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Routine versus Ritual

On the surface, it’s the same.  But basically,

“A routine is a series of actions done out of habit or necessity, while a ritual is a series of actions performed with intention and meaningful purpose”.

Today’s post is about “Routine”.

Being home means life is more routine than ritual.  Usually, routine is, routine. Boring but necessary. Brush your teeth twice a day. Skin care, twice a day. Read the news with coffee. Wash the dishes before bed (so I have a clean kitchen the next morning). Take the trash out on trash day and roll the bins back inside the next morning before asshole dog owners dump their waste in the bins and claim they’re doing a service by dumping it in someone else’s bin instead of disposing of it in their trash bin or on the street. Not necessarily fun but things that need to be done.

Then there’s other routines. For example…every month, I have some blood work done because I had a kidney transplant 5 years ago. There are also biannual appointments with the kidney clinic. All routine and all like clockwork. And while I’m out there at the hospital for my blood draw, I always make it a point to have some pho bac for breakfast because there’s a good Vietnamese place nearby. Pho is traditionally a breakfast dish in Vietnam and pho bac is the northern variation, with a clear hearty broth and lean beef.  Not too heavy and not too complicated.  A nice meal to have after dealing with complicated things (like health care).

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Pho Bac and a $5 Cafe Sua Dua

The place is called My Father’s Kitchen and he’s been open for at least 30 years. You can see him in the kitchen during the lunchtime rush. The pho and imperial rolls are good, as are the plates. The cafe sua dua is fine, but after having been in Vietnam a few months back, it seems like highway robbery to pay $5.00 for one of life’s basic necessities. And the world’s morning routine.

My Father’s Kitchen
1655 Divisadero Street
San Francisco, CA 94115
415-829-2610

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An iPad epiphany

I was on a domestic 4 hour flight recently. And since it was a domestic flight, it was basically riding the bus. It was a single aisle A319 (yeah that’s an old Airbus) with no seat back AVOD. There was WiFi, so it wasn’t completely unbearable. The bandwidth was strong enough to keep me occupied with Netflix and YouTube for most of the flight, which was a pleasant surprise.

Yes, this is AI generated. I couldn't get a proper photo because it was dark.
Yes, this is AI generated. It was hard to get a proper photo of all those screens lighting up a dark cabin.

While going up and down the aisle to use the bathroom, I noticed a lot of iPads. Every other passenger seemed to have one, all with some sort of TV show or movie on it. For every 8 to 10 iPads, there would be someone with a laptop of sorts either watching video or doing work. More of them were watching video actually. Everyone else was watching video on their phones or trying to sleep.

Why so many iPads? I did some Serious Internet Research™ and found out that you can download shows and movies from the major streaming services to a tablet for offline viewing later. Instead of downloading individual video files that can be shared with others (Ohhhhh Noooooo), it downloads the files to the app. If you download a few movies and seasons of TV shows, the app will become huuuge. You used to be able to do this with the Windows 11 Netflix app, but that useful feature was removed in 2024. Forget about doing anything of the sort with a MacBook Pro.

I did not know about this!!

I currently have a 2nd gen iPad Pro 12.9” that’s almost 10 years old. It has served long and well, being the device I read while I have my 2 cups of black coffee in the morning. However…since it’s close to a decade old, it has been orphaned by Apple (software updates ended about 2 years ago), the battery health is just above 70% and more importantly, has only 64gb of memory. The OS takes close to 40gb so storage space is extremely limited.

So now it’s time for me to start looking around for a successor for my iPad. Have they always been this expensive??

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Going to the Library

While I was in Seoul, I checked out some of the more interesting spots that I saw online.

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All the library books are accessible on the lower shelves. The books up high are decorative, like this book about one of my favorite things
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There’s the big Christmas Tree. You can see the starfield on the ceiling.

This is a library which is in the center of a very large mall in Gangnam. It’s called the COEX Starfield Library and it’s a place where you can take a breather from your shopping, relax and read a magazine or a book or have a cafe style snack. Lots of people here during my visit and people were respectful of each other. And as the linked article says, people hang out there for a brief time and then leave. Great people watching spot. In San Francisco, homeless and druggies would camp out here permanently and soil everything. Glad this isn’t there.

South Korea, Seoul, Gangnam District, Yeongdong-daero, 513 스타필드 코엑스몰 B1
Google Map

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The Decisive Moment

Henri Cartier-Bresson was an influential photographer from the post WWII period. You have probably seen some of his work without knowing who took the photos or how he did it. He was a pioneer of street photography and also a war photographer in France and in China (before and after 1949).

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This is one of his most famous photographs, Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare

He was interviewed many times about how he composed his photos. He didn’t edit his photos; he would compose them in the viewfinder and wait until everything was right and then he would release the shutter. This was, of course, before the time of digital where film and film developing was expensive and most importantly, time consuming. Nowadays, you can frame a photo and fire off 20 versions of the same scene and choose which ones pass muster and delete the rest. And even with that, you can always take the images and post process them so they look even better than when you took them using your Mark I eyeball to compose the shot.

From what I’ve read about Bresson, it was all about waiting for everything to come together. The light, the color of the sky, the subject matter co-operating with you and the camera. The Decisive Moment. I’ve always found it harder to photograph people than still life. Still life doesn’t complain when the picture doesn’t get their “good side”. Still life cooperates and can be more predictable than people.

So I took this from my room at the Grand Hyatt Incheon.

On approach to ICN

90 seconds before this shot formed, I saw how the sun was setting and how it looked with the clouds. It’s a play on emptiness, with the foreground of roads, parkland (that’s supposed to be landscaping) and the sky. It’s not a completely devoid scene, you can see people walking in the foreground and the sprinklers going off. And an airplane on approach to ICN. I cheated and took two shots. The shot before has the airplane blocking the sun. At this distance, any effect that would have with the photo would be minimal. What it would do would be to mute the scene of vibrant color even more. I like this one because the plane breaks up the emptiness; a metal tube full of people who will soon be reunited with loved ones or beginning (or ending) an adventure or a journey.

The Decisive Moment for this photo.

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New movie, old friends, New place to have noodles

Gladiator (2000) dgfg
Gladiator (2000). Cool poster for a Best Picture film.

Gladiator was released in 2000 and won Best Picture.  I remember seeing it in the theatre with two friends I first met when I began working in politics.  

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Gladiator II, saw it in IMAX!

24 years later, Gladiator II was released, and I drove down to San Jose to see it with the same two friends I met when I began working in politics.  

What can I say about the film?  I like it. It’s a good sequel; it ties up many of the loose ends from the first film and leaves one loose end dangling at the end of the film. It’s a Ridley Scott film and I’ve been a big fan of his films since before my USC days.  These are my faves, all for different reasons that could come up in future posts.

  • Blade Runner (1982)
  • Apple Commerical (1984) 
  • Aliens (1986)
  • Black Rain (1988)
  • Thelma & Louise (1991)
  • Gladiator (2000)
  • Black Hawk Down (2001)
  • The Martian (2015)
  • Blade Runner 2049 (20`17)
  • Gladiator II (2024)

Guess why I like these!

It’s really sad that to get much of the Chinese/Asian food I like, I have to leave San Francisco. Why? Because the experience and quality of the food in San Francisco is generally lacking.  Why? Because more often than not, it’s overpriced and underwhelming.

(Stands on soapbox) San Francisco, THE home of the Chinese America diaspora, should do better with its Chinese food. I understand the difficulties of running a restaurant here, with all its bureaucratic nonsense, taxes, hostile business environment and lack of parking. Still, that should be incentive to do better. Despite this, I will continue to endeavor to find good places to eat here. (Steps down from soapbox) Amen.

So that’s why a lot of the good food has migrated to the South Bay and dinner often requires a drive and an entire evening. Anyway, enough about work.  Let’s look at Duan Chun Zhen (AKA, that “Taiwanese noodle place in Cupertino”).  

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Pinched from restaurantjump because when we arrived it was already dark.

It’s newish, clean and modern.  It wouldn’t look out of place in Taipei, except for the size (It’s too roomy for Taipei).  It’s located in one of the many ubiquitous mini malls that populate De Anza Boulevard from end to end and its next door to a Pacific Market with good parking.  There was a good mix of customers, us and families out for Saturday night dinner.  

You get different degrees of spicy beef noodle soup.  Regular, (one hot pepper), Mala (two hot peppers) and Sichuan (three hot peppers).  You can also have thin, thick or housemade (wide) noodles.  Naturally, I went with the housemade.  

The noodles came out with steaming hot broth and an acceptable amount of noodles and beef stew.  The beef was a good in-between; more tender than Hon’s and not quite as scrumptious as Yin Du (see post here to get what I’m going on about).  

Chicken broth soup with noodles

We also ordered two appetizers; xiaolongbao and red oil wontons.  The xiaolongbao isn’t the usual ones like you would get at Din Tai Fung or Paradise Dynast with soup inside the wrapper; these are instead standard dumplings that have soup soaked steamed pork inside.  Tasty, but not a XLB.  The red oil wontons are a home run.  They came out hot and the red oil that they soaked in had several different kinds of heat, including some numbing.  Yum.  The wontons were devoured so quickly that I wasn’t fast enough to get a picture…cos my mouth was full.

Definitely worth eating here if you’re in San Jose.

Duan Chun Zhen
10118 Bandley Drive, Suite H,
Cupertino, CA 95014

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New (and only) Soba shop in SF

My iPhone has a “helpful” feature called the Journal App. Basically, if I take pictures of something, somewhere, it will prompt me to write something about it. Of course, since I have this blog, I don’t need to journal on the Journal App.

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Screenshot of a “helpful” prompt.

It’s not perfect; this is not a mailbox, although the soba restaurant I was at was next to one so I guess it’s accurate. And about soba in San Francisco Japantown…

We had a go to place for freshly made soba called Mifune inside the Japan Center for years. I remember it from high school days. Was the place named after the actor?

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This is Toshiro Mifune, the actor having lunch.
This was Mifune the soba restaurant. I don’t see a resemblance.

Mifune was a go-to for a quick dinner or lunch special. Freshly made kake soba (soup noodles) or zaru soba (cold noodles with dipping sauce) was the specialty here and was the place to go for a noodle fix since ramen wasn’t a big thing yet. They’re no longer around, having closed due to the plandemic.

Since then, many ramen shops have opened up in Japantown to sate the need of noodle slurpers but sometimes you want noodles that aren’t overloaded with toppings and rich sleep inducing broth. You want noodles that are freshly made. And are healthy. You want soba. And there’s a new place where you can get it.

The queue for Sobakatsu. From Yelp because I forgot to take a picture of it.

Sobakatsu. A very low key, very small (4 tables with 2 seats each and a 3 seat counter) soba shop. It’s so low key, it doesn’t have a website of its own and to find information about it you go to Yelp or DuckDuckGo to do the internet search. Here’s a review; read for some background of the place and a hint of something upcoming.

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Wasn’t kidding, those are the eight seats and four tables

Because of the size of the restaurant and their hours, you will encounter a queue for lunch and dinner. They’re open from 12:00 until 19:00 (or when they run out of soba). I showed up at 13:00 on a Thursday and I waited for 30 minutes before being able to order and then be seated. Your options are cold or hot soba and variations on same.

Menu from Yelp

Wound up getting an order of cold soba, the Ten Zaru with tempura (because soba and tempura ALWAYS go together).

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The Ten Zaru
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Why I’m here

Yes, it’s freshly made soba. It tastes as good as it looks. Snappy, firm and springy all at once. And although I usually associate soba with soup, the cold soba is better for warm days (of which it was when I went). The tempura was bite sized as was the token green vegetable which was also coated with yummy tempura batter which made it edible. Will I return? Yes, but maybe later in the afternoon. And for the promised katsu in the SF Standard review earlier. I still hate queueing. But this was worth it.

Sobakatsu
1700 Laguna Street
San Francisco, 94115