In a city like San Francisco, there’s so much to love, it’s easy to veer into bad poetic cliche (the fog rolling in on the Golden Gate; how, on unseasonably warm days, the entire city appears to be picnicking on every available patch of green; the dreamy views of the bay from the top of Pacific Heights).
There are other things about SF that rock, however, despite an obvious lack of romanticism. There’s the food truck scene, for example, which in less than five years has become a firmly entrenched part of the city’s culture. Like SF’s ethnic restaurants, the trucks roam the culinary map, from Eritrea and Malaysia to the Philippines, Hawaii, India, the Deep South, Latin America, and even, god help us, dessertlandia (cupcakes have nothing on the crème brûlée truck).
I’ve written before about Off the Grid(OTG), the ginormous, weekly food truck fiesta held down at Fort Mason (there are other, smaller venues and food truck “pods” in SF, the East Bay, South Bay, and Marin County, as well). Featuring over 40 trucks, music, and stellar views of the Bay, it’s become a beloved celebration of all that’s great about life in San Francisco. My favorite vendors include The Chairman (as in Bao), and Gohan.
I’ve been to OTG before, but until last week, I’d never visited its more urban equivalent, SOMA strEAT Food Park. Located just south of Market Street (SOMA), this formerly dumpy, sketchy block has been transformed into an oasis, complete with landscaping, attractive seating areas, music, a beer garden, and an indoor tent for inclement weather. SOMA has long been an up-and-coming ‘hood for hipsters thanks to its bars, cafes, and restaurants, but it’s also convenient to the Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), Metreon entertainment complex, Yerba Buena Gardens, Moscone Center and the Union Square shopping district.
Unlike OTG, the Food Park is also open daily. A number of the same vendors work OTG and the Food Park (which has different vendors every day), but others are unique to each location. My favorite at the Food Park is Adam’s Grub Truck, which specializes in Pacific Rim-inflected sandwiches that are the bomb. There’s also Del Popolo, inarguably the most famous – and high-tech – food truck/pizzeria on wheels in the nation. It alone is worth a trip down to SOMA.
Whether you head to OTG for the scene, selection and bayside location, or the strEAT Food Park for a convenient shopping or cultural break, you’ll come away stuffed, satiated and waxing a little poetic about SF, yourself.
Aurora Borealis, new Nordic cuisine, ice hotels, hot springs, fjords, moose, meatballs and music? Scandinavia is at the top of the list for a lot of travelers these days. But if you can’t book a ticket to the northern countries this year, Washington, D.C., might be your next best bet.
The city is the host of Nordic Cool 2013, a month-long international festival celebrating the culture of Scandinavia, taking place at the Kennedy Center from February 19 to March 17, 2013.
Featuring theater, dance, music, visual arts, literature, design, cuisine and film, the festival aims to highlight the diverse cultures of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden as well as the territories of Greenland, the Faroe Islands and Áland Islands. That’s a lot of Scandinavia in one month.
There is a wide selection of free events that are open to the public, including exhibits on Nordic design and plenty of musical performances. In fact, a total of more than 750 artists, musicians, dancers and writers, will descend upon the capital for the festival, all in an attempt to answer the question, “What is Nordic?”
There’s no simple answer to that, but at least you know it will be high on the cool factor.
The four-story, dome-shaped structure was originally envisaged as a hotel, but it has sat half-finished and abandoned (save for the odd vandal) for nearly 40 years.
Dubbed “Igloo City” by locals, the building has fascinated passersby, but was never completed because of problems with the original construction and a lack of funds.So what’s the price for this rare piece of real estate? The owner says he’ll hear out any serious offers, just as long as the buyer is willing to put in the hard yards to get the igloo up and running as a hotel.
However, getting the building into shape is probably only the first part of the challenge for its new owner. Finding guests for the hotel might be quite the task too – the igloo is located along a remote highway 180 miles north of Anchorage, and the nearest town is home to a little over 200 residents.
In ancient Babylonia, where the first beer was supposedly made, they took the sudsy stuff so seriously that if you made a bad batch, you’d be drowned.
The Vikings’ version of heaven, Valhalla, was really a great meat and beer hall in the sky, complete with a giant goat whose udders spewed-you guessed it-beer.
Light makes beer go bad, hence the reason one usually finds it in a tinted glass bottle. When exposed to prolonged light, beer gets a skunk-y smell (Corona, anyone?).
The melody to the American national anthem, the “Star Spangled Banner,” was taken from a beer drinking song. Seriously.
Much of the corporate brewery beers from other countries that you might consume in the United States was either made in Canada or America.
[Record scratch across the heavens] Wait, what? That’s right. Big breweries don’t necessarily fall over themselves to keep this a secret. But they don’t exactly advertise it, either.I had never thought about this or the effects of travel on beer until I was recently at Hospoda, a Czech restaurant on New York’s Upper East Side. There was something about the taste of the Pilsner Urquell on draught was so…good. It was crisp and light yet the flavors were not muted, as is the case sometimes when I drink it on tap at other bars in North America. And then Lukas Svoboda, who is in charge of the beer at Hospoda, told me that restaurant is one of the few or only places in North America that has their Pilsner Urquell kegs shipped to them in air conditioned containers.
All the Pilsner Urquell one’s drinks in the world is made in Plzen, in western Bohemia. But almost none of it shipped with an air conditioning unit inside the shipping container. And that, apparently, makes all the difference.
Which is one reason why most of the big breweries open up localized breweries to make their beer. Like Japanese beers such as Kirin, Asahi, and Sapporo? It’s brewed in North America by Molson and Anhueser-Busch. Foster’s? Nope, that didn’t come from down under, but rather from up over: it’s made in Canada. The same goes for Beck’s, Heinekin, Bass, and many other “foreign” beers.
Which gives some incredulity when you see “imported” on some beer labels. It’s not lying; it’s imported. But likely from Canada.
I always liked drinking foreign beer at home because it gave me a taste of the world, a bit of travel on my palate, knowing it was made half a world away by guys (and gals) who toiled over the beer making process. But I guess I just failed to read the fine print on the back of the label that says it was made in a not-so-distant land.
I turned to beer expert and widely published writer, Evan Rail for an explanation. “Big industrial breweries usually have one reason for everything they do: to maximize profits,” said Rail who is the author of “Good Beer Guide: Prague & the Czech Republic,” and the Kindle singles “Why Beer Matters” and “In Praise of Hangovers.” “Beer is heavy. Shipping it can be really expensive. And shipping it under refrigeration – which a good beer really deserves – adds even more to the cost.”
But does it change the flavor? Does it destroy any sort of “terroir” that the beer would have had if it was still brewed in the land for which it originally hailed?
Rail says: not really. “Heineken, for example, really shouldn’t be any different when it is brewed in Canada: modern industrial brewing is so incredibly precise that the beer should taste almost exactly the same – at least within the occasional variations for the brew in its place of origin. This is more true for industrial lagers like Heineken and American Budweiser, which are relatively flavorless anyway.”
Interestingly, some previously smaller breweries are getting into the game. Brooklyn Brewery is building a facility in Sweden to make beer. San Diego’s Stone Brewery has been, according to Rail, trying to build a brewery in Europe for a few years now.
The best thing you can do, whether you’re home or traveling, is to drink whatever brew is made nearby.
Rail puts it nicely: “In terms of cost, taste and the environment, there’s really no substitute for drinking local beer.”
The new Syfy channel show “Ghost Mine” is, geographically, a new low for the genre, suggesting that the torrent of paranormal reality programs has exhausted every haunted site above the earth’s surface and left no above-ground spirit unquestioned in the presence of a camera crew. So I had to wonder how in the heck all 3 billion of these shows have missed Wickland in Bardstown, Kentucky, where young, modelesque mediums give a tour every week and practically guarantee that you’ll get to talk to dead people – without any frightening specters of evil or demons or confidentiality waivers.
That’s what happened to me both times I visited last year, anyway. That’s right, as crazy as it sounds, I believe I conversed directly with dead people, even someone I knew, at Wickland. It definitely wasn’t Bardstown’s famous bourbon talking, because I hadn’t had any.
I heard about the little-known Spirits of Wickland Tour from a friend, who happens to be a pastor and, as such, has some extra credibility in the afterlife department, in my eyes. I have no interest in the paranormal, but my husband wastes a few hours each week on ghost-hunting shows, so the next time we visited family near Bardstown and wanted something to do, we signed up for this tour:
If you didn’t make it through the videos, here’s the crux: Wickland is a well-preserved Georgian-style mansion built in 1826 for a family that produced three governors – two of Kentucky and one of Louisiana. Dixie Hibbs, a former mayor of Bardstown and respected historian in the area who has written more than 10 books, oversees the landmark. Until five years ago, it was open only as a historic attraction, and Hibbs wasn’t aware of any ghostly activity. That changed when a pair of local teenagers, Katie and Michael Wilhite, volunteered to help decorate for the holidays.
The twin sisters (Michael is named for their father) were already aware of their “sixth sense” sensitivities – they had been seeing and hearing dead people for years, usually in a scary way, and they weren’t happy about it. But during the decorating session at Wickland and subsequent visits, they had their first friendly encounters with spirits – in this case, some of the home’s former residents. They told Hibbs what they were experiencing, and it didn’t take long for Hibbs to match up the names and physical descriptions the twins provided with her records and launch the interactive tour.
Since then, either Hibbs and the twins have carried on an elaborate ruse of Manti Te’o proportions, pretending to have detailed conversations with spirits every single week, or they’ve been offering the best-kept secret in ghost tourism for a mere $15, cash or check.
“All we really ask is come with an open mind, and all we promise is entertainment,” Hibbs says. “You get to be involved. You get to interact. At most of these spirit things, you don’t get the opportunity to ask questions and get answers.”
She’s being modest about that promise. On both of my visits, copper dowsing rods moved every which way I asked them to; we got logical answers to questions about life in the 19th century; and Katie diagnosed me with a benign spirit attachment and suggested I pray it away. There was also a totally surprise encounter with my deceased father that sounds too nuts to explain without lots of preamble, but I still can’t chalk it up to anything logical because both my sister and I smelled his cigarette smoke, as clear as day.
Second in amusement only to the twins’ stories of their encounters – including a recent trip to a Civil War battlefield in Kentucky where they stunned the park’s director by identifying nearly every dead soldier by first and last name (a record only he had, in an Excel spreadsheet) and found themselves ducking from bullets – are cameos from spirits not connected to the house. Katie and Michael never know who will show up from an unknown time and place to bend their ears. They once heard from someone claiming to be an infamous outlaw, and the more Hibbs questioned him – through one of the twins – the more she doubted that he was telling the truth about his identity. “Ghosts lie, there’s no question,” she says.
Hibbs, more than anyone, dreads the inevitable end of the tour, which has been an unconventional boon to her work as a historian. She records every word the twins repeat from the spirit world and researches its veracity. Last fall, she says she located the home’s long-lost slave cemetery based on tips from past patriarch Charles Wickliffe.
It was the first time Mr. Wickliffe had appeared to either twin, and a moment Hibbs had been anticipating for years. “The craziest part is he’s calling me by name,” she says. “I said [to Katie], ‘When did he die?’ His answer wasn’t a date; he said, Dixie, you know that. Two weeks ago, he came again. I asked why he had returned. He said, Dixie, you ought’ve known I would come back. I told my friend, it’s really weird that I’m on a first-name basis with Charles Wickliffe, who’s been dead 150 years. If I had been told seven or eight years ago I’d be doing this kind of thing, I’d have thought someone had lost their mind.”
Friday nights at Wickland could be numbered. Though the site isn’t showy enough for reality TV, major cable channels are well aware of the twins and their camera-readiness, and at least a couple have considered a pilot. So far, the twins haven’t found the right format. But it could be only a matter of time before they move on from Wickland to TV land – later this year, even, Hibbs believes – and then the enchanting Spirit Tour will become a ghost itself.