12.07.12 - Oakland Exploration

I had a long skype with Hats this morning but her microphone wasn’t working so I was speaking and she was writing, a stilted way of conversing but was good to catch up. She is going back to St Kilda until the end of August, she just can’t get enough of the place.
I spent the day in Oakland, which is over the river, on the way to Berkeley. I had spied what I thought looked like good photography spots from the BART on my trip last week so I ventured back with my camera. Most of it was walking underneath the freeway and through industrial areas, but that is where I love to be with my camera. As usual the best spots are behind massive fences or in someone’s back

 yard. I might have to go back with a bit more courage and see if I can find anyone to ask. There is a funny patch as you approach Oakland where there is a strip of old, wooden houses sandwiched between the freeway, the BART rail and industrial units. They look wonderfully run down and old worldy but a horrible place to live. Someone has planted sweetcorn and squash in a tiny strip of earth on the pavement.
It is much hotter over here than in SF, no cool breeze, and it being the middle of the day there was hardly any shade, I had to keep crossing the road to find tiny scraps of coolness. I arrived at the heart of Oakland; one side of the tracks is the waterside, ferry building and Jack London Square which looks like a new development of shops and restaurants. Very typical of all new waterside places, lacking in any character. The docks here have these amazingly huge cranes that look like dogs, a very simplistic dog or horse shape. In a sci-fi movie they might come alive and start rampaging around the city.

On the other side of the tracks is Oakland central, a weird mix of wonderful art deco style buildings with horrible big blocks in between. Everywhere is quite quiet, and San Fran feels the same, there just aren’t as many people here as in London. The very central tourist hubs are busy but away from that there’s nowhere that feels full. Oakland has much more of a hot, lazy feel to it today. Some shops have their shutters up to keel cool and the quiet is like the quiet of siesta.
I stopped for lunch and was presented with another huge meal, this has got to stop. I can’t be bothered to carry leftovers around but also hate leaving food. Isn’t life full of awful dilemmas, too much food!

I had sent my Hotel Frank to the editors in the morning so checked my email just in case they had replied but due to previous experience I assumed that they wouldn’t have. Well, I had quite a few emails asking for a photo (which I’d stupidly forgotten to send) and extra details which I had left out. I replied but got rather short shrift from Paul, an older editor, for not being in contact and for not having the details he needed. Whoops! As much as I hate being constructively criticized it is the best way to learn but it’s not as if the story was going to go stale if it waited a day. I think that they were short of stories for the week. Anyway, I have a story in web print and my very own, solo byline for New America Media (http://newamericamedia.org/2012/07/sleepless-in-san-francisco-as-two-year-hotel-bangs-on.php).
When I got back to SF I decided to treat myself to a pedicure. It was pure bliss; a Vietnamese woman did it in a shop totally deserted apart from us, her husband and their dog Fifi, right in the heart of the city. I read numerous copies of People, an American magazine, verging on trashy but not too bad, perfect for waiting for my toes to dry.

After that my feet felt amazing, especially after a sweaty day walking. I was going to go to cinema but there was nothing on at the multiplex that I wanted to see so I got the bus back towards me, getting off one stop too far to investigate a sushi restaurant that had been intriguing me for days. Last time I had been in they had been full but tonight they had space for a little one. It’s called Okina Sushi and the windows and door are covered with hanging fabric so you can’t see in unless you are really trying. They have a sushi ‘bar’ behind which the husband makes the sushi which he then puts on a sloping bench in front of customers. They eat off that rather than plates. The wife is the waitress/maitre d’ - it’s just the two of them. And the best thing about it was having just the right amount of food, not a plate groaning with it. I had a salmon skin roll which was delicious. I want to go back and sit at the bar, be closer to the action. I bought some more pretzels from the shop which was a bad idea. I tell myself that they’re mostly pretzel rather than sugar but I think that is a lie. I have eaten them out of the chocolate ones so hopefully it will take them a while to restock otherwise I’m doomed.
I ended up watching ‘Mugabe and the White African’, a documentary about a family of white farmers in Zimbabwe who took Mugabe to court. I could tell from the first shot that it was going to make it cry, and it did, all the way through. It is a very powerful film, in a way that neither words nor photography can achieve, because it really captured the personalities of the people involved. Whatever the rights and wrongs are of land redistribution, etc the violence and intimidation shown to these people was appalling. It’s so easy to read about something in the paper and not feel anything whereas as a good documentary doesn’t let you escape. I recommend it but have a hankie on hand.