The weather has been amazing for the last week here, and this past weekend was no exception. It’s regularly been sunny and 70 degrees, and it really feels like spring has finally arrived. I am not a huge fan of rain, so I couldn’t wait for the rainy season to be over. (The weather in the Bay Area is pretty nice all year round, with the exception of about eleven straight weeks of rain, during which I am miserable.)
Dan and I decided to spend Saturday in San Francisco, since we had tickets to go see the Tutankhamun exhibit at de Young museum in the evening. I’d been wanting to see the exhibit since it came to San Francisco in June of last year, and it happens to be ending next weekend. (Talk about waiting until the last minute, huh?) We spent the afternoon walking around Baker Beach, which sparkled under the California sunshine. The beach also has a great view of the Golden Gate Bridge.
After the beach, we drove through Golden Gate Park and headed over to dinner, past the rolling hills of San Francisco…
…and arrived at San Tung! The dry-fried chicken wings here are out of this world! I’m usually not that crazy about wings because they are so messy to eat, but these are the best I have ever had. Ever!
The shrimp and leek dumplings are pretty yummy, too…
Plus the seafood noodle soup! Yes, we ate all of this between the two of us.
Full and content, we headed over to de Young Museum to see the exhibit “Tutankhamun and The Golden Age of The Pharoahs.”
I realize that my blog post title is a little misleading, because we didn’t actually see any mummies. King Tut’s mummy and his three nested coffins and stone sarcophagus have actually never left Egypt, and he continues to rest in the Valley of the Kings. I wanted to see the gold mask of King Tut (which apparently travelled around the world for different exhibits back in the ’70s), but the Egyptian government no longer lets it travel outside of Egypt, as it has been declared a national treasure (and rightly so). Still, the exhibition at de Young was very impressive, showcasing over 130 outstanding works from King Tut’s tomb, as well as those of his royal predecessors, family, and court officials. It’s incredible how intricately and artfully crafted those pieces were, when they were created over 3,200 years ago. During my four years of taking art history courses in college, I remember studying some of those works in my archaeology course with Profess or Knoblauch so it was sort of surreal to see them in person. I feel really fortunate to have been able to catch the exhibit in its last week. Although Tutankhamun is leaving San Francisco at the end of the month, it’ll be making its way over to New York, Toronto and Denver in the coming months, so I definitely recommend it for anyone who is interested and lives near one of those cities!
If you know me, you know that one of my latest obsessions is cupcakes — more in terms of eating them, rather than making them (although I do enjoy trying my hand at a few cupcake recipes here and there).
So when I heard about Cupkates Truck from a friend recently, I was immediately intrigued. Cupkates Truck is a mobile cupcakery, and the very first “cupcake truck” in the whole Bay Area. They wander around Berkeley and Oakland selling delicious cupcakes straight from the truck (like a taco truck, except with cupcakes!) Their cupcakes are apparently baked fresh daily with local high-quality ingredients. Sounds like a winner to me! 🙂
We actually didn’t get a chance to try them until today, since aside from us being busy, the truck moves to a different location everyday and sells out promptly within a couple hours of arriving. You have to be on the ball to catch them before they’re out of cupcakes, especially on a weekend (which is really the only time we can get them, since we’re both at work when they’re out and about during the weekdays).
Let me tell you right now that Cupkates Truck is a slice of heaven that you will not want to miss out on. If you don’t believe me, here are some mouthwatering photos.
Today, the Cupkates Truck vending cupcakes in Elmwood.
Got my cupcakes! (Note: This photo of me is not one of the mouthwatering photos I was referring to... haha* Just keep scrolling down to see the good stuff.)
Cupkates packaging
Almost too cute to eat. But we ate them (of course).
S'mores cupcake. It really did taste as amazing as it looked.
Lemon Raspberry. Unfortunately, the frosting took a hit during the drive home so the tip is gone. The raspberry buttercream was too buttery and not fruity enough for my taste, but the lemon cake portion was pretty awesome even by itself.
Red Velvet. I'm a huge fan of red velvet, and this one did not disappoint. I took a bite and felt like I died and went to heaven. I didn't want to come back down.
I’m so glad that we were finally able to track down Cupkates Truck after stalking them on Twitter for quite some time now. Their cupcakes are definitely some of the best in the area, and have a great balance of seasonal/unique flavors and traditional (like double chocolate and double vanilla). You can follow them on Twitter or Facebook to see where they are daily, and look up their available flavors on their Menu. I know I will definitely be paying them another visit soon to get my cupcake fix.
I am so behind on updating our blog. The beginning of the year is somehow always so busy. I promised myself that I would make some solid New Years resolutions but I haven’t even gotten a chance to sit down and do that yet. Is it too late? It’s still January… maybe as long as I can get them figured out by the end of this month, I will be okay.
So another fun thing we did earlier this month was attending the Mochitsuki event at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. Once essential to the Japanese New Year celebration, the practice of mochitsuki (mochi pounding) is now rare even in Japan, as people tend to eat store-bought mochi rather than make their own in today’s hustle and bustle society. San Francisco-based Kagami-kai is a group dedicated to maintaining the Japanese tradition of mochitsuki, and this was their sixth year performing and churning out mochi for the masses at the Asian Art Museum.
My friend Akiho was visiting from Virginia Tech because she was interviewing for an internship position at UC Berkeley, so she, Dan, and I went together with some of our friends from the San Francisco Bay Area Japanese Language and Culture meetup group. It was quite an experience — the Kagamikai’s mochitsuki performance was very impressive, and the taiko drumming accompanying it was equally breathtaking. We even got to have a bite of mochi at the end. Growing up with Japanese traditions, it really doesn’t feel like the New Year has come until you have some mochi. 🙂
Below are some photos and video footage of the mochitsuki action:
For more information on this yearly event, please hop over here.
Dan, my sister and I spent a good part of the day yesterday in Washington, DC. They had never been to the Holocaust Memorial Museum before, and I hadn’t been there since going there for a field trip in fifth grade, so we decided to brave the freezing cold to pay a visit to the museum. It’s definitely one of those places that everyone should visit at least once in a lifetime. The permanent exhibition there is one of the world’s largest and most comprehensive repositories of Holocaust-related records. After going through floor after floor of photographs, models, videos, and preserved items from the era, you are confronted with the horrors of this atrocity. It serves as a reminder of how awful and inhumane genocide is and encourages us to work towards a world in which such injustices will be eradicated.
Clear skies in Washington, DC!
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
the line into the museum
The Next Time You Witness Hatred... The Next Time You See Injustice... The Next Time You Hear About Genocide... Think About What You Saw
Miwa and I in front of the Holocaust memorial museum.
There was no photography allowed in the exhibition areas, but we were allowed to take some pictures on the first floor of the four-story museum.
Quote by Bill Clinton at the entrance of the museum.
enscription on the wall
"For the dead and the living we must bear witness" - Elie Wiesel
memorial area
From Memory to Action
Smithsonian Metro station... waiting for the train to go back home.
I’ve really missed DC and the richness of history, culture, and education that is characteristic of our nation’s capital. In the Smithsonian area alone, there are so many art, history, and science exhibits and archives that you can enjoy free of admission. Because I was so used to museums where everyone and anyone had equal opportunities to visit and enjoy exhibits, museum admission fees are such a foreign concept to me and I didn’t really realize that most museums around the country charge until I traveled to other cities. The Kennedy Center, where I interned one summer, boasts the nation’s busiest performing facility and as the national center of the performing arts, it is a public-private partnership in which ticket proceeds and gifts from individuals, corporations and private foundations go towards educational and outreach initiatives. There are endless resources to educate and open your horizons in DC, and it had been such a privilege to live only fifteen minutes away from it all. It’s one of those things that I couldn’t truly appreciate the value of until I was away from it.
Dan and I just booked our plane tickets home to Northern Virginia for the Christmas holidays, and I am already super excited. We’ll be back December 24th to January 3rd, so we would love to see friends and family who will be in the area around the same time.
Northern Virginia, especially my hometown of Vienna, holds a really special place in my heart and I think it may be the only place I may ever really consider “home” after growing up there and living there for twenty years. Unfortunately, my hometown pride has been bruised countless times since moving over here to California two years ago. Many Californians — several of which don’t seem to have stepped one foot out of their beloved state — regard the rest of the 49 states that comprise the country as only an afterthought. When I first tell people where I’m from, whether they be neighbors or coworkers or new friends, the most common response is that of pity or disbelief. At first they are aghast at the fact that I’m from such an unfamiliar, “remote” place, and then what usually follows is a reassuring “Oh honey, well… aren’t you glad you’re in a much better place now” type of comment. Apparently when the majority of Californians hear “Virginia,” the images that immediately spring to their mind are those of farms, cows, plantations, fried chicken, rednecks… basically what characterizes “the boonies” and “Dirty South.” After a while, I just started to tell people I was from DC (as Northern Virginia’s in the Washington, DC metropolitan area), simply because I was sick of the ignorant negative reactions I kept having to deal with. When I mention that I really miss my hometown, the response is usually along the lines of “But why would you want to go back there?” I’m all for state pride and being loyal to your roots, but also think it’s unfair and rude to trash-talk on other regions and locations when you’ve never even visited them to know what they are really like.
So I wanted to take an opportunity here to provide a geography lesson and introduce those who are unfamiliar with Northern Virginia to the area, complete with supporting facts and statistics. (I’d like to thank Wikipedia in advance.) Hopefully this will help enlighten some of the more ignorant minds out there.
Northern Virginia (often referred to as “NOVA” by the local community) consists of the several counties and independent cities in Virginia, a large area that stretches southerly and westward from the nation’s capitol. It is the most populated region of both the state of Virginia and the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area.
Affluence:
Northern Virginia is the most diverse (in terms of both the number of ethnic groups and nationalities represented) and highest-income region of Virginia, having six of the twenty highest-income counties in the nation, including the two highest as of 2007. The region is known in Virginia and the Washington, D.C. area for its relative affluence. Of the large cities or counties in the nation that have a median household income in excess of $100,000, the top two are in Northern Virginia, and these counties have over half of the region’s population.
The Tysons Corner Center located in my hometown of Vienna is the Washington area’s most popular upscale shopping destination and in 2002 National Geographic described it as “the Rodeo Drive of the East Coast”. People travel miles to shop there and it is a popular tourist attraction it itself. The area surrounding Tysons Corner’s shopping center sprawls with several prominent companies that appear in the Fortune 1000 list, including Freddie Mac, Booz Allen Hamilton and BearingPoint, among others.
Crime Rate:
Crime? What crime? Fairfax County has the lowest crime rate in the Washington metropolitan area, and the lowest crime rate amongst the 50 largest jurisdictions of the United States. A 2009 report by the Northern Virginia Regional Gang Task Force suggests that anti-gang measures and crackdowns on illegal immigrants by local jurisdictions are driving gang members out of Northern Virginia and into more immigrant-friendly locales in Maryland, Washington, D.C., and the rest of Virginia. The violent crime rate in Northern Virginia fell 17% from 2003 to 2008. Sorry, you won’t find any homicide maps here. (WTF. I’d never even heard of homicide maps until moving out near Oakland.)
Education:
Fairfax County’s most notable commitment is to education, with an allocation of 52.2% of its fiscal budget to the public school system. Including state and federal government contributions, along with citizen and corporate contributions, this brings the 2009 fiscal budget for the school system to $2.2 billion. The school system has estimated that, based on the 2006 fiscal budget, the county invested $13,340 in each student in 2009. With over 170,000 students enrolled, Fairfax County Public Schools is the largest public school system in the Baltimore-Washington Metropolitan Area and in Virginia. The school division is the 12th largest school system in the nation and maintains the largest school bus fleet of any school system in the United States. It’s hard to imagine myself sending my future children to school anywhere else after coming from such a successful, safe and prestigious public school system. It’s been among the top public school systems in the nation for decades now, one of the reasons why my parents (along with so many others) were dying to enroll their children in FCPS.
As for higher education, the population of Northern Virginia is highly educated, with 55.5% of its population 25 years or older holding a bachelor’s degree or higher. This is comparable to Seattle, the most educated large city in the U.S., with 53.4% of residents having at least a bachelor’s degree. The number of graduate/professional degree holders in Arlington is relatively high at 34.3%, nearly quadruple the rate of the U.S. population as a whole.
Speaking of Arlington, here is a rap about the town that went viral this summer on YouTube, which showcases the feel of the area.
But I digress.
The federal government is a major employer in Northern Virginia, which is home to numerous government agencies, including the CIA headquarters (right over in the neighboring town of McLean) and the Pentagon. Government contracting is an important part of the region’s economy. Arlington alone is home to over 600 federal contractors, and has the highest weekly wages of any major jurisdiction in the Washington metropolitan area.
Due to high income families and the excellence of the public school system, real estate in Northern Virginia is some of the most expensive you’ll find in the entire country. Real estate is comparable to (if not pricier than) the more affluent parts of the Bay Area and Southern California.
Vienna, Virginia
Some tidbits about my own hometown of Vienna, nestled in the heart of Northern Virginia: In July 2005, CNN/Money and Money magazine ranked Vienna fourth on its list of the 100 best places to live in the United States. In addition to excellent public schools, its assets include a downtown with many small businesses, a Washington Metrorail station with large parking garages just south of the town, and a portion of the Washington & Old Dominion Railroad Regional Park hiker/biker trail cutting through the center of the town. It is home to the aforementioned Tysons Corner and the famous Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts.
I feel like this post has ended up sounding pretty pretentious, but please keep in mind that it’s been difficult for me to put up with the offensive stereotypes that people have been slapping onto my old stomping grounds the past couple years since I’ve relocated out here. My university, Virginia Tech, was indeed in the middle of nowhere in southwest Virginia, but it was four hours away from my more metropolitan home. (And it still had many endearing qualities of its own… but I’ll save that for another day.) Yes, a good portion of the rest of the state is rural and less metropolitan, but the differences in the political and economic climate between Northern Virginia and the rest of the commonwealth are so stark that some secessionist sentiments have emerged, with hopes for a separate state of “North Virginia.” I personally think that that is a little ridiculous, but it is a good illustration of how urban and distinct NOVA is from the rest of the state.
So next time you’re about to pass judgment on a city, region or state that you’re unfamiliar with, please do your research first. Or better yet, step out of your comfort zone and pay it a visit before you open your mouth to throw in your two cents.
