The Long Tail

We are now officially part of the long tail! From now on you can enjoy highly-targeted, ultra-relevant links on this page, courtesy of a premier internet company headquartered in mountain view, CA. Amazing what you can do these days from the comfort of your own home...

More Belgians in San Francisco

We had the great chance to welcome Laetitia, Audrey & Laurent in San Francisco just after our trip to Japan. It was great to have them here and we tried to impress them as much as possible with some of the great things California has to offer. Unfortunately, they only got to see a rainy California. Even worse, the sun came back just after Laetitia stepped into her plane back to Belgium. Maybe she was the one to blame ;-)
At least she can say she was there for the rain record in Northern California since 1904. So many things to do in California: they went to visit Alcatraz; discovered the steep streets of San Francisco; went biking on the Golden Gate; got a bay area tour in a small plane with Cedric the pilot, we showed them that one can eat well in California with multiple restaurants and a cheese & wine party at our place; we met Julie, Laetitia's friend who is doing her PostDoc in Berkeley; we initiated them to oysters bbq (everybody likes that, even those who dislike raw oysters); went camping in Point Reyes Park; went to Muir Woods with its giant sequoias; enjoyed Napa Valley under the rain; and finished the californian adventure for Laetitia with Mishapalooza and the mechanical bull. Laetitia is a real cowgirl now. Now it’s your turn to come see us ! For some pix, check: www.maureencedric.com/photos/LaetitiaAudreyLaurentSanFrancisco
Maureen

Lost in translation

This is the somewhat lengthy tale of our first time in Japan. We hope it will make you want to take the trip.
We took off from SFO on Friday and arrived in Narita Airport at 6PM on Saturday after an uneventful flight. We decided to take the train to Shibuya and we only were lost for about 15 minutes once we got there. It's really no big deal to walk to the Cerulean Towers from Shibuya station if you can find a map of the area and you have a compass (thanks for the advice John). The Cerulean Tower is REALLY nice with great views in most rooms. Although we had grand plans to see some of Tokyo by night the first day, We crashed in our beds as soon as we got there.
On Sunday morning, we took a stroll in Shibuya, which is a rather busy place where mostly young people hang out to shop and play games (we saw a line of ~150 people at 7AM who were waiting to play some weird game involving little steel balls in a 3D pinball-like machine). We met up with Miz, Shamayn and Tom for lunch and had our first local culinary experience: tonkatsu. Basically some super finely sliced pork that is formed into a patty with various tasty things (cheese, pepper, garlic or oignons) inside, then the whole thing is deep fried - YUMMY. Although it felt exotic and all, this was rather tame stuff considering our next few meals. After lunch, we took the train to Harajuku. Tons of people shopping, with bazaar-like shops (takeshita st.) right next to flashy ubertrendy malls. There is also a bridge where teenage girls show off their peculiar vestimentary style (along with some skin usually), the whole thing is covered by national TV and a dozens of specialty press reporters. A shrine (Meiji) and street bands in the park wrapped up our afternoon. That night we met up with Shamayn's friends to have shinko-nabe, the thing that makes sumo wrestlers huge (and there only meal). Tasty stuff!
On Monday we took advantage of our jetlag to meet up at 4AM with Miz & Tom (who had no jetlag to take advantage of, they are just troopers...), and head out to the fish market. We saw a lot of sea creatures in crates, and check out these videos (here and there) of the Tuna auction. This was followed by one of the culinary highlights of the day: a 6AM sushi breakfast. We crammed ourselves in the world's smallest sushi restaurant and committed to eat all the (really tasty) sushi the guy behind the counter presented to us. This was more sushi I could have handled at any time of the day, but we felt it was the honorable thing to do... We visited the Google office later that morning, and left for Hakone at lunchtime (needless to say we did not have lunch). The trip to Hakone was an adventure, as we quickly came to realize what luxury Tokyo's translated informational signs really are. None of this foreign stuff in the countryside! We were using all our imagination to (unsuccessfully) infer meanings from the ideograms on the Odawara station's signs, as any official looking person we would approach for help would tell us with a terrorized look he does not speak english. By some miracle we ended up not only buying the right ticket, but also finding the correct bus terminal for our ride to Hakone. Of course, this made us realize the main difference between travelling by bus or by train as an language-ignorant foreigner: busses get stuck in traffic jams, which screw up their schedules which in turns makes the universal measure of time useless in order to identify where we need to get off! From an incompletely translated time table (which gave us the ideograms for Ashinoyu) we found a word that was spelled the same, but with some stuff before it, and we concluded this must be our station Higashi-Ashinoyu. We got off at that one, then followed our precise directions ("a 2 minute walk from the bus stop"). We picked a street at random and started walking. Using a print out of the name of our Ryokan, we actually made it with the help of very helpful (and super-friendly) locals. At night, we had our first kaiseki dinner served in our room (very cool). Kaiseki basically consists of a lot (~20) of different plates, the content of which we made no attempt identifying. Our guidebook qualifies the food we ate as "adventurous" for westerners, and some of it certainly was. While we felt pretty good about trying all the exotic dishes, little did we know that the real rough stuff would come in the morning. Think you know what breakfast looks like? Think again. That one was a little harder on our stomacs, and the maid kept on serving us more and more... Anyway, I must admit this stuff is more filling than a croissant and a hot chocolate, so I guess we headed out of our first ryokan experience full of energy after soaking for a while in our own private hotspring (the volcanic (=smelly) water was piped directly into our room). In Hakone, the highlight is the view of Mt. Fuji. You can see the mountain from a gondola that brings you up to an area of volcanic activity. The whole scenery is very beautiful, although the Swiss-themed facilities are somewhat tacky. We then took a scenic cruise on lake Ashi on a pirate ship (we like to travel in style) that took us back to our bus. Next stop was Toyotashi (Toyota city) where we would visit Elisa & Elia, two friends from College who expatriated to Japan. On the way, we had our first experience of the meaning of "cash society", as we ran out of cash and were told this was the only way to pay for our ticket. If you ever go to Japan (which I hope you will after reading this fascinating post) you will notice there are A LOT of banks. Even 7 elevens have a banking division over there. But this does not mean you can get cash at just any old ATM, as we were soon to find out. After trying a dozen or so different places, I called Elisa who gave us the secret handshake: the post office is where it's at! This is something you should remember on your Japan adventures: the ubiquitous post office and the much more rare citibank is where your foreign plastic is most likely to be changed into cash. Sure enough, we found a post office and salvation and half an hour later we were on our way to the industrial Japan of Toyotashi. Elia & Elisa live in an amazing appartment with all the technological gizmos you'd expect from our stereotypical view of hi-tec Japan. After a Geijin breakfast, Elisa drove us around in the city and dropped us off at the Toyota Technical center for a tour of the factory. Very interesting stuff, you can actually enter the factory floor and see the ballet of the welding robots, various moving assembly lines and the Toyota Production System is explained to the uninitiated. For Maureen, it was the first time seeing the production site of a company that makes "real stuff" and I think she was impressed with the sheer size and complexity of a firm with a market capitalization smaller than Google's. On Wednesday, we took off for Kyoto in a Shinkansen (tricked out superfast - and supercomfortable - train). We arrived early enough to take a stroll in the old town before dinner. As a first time visitor, you have to be in awe walking through the streets of old Kyoto. The city is amazing, with shrines and temples all over the place, small restaurants and shops everywhere, people dressed up in traditional clothing, the whole enchilada. That night it was the return of the kaiseki, and I think we put up a decent fight. I am not going to say much about Kyoto except that you have to see it if you go to Japan and are into shrines and stuff. Check out the pictures we posted, and remember photography is prohibited in the most of the really cool places, so there really is much, much more. After two days in Kyoto (awesome hotel btw: ryokan Kohro, ask for the "cypress room"), we are off on the Shinkansen back to Tokyo just in time for the giant cherry blossom picnic Mizuki had organized.

Tokyo is amazing. It's really hard to describe so you will need to see by yourself. "Bustling Metropolis" really is an understatement when referring to Tokyo, there is no city in the world (that I have been to) that is in the same league. Standing in front of Shibuya station at any time of the day (or night) and watching the endless flow of people going places is absolutely mezmerizing. The fact that we were there during the peak of the cherry blossom season made it even more special. City dwellers are magically attracted into the parks to enjoy the beautiful pink trees. They will sit there on tarps for hours to reserve the best spots for afternoon picnics. Tokyo-ites play hard, and the drink of choice during these picnics are half-gallon bottles of Suuntory whiskey. Mizuki had organized a picnic for googlers so we spent the night under the trees at the Yasukuni shrine. The next day, we tried to visit some sumo stables, we didn't see much as most wrestlers were in Osaka for a tournament and it turned out these stables are not really open to the public. We had a lot of fun being gently chased away by big fellows, though... Saturday night, we went to my friend Taku's wedding which gave us a nice glimpse of a special part of japanese social culture. After that we went out with Lila and Mark to some bar in Shibuya until their hotel-imposed curfew (!). The next morning we went to Ueno park for more cherry blossom sightseeing and met up with Miz & Tom who gave us the insider tour of the electronic neighborhood (basically a Fry's of the scale of a medium-sized city). At night we went to a Korean bbq place and then had a drink at the "icebar", a bar that is actually made of ice imported from some swedish river and serves (chilled) vodka based drinks in glasses that are made of ice as well... weird stuff. Although we were wearing stylish eskimo-style capes, it got rather cold and we did not stay very long. Monday was the last day of our trip, and we were treated with an amazing view of Mt. Fuji from our bed waking up. After french breakfast at Viron and a nice walk in Shinjuku, we headed to Narita Airport where we had our last Sushi on Japanese soil. We will be back... for sure! Here are the pix

A week-end in San Francisco

This was a pretty quiet week-end, no skiing, since the ski season has been shortened with Cedric's accident. On Saturday, Cedric took a break from his homework to get his triathlon bicycle that he wanted to get for a long time. It will mostly be used for rehab now. I am pretty jealous because he has 2 fancy bikes, while I am still using his old mountain bike from Stanford. I think he's scared I might get faster than him !!!

On sunday, we initiated Benjy to climbing. I hope we convinced him to come back.
I also did more planning for our trip to Japan (I am looking forward to it, it will be fun) and finally updated our photos. Check it out: www.maureencedric.com/photos
Maureen

Orthopaedics for dummies

I went to get a second opinion from an orthopaedic surgeon this morning, and the latest news is that my ACL is still attached. Instead, it's the lateral meniscus and the LCL who took the bullet. The guy made it sound like good news, so I am pretty happy although I still don't know if I'll need reconstructive surgery. check out those tasty images of knee surgery.

Sierra snow

Some Lake Tahoe resorts were claiming an unbelievable 5 feet (150cm) of snow over the course of the week. We had to go check it out for ourselves, so we headed to the cabin on Friday night. After the now usual Caltrans-induced traffic pain on stormy nights (6 hours "drive"), we woke up on Saturday to find near perfect conditions: cold, 2ft+ of new snow, sun shining, etc. We decided to ski Alpine, as we had not been there this season. Snow conditions were absolutely amazing, in some spots I could make my entire pole disappear in the powder (50inches-125cm). To make our friends who stayed home jealous, Maureen took a couple of video clips of me playing in the white stuff. I hope you enjoy them, because this is the last bit of skiing I will be doing for a while. At 3:30 PM I was enjoying my last run of the day, when my right binding released. Unlike John Cusack on K-12, I decided to abort my run (Let's pretend this has nothing to do with my one-ski skiing ability, but more with the fact that I did not feel like hiking up too much to look for my ski stuck in the powder). Unfortunately I twisted my leg trying to come to a stop, and while I was taking a glorious faceplant I heard a nasty pop in my knee. Ski Patrol, luge, first aid hut, Truckee Emergency Room, what a fun way to end a ski weedend. At least I made a new friend in the ER.
The ER-Doc thinks my ACL is torn, I'll get a second opinion next week so I keep my fingers crossed. More pix can be found here.

More Tahoe Snow

Tahoe was hit by a much needed storm this weekend. We headed up to the cabin (along with Mike & Wei, Benjy, Marc and Ovi) for two days of great powder skiing. The drawback of the storm was a 6-hour drive through a mess of stranded 2-wheel drive vehicles (an ancient type of automotive technology) and hibernating trucks at Applegate. The snow kept falling all weekend, and strangely enough for a holiday (today is commander-in-chief day), there were no lines to speak of at the lifts. Happy Birthday Wei!

Bay Area From Above

(posted by Maureen) This Sunday I went flying with Cedric for the first time. We flew around the bay right over San Francisco, enjoying amazing views of the city and the Golden Gate. The trip to Napa takes less than half an hour this way... I am looking forward to Cedric finishing his license to go travel around California.

Bear in Mott Canyon

I forgot to mention Ray and I ran into an adult black bear while skiing at Heavenly's Mott Canyon last weekend. The poor fellow was sitting in a tree in the middle of the skiable terrain, probably scared up there by the first skiers of the day. It spent the whole day at about 10ft off the ground, balancing its massive body on a 10 inch branch. Incredible...

New Year - New Ski Season

I spent last week at Ray's place in Stateline. The snow cover is still thin, but we had a lot of fun playing on the slopes. I got to try a Stalmach snowbike - pretty cool stuff! On Friday, we picked up Maureen and Misha in Ray's pimpin' plane (see pix here). I got to fly this Mirage over Lake Tahoe at night, which is an experience which cannot be described without audio effects and uncoordinated hectic hand gestures by the narrator (me). The long-awaited storm finally hit on saturday, and after a day of skiing in Heavenly we headed to our cabin in North Lake and met up with Mike and Wei to eat at an excellent italian restaurant recommended by Amy. We spent MLK skiing at squaw (1-2ft of powder) and headed back to the Bay Area on Monday night.