First post in forever. Just want to catalogue this great day.
We have generated a sort of normal sunday routine. Today we seem to have gotten a nearly perfect day out of it.
Woke up early and got out of the house around 9:30 and rode our bikes into the park. I’m riding this obscenely great road bike that was my present to myself when I got a job. Really someone who’s touring or racing should be riding it but too bad. I got to it first. Sarah’s ride is way cooler than mine and not much less functional. Last week I got up bleary eyed and took a street car down into sunset and bought her a 1974 raleigh Grand Prix 10-speed. It spent the last ten or 15 years in a garage and is in really good condition. It’s green with ornate bronze-trimmed lugging and is completely gorgeous.
So with the sun beating down we rode down the main road (closed to cars on sundays) and then down the bike path past ponds and tropical trees. We rode down to a coffee house on Judah across from the beach. I had the best croisant I’ve had since thailand and we both had Gypsy tea. Tea so good we ordered several tins of it from new york a few weeks ago.
The ride back was as nice as the ride down. Sarah was originally trepedacious about bikes in general and nearly affraid of roadbikes and their foreward-leaning posture. But she’s really good on her bike and is even getting the hang of the index-less shifter leavers mounted on the down-tube by her knees.
So from there we surfed the web a while. I’m reading a book about squatters around the world I’m really enjoying. It has a very different view of Brazilian Favelas than I have seen before.
Then to lunch. Well really we were still pretty full from breakfast so lets just have a pint at the local brew pub, Magnolia. Their brown ale out of a gravity tap is mmm. Then we wandered into Richmond to pick up some computing widgets for Sarah’s reinstall of windows.
Back home to do some more reading and Sarah’s started playing ‘drawn to life’ which she says is ‘awesome for creative’. I’m also really enjoying trolling the local craigslist bicycle listings and reading up on vintage raleighs.
Then dinner. I have been complaining since we got here that we haven’t had a really good meal. All the restaurants here are uninspired. There’s a Thai place up the street that’s good but the bar for Thai food is pretty damned high. So anyway I’ve been collecting suggestions. One of the suggestions was Hama-Ko which is a shushi ya just a couple of blocks from us.
So we wander up there and have a little trouble finding the place. It has no sign and it’s just big enough for four or five tables. Serious deja-vu from Japan walking into the place. All through the meal I had to keep reminding myself I didn’t have to order in gestures and horribly broken japanese.
The meal was, absolutely, fantastic. We loaded up on nigiri and a couple of roles. It’s been run by this japanese couple for 25 years with no sign and no advertising. It’s crazy delicious. We ordered all of our favorites and she recomended the Thai Snapper and the Scallops. The scallops were among the best things I have ever eaten. The unagi (baked eel) roll was among the best unagi I’ve ever had which is among my favorite foods. The Toro and Meguro (both cuts of tuna) were up there for best I’ve had in north america, although fresh tuna in the Ueno fish market soundly trumps it as best fish ever tasted.
So we finally had a really good meal. It took us two or three months to find a good restaurant, and it is pricey, but at least it’s close.
We finished the ‘gastronomic perfect storm’, as I am refering to today as, with a pecan bar at a favorite coffee place. Sarah had a roibose-chai tea and I had a double espresso.
Now we’ll round out the night with a bath and a good book/good ds game/cruising craigslist for a 1970’s Raleigh super sport with a brampton flip/flop hub.
See you all in a week!
