Sanfrancisco vacation day 2

Chinatown!

Day two saw us heading to Chinatown. We started off our day by walking down market street, threading our way thru the homeless people to a little café called Munch Haven. Breakfast was wonderful but expensive. This little place was really neat. Tiny, and inhabited by locals, it wasn’t too busy. We felt like we had found a place that wasn’t touristy. We were in a section of the city known as “The Tenderloin”. I had read horror stories about the Tenderloin and even early in the morning, I knew they weren’t kidding about it.

Back up Market street we got in line to ride a cable car for Chinatown. It was early so there wasn’t a big line. The conductor was calling for people who were going to work to get in the front of the line. The tourists would have to wait. The cable car ride was slow but fun, nothing I would ride unless I needed to really get somewhere. We jumped off and walked several blocks to Chinatown.

Right at the Chinatown gate we strolled in and found out that we were a little early. It was dead in the water. All the stores had not opened yet. Not to worry, I had been studying up on Chinatown and I knew that the REAL Chinatown was on Stockton street a block over. We hiked up the hill to Stockton just as it was awakening. The open air markets are a real blast to your eyes, ears, and nose. Especially your nose. I smelled things and had no idea what they could possibly be. I’m not taking wonderful smells either. It was pretty funky. Kind of a fishy, herby, weird sort of thing. There were lots of shops selling herbal remedies that were dried roots, fungus, mushrooms, and God knows what else. The idea is to tell the doctor at the counter what is ailing you then he prepares a concoction of these dried mysteries and you go home and brew a tea out of it. Drink the tea and hope that it doesn’t kill you in the process, then you are cured. I didn’t buy any. There were lots of Chinese people, mostly elderly, buying groceries and meat at the open markets. We strolled thru and saw butchers cutting up fresh pork, fish markets where the fish were laying out in the open and still wiggling, and even saw an old woman who had a large fish in a cardboard box that she was trying to sell to everyone who walked by. Sort of a miniature yard sale. It was cut up in weird sections and looked a little scary. There was no behind the scenes food preparation going on either. Everything was done right in front of you. The butcher shop was really something. All those people hacking away at the carcasses right in the open. The little shops had just about everything imaginable for sale and it was pretty hard to negotiate the narrow isles. I really enjoyed the Chinese restaurant supply places and wanted to buy everything I touched but there was no way I would have been able to pack it for the trip home. I will get these things on the internet one of these days. One item that I really wanted to bring home was a teapot to remember the occasion. I’m becoming sort of a collector of these silly things and have amassed about a dozen or so. I only really need a couple to brew just about any kind of tea. I must have looked at over 1,000 teapots of all sizes and shapes. I saw teapots that would hold over 5 gallons of tea to tiny ones that would hold only about 1 ounce. I just couldn’t find one that was really “me” though. Towards the end of the day I told Kathy that I thought I would try getting a tea pot in Japantown another day instead. After buzzing thru the area I began to notice that the majority of the stores were either grocery/vegetable markets, restaurants, herb stores, or junk shops. There wasn’t a large variety. We did notice a pet shop in the area but it had went out of business. I won’t try and spin a joke about Chinese restaurants and pet shops but it’s tempting. We were pretty tired from running around looking in all of the shops and decided we would try our luck at lunch. Kathy picked out a dim sum house that looked pretty nice and it turned out to be yummy. We were seated at a very large table that could have held a dozen people. There were others at our table and they must have thought we looked pretty out of place in there since we were the only two white folks in the place. It was packed too. I took that to be a good sign. The food was really good and we ate our fill. After a while, an elderly lady at our table struck up a conversation with us. She was friendly, like all the people in the city, but her English was only slightly better than our Chinese. Anyway, Kathy enjoyed talking with her. She asked how much our bill was and we told her around $20. She said we got out of there pretty good. The dim sum was a little different than what I was used to but it was great. I had some Chinese broccoli that was wonderful. We also had pot stickers, custard muffins, and other things that I can’t even name. The best thing about this place was that you didn’t ask for tea, they just put down a pot right in front of you. I was disappointed that it came in that ugly stainless steel pot just like at home but I guess that is the North American standard for Chinese restaurant tea pots. One lady who was bringing the dim sum out in carts would get right behind me and yell what she had in Chinese. I didn’t know what her game was but she made me jump more than once. Once out of the restaurant we continued on our way to discover new treasures.

The very next place we came to was an authentic tea shop. It was tiny and we were the only people in there. The entire shop was about the size of an average bedroom. We sat down at the little counter and talked with the owner for about an hour about tea. He served us several varieties and we all had a great time sipping tea and talking about everything. We came out of there with over $150 worth of tea and that was for only two 8 ounce bags. This stuff was EXPENSIVE. It was also very good. He let us sample a very high grade of tea that sold for $700 a pound. I have never had tea that good. The taste was unlike any other tea I have ever had and to say the least, it was incredible. I learned a lot about tea that day. The owner’s wife also gave us a couple of small bags of tea as gifts. The tea shop visit turned out to be one of the most rewarding aspects of the day.

We wandered around for a couple more hours and saw a little more of the real thing. We went past the Hang ah tea room and I told Kathy we would come back another day for tea. I will discuss the merits of the Hang ah tea room in a future blog. Right past this place (we were in a small alley) we peered into a room that was filled with people playing Mah Jong. No way we were getting in there (it was packed) but I felt like this was part of real Chinatown life. Kathy was afraid we were going to get mugged in the alley so we pressed on. We also found a lovely park that was full of Chinese people playing a game that I think is called “Go”. It kind of looks like checkers but the playing pieces are placed on the intersections of the squares and not in the square itself. It was a very popular game and there would be two guys playing and about a dozen watching them. It could have been the national championships for all we knew. Kathy asked a man if she could take his picture but he pointed to some others. I told her that people don’t always like to have their picture taken. Could have been that there was just a little bit of gambling going on and I figured that they didn’t want to advertise themselves.

Back on the street, we plowed our way thru the rest of Chinatown. I wanted to find the fortune cookie factory but never could locate it. Try as I might, it eluded us for the entire visit. Kathy wasn’t as enthusiastic about finding it as I was but it really wasn’t a “holy grail” type of thing for me anyway. I just wanted to see how they made the stupid things. Chinatown is really “tinsely”, brightly lit, and full of tourists on the main drag and we ended our trip where we started. At the end of the day I told Kathy that I was in “sensory overload” and couldn’t take it anymore. It was just too much to see.

As far as I could tell, we pretty much covered nearly every square inch of Chinatown except for that stupid fortune cookie factory. We even got to the outer limits and saw some of North Beach. This area is Italian and we switched from ducks and pieces of barbequed pork hanging in the windows to the smell of coffee and garlic. We didn’t take too many pictures in Chinatown. I was so intent on seeing everything that I just dragged my poor wife around at high speed and wouldn’t hardly let her stop long enough to snap many pictures. She took nearly all of the pictures on the trip and did a great job with them.