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.

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!

Breakfast with a yellow belly

I had just finished eating breakfast in the courtyard garden at the Astrolab Observatory Restaurant at Kura Hulanda Hotel in Curacao when I noticed a small yellow-bellied bird fly down to the vacant table across from me. It was hopping and chirping in the most delightful fashion.

Seeing it sweetened my enjoyment of sipping my tea in the tree-canopied Indian marble garden. Already I was feeling serene after listening to the continuous gurgling of the cross-shaped fountain next to me and watching the play of morning sunlight on its marble and water.

Suddenly the bird stuck it's beak into the sugar-pack holder and brought out a brown pack of brown sugar. After just a moment's hesitation it sprung off the table and flew up to a long tree limb just directly above and in front of me. "What a trick" I thought to myself, but I wondered what on Earth the bird was going to do with a closed pack of sugar.

Then the bird lodged the pack between the limb and a small branch growing out of it, and then quickly jabbed it's beak into the pack and withdrew some sugar. After swallowing, the bird stuck it's beak in again. After repeating the proceedure several times, the bird pecked hard to get any remaining grains out of the pack. The pack was dislodged and fell out of the tree to the courtyard below.

"Did you see that bird grab that sugar pack and eat it in the tree!" I said as if I had just witnessed the second coming.

My waitress shook her head and said "No, but they like sugar." A man dining across from me smiled but didn't say anything. I asked her what the bird's name was, and she said "It's 'barika hel,' which means 'yellow belly' in Papiamento, but I don't know the real name is in English."

After she left the man next to me said in a slight Dutch accent "It's a bananaquit. They are very common on Curacao."

"Well, they must be very smart," I said, and he smiled and nodded.

I continued to drink my tea, savor the garden and watch the bird. The bananaquit garden is now etched in my mind as a virtual retreat like other serene corners of Kura Hulanda Hotel. Such places of peace (sometimes found on land and more frequently under the sea) are my touchstones for calm. They are my churches, where I feel the force of the universe, which I call God.

After I got home I learned the yellow-bellied bananaquit is nicknamed "the sugar bird" and lives throughout most of the West Indies, Mexico and even in South Florida. It can use its beak to pierce a flower from the side to take its nectar. So piercing a sugar pack is all in a day's work for my favorite little yellow belly.