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Many visitors to the Bay Area of northern California don’t often venture beyond ‘Frisco, or at best make a trip to Palo Alto or Berkeley. Few tourists brave the traffic on the godawful US 101 to visit San Jose and its environs.¹ It’s certainly worth the trip, though. Here is a very short chronicle of my trip.

Day 1. The Bay Area’s best dim sum

Such was the situation I found myself in when I landed at San Jose airport on the way to visit troodon, who works for a very famous company located in Silicon Valley. troodon was kind enough to pick me up from the airport and bring me to the “99 Ranch mall” in Milpitas, a.k.a. Milpitas Square. In addition to the famous 99 Ranch supermarket (whose sister company, T&T or 大统华, is well-known to Canadians), the mall is also home to a great many fantastic restaurants; the Mayflower, for example, where we had lunch. The dim sum, which troodon had proclaimed the best in the Bay area, was excellent; it was certainly better than anything I’d tried in SF’s Chinatown or Palo Alto.² The rest of the day was uneventful, consisting of checking into my hotel, trying the bi bim bab from the Korean grill next door (not bad, but a bit skimpy on the beef), checking in on work and planning the rest of the trip.

Day 2. The most underrated park in the Bay Area

Monday was much more enjoyable after renting a car from Enterprise.³ Driving around Fremont and Milpitas, I could see that the Bay area is absolutely jam-packed with beautiful hills even down south. Lunch was packed and eaten in the absolutely gorgeous and bucolic Mission Peak park. Since I didn’t have the five hours needed to climb to the top, I settled for a picnic on a mound at the junction of two trails about 15 minutes in, next to a herd of serenely grazing cows and the occasional hiker. Downtown Fremont’s Central Parkwas also totally worth going to, situated around the small turquoise Lake Elizabeth with the verdant Mission Peak range in the background. Dinner was wonderfully MSG-free beef ramen at the Le Shan Niang Ramen place in Milpitas. I thought Melanie Wong’s rating was somewhat harsh, considering that it wasn’t a Japanese place. The fried shrimp came with the salt and powdered plum mix that to me was a dead ringer for a Taiwanese cuisine.

Day 3. Pixar, Chocolate, Alcohol and the Bay Area’s Best Indian Food

I was done with the business end of the trip and had the whole of Tuesday off, so I promptly planned and drove in a leisurely circuit around the Bay. I drove up to Emeryville, a tiny enclave situated amidst the sprawl that is Oakland which is famous, amongst other things, for being the location of Pixar’s corporate headquarters. I had lunch there, which was split pea and ham soup along with truffled gnocchi. It’s not free, unlike the gourmet meals at the Googleplex, but it sure was good anyway. It certainly made me wonder why I was still slaving away in academia when I could be earning a six-figure salary working at a place like this. Amongst the other perks are the free movie screenings in their three state-of-the-art in-house theaters. Man…

I then made my way after lunch to the Scharffen Berger chocolate factory in Berkeley. Situated in the building that used to make Heinz’s pickles, it now houses all sorts of machines they use to process raw cacao beans. Unlike many other chocolatiers, Scharffen Berger controls its own supply chain, from choosing which farmers and plantations to buy cacao beans from to the actual roasting, blending, tempering and packaging processes. For example, here’s a German coffee roaster where raw cacao beans being their magical journey toward chocolatey goodness:

At this point my camera ran out of batteries so I can’t show you the chocolate waterfall, the chocolate dripper that forms chocolate bars and the Oompa Loompas they hire to wrap and box the chocolates. But I did walk away with all the chocolate samples I could reasonably ingest in one sitting, helped along with copious amounts of gourmet hot chocolate. There was the Las Islas blend of beans from Trinidad, Jamaica and the Dominican Republic, the Yum…

After this I made my way to the nearby Takara Sake factory, where they had complimentary sake tastings. I discovered the cloudy (unfiltered) Shō Chiku Bai Nigori Creme de Sake (松竹梅にごりクレンデ酒) sake, which was very sweet, and the Shō Chiku Bai Yūki Nama (松竹梅有機生) organic sake with live cultures, which was also sweet and had a pleasant taste not unlike an alcoholic yogurt drink. I didn’t care too much for their Koshu Ume (コウシュ梅) plum wine, which was far too sweet for my liking.

Having whetted my appetite for alcohol, I then proceeded to drive around the famous wine valleys of Napa and Sonoma. It wasn’t quite grape season, but the area was still covered with rows and rows of supporting struts in exacting rows, with the occasional posh farmhouse looming over hills and dales. I stopped by downtown Sonoma for a free wine tasting at the local vineyard association, and got some very late season muscat grape wines. I found out about the surprisingly citrusy orange muscat grape and the amazingly fragrant black muscat of the Muscat de Beaulieu.

I met up with a recent alumnus in San Rafael, a city immediately north of the Golden Gate Bridge in Lotus Cuisine of India, which claims to serve the best Indian food in the Bay Area. The food was certainly quite excellent (I had the chicken thali), if disappointingly mild. Curse those spice-averse American palates!

Day 4. The Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum

Before leaving the Bay Area I stopped by the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum in San Jose, just west of downtown. They had quite an impressive collection of mummies, including a pretty good exhibit of an entire, almost unwrapped mummy, along with photographic plates showing the newfangled kind of noninvasive reconstructive imaging that can be doing using modern spectroscopic techniques.⁴

1. On a not unrelated note, check out this amazing scene on Google Maps. Then zoom out and watch the colors change…↩
2. I still feel, however, that the Cantonese restaurants in Markham and Mississauga are still hard to beat.↩
3. Contrary to my worst expectations, getting to San Jose airport from downtown Fremont by public transport was quite straightforward. Here’s how: take the free #10 airport shuttle to the Metro/Airport light rail station, take the light rail ($1.75) two stops south to the Civic Center station, and then take the Northbound #180 express to the Fremont BART station ($3.50). Total travel time: just over an hour↩
4. The Field Museum’s King Tut exhibit was better, of course, but it was much more expensive.↩

Thanks to the Flash technology and the creators of “The biggest banner in the world” at the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society, you can now view a life-size picture of a whale online.

Honestly, I had thought the eye would have been bigger, but what do I know about biology.

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