Day: January 23, 2006

San Fran revisited

I’m in SF, actually Marin County, Novato now. I had to scramble for a flight and found a good NYC travel agent my dad uses for his China trips. I’d highly recommend Jessie from Far Eastern Travel International to get your tickets. Fast and accurate. I had basically 2 days to book a cheapo flight to SFO and she found it! Amazing because none of the on-line places could come through. The only closest one was Westchester County Airport near White Plains for $350 and that just wasn’t going to cut it. In the end Jessie found me AA tickets for $395. I’m now signed up on the OneWorld AA miles program. I think I’ll be collecting those as well 🙂

Weather was nice and good feeling to be here. I found Fox Rental car online for $15 a day. They gave me a brand new PT Cruiser (450 miles). Drives nice and competently. Other than that, nothing particularly distinguishing about the car performance. Met an Indianian woman also while waiting for Fox shuttle to pick us up. Lots of things changed with the airport, new roads, but nothing too earthshattering. Woman is in event management and doing a couple of events at Alcatraz and Sutter Winery in Wine Country. Her first time and was very excited. We chatted a bit about that and got my juices (no pun intended) flowing again at the idea of driving up there. Hmmm.

Have to focus on some business stuff here and hook up with some old friends/colleagues. That should probably tie up all my time. I doubt I’ll have the chance to make a Bay Area drive around. We’ll see.

Laters,
=YC

In Search of

Much catching up with friends and routines this weekend. Saturday, started the gym again for the first time. I’m still sore today. We saw the Fra Angelico exhibit at the Met. This early Renassiance artist produced spectacular religious artwork, one of which demonstrated some of the first modern usages of perspective. Afterwards saw Syriana, which left P and I uncharacteristically ambivalent — as all of the characters were acting in their own self interests, none of the characters are at all likable or relatable. I didn’t get anything new out of the movie when I left.

Afterwards, we ate at Heidelberg, a legendary German restaurant next door to the German deli at 86th Street. The food was excellent – a touch better then Rolf’s and much better then the generic biergarden in Astoria.

Sunday meant the re-union of the schk dim sum club at Golden Unicorn, which has been meeting for the last 10 years or so. Everybody doing ok, just older and with more ideas. Talk about mini-storage, salon culture, domestic espionage and Google subpoenas dominated the afternoon. $75 of dimsum and a few bubble teas later, we adjourned after 3 hours. Afterwards, P and I visited P’s sister’s dogs.

At home, saw on DVD Jay Chau‘s racing movie Initial-D. Wasn’t bad – based on a Japanese manga comic book, it translated well to the screen. You can find lots of info on the Special Features disk. Turns out almost 100% of the driving scenes through the downhill hairpin turns were live action, not CGI. Half of the cast was previously in the “Infernal Affairs” series of movies, and the female lead was in “Snow Falls on Cedars”. Also finished “Lost” season One – that series’ extras disk pointed out that Yunjin Kim, the actress that plays Sun, had 1. originally auditioned to play Kate, and 2. is a superstar in Korea, playing the lead in the action blockbuster Shiri. The producers decided to create a role especially for her, and cast a husband for her.

Another Monday morning rapidly approaching….