Coastal Voyager

The price of tea in Chinatown, San Francisco, California

My friend and I took the cable car to Chinatown in San Franciso. She wanted to show me the wonderful sights, sounds and smells of the Chinese markets and apothecaries. Walking down into the heart of the area we were delighted by the festive atmosphere. There were colorful banners and signs and storefronts with Chinese architectural elements.

Along the way we came across a sign reading "free tea tasting." Hmmm. That sounded interesting. So we walked into the shop, which was empty except for a man and woman behind the counter.

The tea room looked brand new and had a vibrant red and gold decor, a long wooden bar and hundreds of containers of loose tea labeled in Chinese and English. Most of them seemed to be priced at $100 or more a pound. Yikes!

A young Chinese woman, who looked like a model, asked if she could help us as her male colleague, perhaps her husband or brother, was working with a loud drill near by. Because of the noise, the elegance of the surroundings and the price of the tea we said "we're just looking."

Just down the block we saw another tea shop, Vital Tea-Leaf Co. But this one had what looked to be a mixture of locals and tourists around the bar tasting tea. A man was pouring small cups of tea, and after he finished he motioned for us to sit.

The tea demonstrator was part stand up comic, part tea educator and part salesman. Soon he had us laughing and hanging on his every word as he brewed various teas for us to try. He got a little irritated when I kept snapping pictures of the tea demonstration. "What am I the Golden Gate Bridge?" he scolded. I got the message and put up my camera.

He prepared and served us various teas, including green, oolong, medicinal and floral. The rose tea was both pretty and tasty. One tea tasted buttery. The medicinal tea was bitter.

The tea demonstrator pointed out that more than 1,500 types of tea are produced across the world and so we shouldn't limit ourselves to Lipton tea bags.

I asked him if he was familiar with flowering teas, and he pointed to a shelf with multiple jars of them. Each tea ball turns into an artistic tea flower when soaked in water. They are delightfully exotic, yet are available in grocery stores back home.

I noticed the price of tea on the shelves of Vital Tea-Leaf seemed a little less expensive than the shop up the street, but still out of reach for my budget. Although my fortune cookie predicted wealth, I believe that may have meant a wealth of experience, at least so far.

Lipton's orange pekoe tea bags will have to do for me now as the source of my daily morning tea. Of course I'm going to be on the lookout for tea tastings as I venture out into the world. 

And don't be surprised if I occasionally treat myself to a cup of gourmet tea just as I sometimes invest in a glass of good red wine.

Mass transit, movies and mayhem in San Francisco, California

I only had a few hours to check out San Francisco via mass transit and walking, so I thought I'd be doing good to navigate from the airport in San Mateo to the Golden Gate Bridge. You can't have watched Albert Hitchcock's Vertigo without wanting to see the bridge in person. I had dutifully researched the route to get there, but was a little nervous. Although I have been a frequent traveler in recent years, I've rarely visited cities, and when I have it's been with a group via a shuttle bus. I hadn't used commuter rail, a bus or the subway in more than a decade.

All those movies and TV shows I've watched with crime-ridden city subway scenarios didn't help, not to mention Zodiac. Maybe I have seen too many movies. Still all the memorable movies and gorgeous photographs of San Francisco have made me long to see the city, and be willing to face some mass transit discomfort to do so. As the poet John Berryman said "We must travel in the direction of our fear."

Luckily I met a friendly lady from Israel on my San Mateo County hotel shuttle to catch the Bay Area Rapid Transit train. She soon was asking me if I wanted company on my foray into the city. Along the way we learned from the helpful BART attendant that we could see the Golden Gate Bridge from Fisherman's Wharf, and that Chinatown was not too far from the wharf on the way back to a BART station. That sounded good to us.

So we disembarked from the Embarcadero station and began the 20-minute walk down Embarcadero to Pier 39 and the wharf. Our route past the city's many neat-and-clean piers and warehouses gave us great vantage points to take in the San Francisco skyline, including the signature Transamerica Pyramid, and the rolling hills that give the city its unique character. I thought about how photographs, film and video capture such small parts of cities, landscapes, etc. You have to be surrounded by a place to really get some sense of it, even a real taste of it. Photographs and words are just invitations to the party.

After awhile we passed an Alcatraz tour boat, and then there it was rising serenely from the bay: the infamous Alcatraz. Talk about movie locations. The ironic contrast of the brutal history of the prison with its huge popularity with popcorn-chewing tourists today cannot be missed when you're there to witness it. Of course if I'd had the time I would have gone to get an eyeful myself.

We kept walking and watching, and then I saw something that shocked a forgotten image from my memory. It was a bank of trees in two parallel rows. Their almost leafless branches reached up in a contorted gnarly way that was both beautiful and alarming. I remembered seeing a line of such trees about 30 years before in the 1978 remake of the Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The trees, which do look to be from an alien planet, figure prominently in the horrifying ending of the film. I was mesmorized looking at them again.

Could these be the same peculiar trees? I had never seen them before anywhere else. The background was different I vaguely remembered. Later I saw them again when touring the picturesque Filoli Gardens in San Mateo, and learned from our guide they were London plane hybrid sycamores. Their knobby branches are created by the ancient practice of "pollarding," a type of pruning which gives them a unique look for gardens and keeps them from outgrowing their urban environment. See, I told myself, they're not so spooky afterall.

Through googling I learned the film was indeed set in San Francisco and the background of the trees in question is the San Francisco City Hall.

After nosing around Pier 39 and the Wharf, seeing the ghostly outline of the Golden Gate through a light foggy haze, and being introduced to the delights of Dungeness Crab, my friend and I took a cable car to Chinatown. The ability of the cable car to easily climb and descend the many steep hills of San Francisco helped me get why it's still so popular a means of transportation there. Soon the cable car attendant was calling out the stop for Chinatown and we disembarked for our next adventure: tea tasting.

When it was time for me to get back to my hotel so I wouldn't miss my San Mateo tour reception I walked to the downtown shopping district with my new friend where we parted ways. And then in possession of a good mass-transit map and having the ability to ask strangers for directions, I found my way to the Civic Center BART station and was soon speeding back to my hotel with a big smile on my face.

The joy of seafood: Discovering Dungeness crab on Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco

Part of what makes traveling to coastal regions so rewarding is having the opportunity to enjoy the fresh local seafood. Recently I had my first mouth-watering taste of Dungeness crab in San Francisco. Now I know why the species is called Cancer magister, "master crab."

I had a feeling the big red crabs I saw cooking outside of Nick's Lighthouse on Fisherman's Wharf were going to be something special. Folks were sitting on nearby benches with paper baskets heaped up with legs and claws or fried calamari, munching happily. My friend had spied them as we wandered along the wharf and suggested we check out Nick's.

We decided to go inside the cozy restaurant filled with well-worn burgandy vinyl booths and historic maritime memorabilia. Nick's opened in 1934, and it doesn't look like it's changed much in all those years. Fortunately we timed our visit right, as there was an empty booth for us.

While my friend ordered the fried calamari, I opted for an order of the crabs. The $27 price tag for a full crab and salad convinced me to go for half a crab at $13.99. After all, I had to save a few dollars to try the local beer, Anchor Steam.

We chomped on a basket of sour dough bread and waited, wondering if the seafood in this tourist-area restaurant we picked on the suggestion of nobody was any good. When the waiter brought in my glistening crab pieces with nutcracker and a tiny fork, I asked what I should dip it in. "Most people eat it plain," he said, so I took his advice.

After the first bite I knew I'd made a mistake opting for the half crab, because the crab was so fresh, sweet, tender and moist that it would have been worth every penny at twice the price. My friend also enjoyed her calamari, which I tasted. It was some of the freshest calamari with the best breading I've ever put in my mouth.

When I asked the waiter about the crab, he said it was Dungeness crab, which is found in the Bay Area. Later I learned the range of my new favorite crab is from Santa Cruz, Calif., just south of San Francisco, to the Aleutian Islands in Alaska. It's named for the town of Dungeness, Wash. Fortunately my visit fell within crab season, which runs from mid-November to May.

The 8- to 10-inch-wide Dungeness crab has a meat-to-shell ratio of about 25 percent, much higher than the typical 15 percent ratio of other crabs. Always before I had thought eating crab was a lot of work for little payoff, and had preferred crab dishes over eating the crab right out of its home.

The legs and claws of the Dungeness holds much of its meat. Sometimes it's good to have big legs!