      0 comments

Tags: california, parks

Oh yeah, that's trashin' it for ya

When grabbing a quick bite while shopping at the IKEA in West Sacramento, I came across this large group (there were more swirling around) gettin' their eat on. Naturally, when heading out to the IKEA for your evening meal, you put on nothing but your finest sweats, comb out the mullet, and get out the trucker's hat with the least amount of chew stains on it. This, is the high life. Anyone who says differently, is far too ironic to talk to me.

09 06 2009      1 comment

Tags: california, culture, us america

Have your lard and drive it too

Take a good hard look at this temporary license plate paper on a new car of my cousin's. For anyone from the Central Valley of California, this means nothing. It's a big fat place to go buy cars in the town of Manteca. For anyone who knows Spanish, the ugly truth comes out though and that 'fat' aspect becomes especially true. Yes, in Spanish this means, "Lard Auto Square". That's maybe not the foulest thing out there, but it's near the top and let's not even talk about what happens in the summer.

15 05 2009      0 comments

Tags: california, central valley, language