It's all just gum art in Millennium Bridge crevices.

I landed in Heathrow with nowhere to live, and went straight to work. It wasn't smart, and I must have thought that if I were homeless by midnight, someone would just hand me some fruit snacks and send me on the next flight back. The providing universe and such, but sometimes I lean on my luck a little hard.

Running on sleep-fumes, I saw a place literally around the corner from work, where I could theoretically never leave the block on weekdays. The current tenant greets me with the news that he's moving out because his wife is taking him back, and I congratulate him.

The place is a shithole; it is also already rented. Disappointment and relief are strange feelings to bring together.

By 10 pm, Nina and Hannes are ushering me into their living room, making me tea, and I lie awake on the couch most of the night. It's weird not sleeping in a warm tangle of arms and snores.

The London rental market differs in such odd ways from San Francisco. Most people reply to my cheery inquiries about housing, and I'm at four or five flats a night. It feels like speed-dating, and I'm on a charm onslaught. I apply to everything in a four-mile radius of work, which is how far I'm willing to walk. A woman in Vauxhall cancels on me by text as I'm walking up to the door, but I stop by Ade's and see his new puppy Darwin.

I don't know what I would have done if Nina and Hannes hadn't let me impose on them for five days, talking me through the housing offers that I started to get. There's a house of older Polish hippies, and then a room in Bethnal Green behind the mega Tesco.

Nina tells me to hold out for one more interview, at a place across the canal from them that looks way too nice to be in my price range. With backup housing in my pocket, it feels so good to cancel on everyone else.


Next morning, I'm having tea with the girl who owns the place, and I leave with my hopes sky-high. There's a sunny living room with rocking chairs, the fridge beeps if you leave it open, and I would finally have a big boy bed. I would find out the next day on Sunday, so I just start walking west across London.

The city is ridiculous. I regularly spend my weekends here just walking, but it never gets old to see the sun set on the Thames. I walk through a furry convention, share spicy noodle soup with rowdy Australians, and then I'm in a cushion as long as I am, watching the walls flicker and spin.

The couple next to me gives me a shoulder massage, and I just sink into the music.

Wide red skies are still throbbing in my vision when I get the housing offer via text.

I don't expect to have nice things, so when it does happen, I'm awestruck. And I can move in the next day!

Nina & Hannes hug me when they get home, and it's like I've won some minor prize. It's a testament to what good hosts they are that I have a pang of missing the living room couch as I pack up. But then my stuff is out of the back of their van where it's been living since early December, and the least I can do is take them to lunch at the vegan cafe down the street from me now.

Moments where I forget I'm not in Berkeley

A board game housewarming takes place that night, and I'm a baby Cthulu rampaging across Tokyo Bay.

The prayer flags go up at first light, and I'm settled in pretty much immediately. And I have a desk!

Once I feel like a normal person with housing again, I wade back into London life.

Louisa has us over for a big pot of vegan squash stew and brownies, and it's the coldest night in the city so far, but my winter clothes are holding up to the chill.

Epping forest is a pretty magical place in winter. My first time wearing wellies!

I kept remarking how invincible I felt plunging up to my knees in cold mud, and we're giggling at every mud squish and plop.

I still don't quite understand the concept of lakes freezing over.

This one had a millimeter of ice floating on top, and we threw in everything we could tear off the ground.

Ikea meatballs finally. The beef/pork union is so perfect in texture that you're left disturbed.

The night ended in Dalston for Nate's birthday, where Passing Clouds had become too hip to be entered, POWERLUNCHES was a post-apocalyptic hipster diner, and Brilliant Corners had music that had us all gyrating. The place also doesn't serve Cuba Libres, but will make anyone rum and cokes. 

And I just bought a flight to Morocco since it was fifty quid, so...I have twelve days to wander the country by myself. 

Chefchaouen, here I come!

Moments later, the bear knocks us both unconscious.

After almost a year in London, I've never been so conscious of how many support networks kept me aloft in San Francisco, nor of how many people made my life all the shinier. And yes, I appreciate how oozy-cheese-filled predictable it is to not realize this until leaving across the Atlantic.

But being homesick is such a privilege in that you have a warm place where people miss you right back.

And when I do end up back in the Bay Area for good, I'm going to treasure and hug the poop out of all of you, likely never letting go, Jack.

I'll still want to see and do all the things, but I also want a home fort to fill up with our things, pictures, little herb planters.

A block from where I grew up, and this is the first picture I've taken of it.

I won't pride myself on only having enough to keep in two suitcases like now, and I really hate saying goodbye after each trip home.

That stuff sucks.

Hub city that it is, I'm usually surprised when people tell me where they're from. Home is always so vivid for people when they recount the beer their grandmother brews, the vegan shampoo they took for granted in Germany, and how beaches in England can never compare to anywhere in Brazil.

Until we pack up our things for good, London is a funny shared experience of a town, and there are so many conversations about how we love-hate the place:

"All buses are on strike, the ferry is at the bottom of the Thames, and the Overground will only be making one scheduled stop."

D'aww, are they competing for Cutest Couple prizes?

Thank god for generous vacation policies in Europe, so I was in San Francisco for almost all of December, where I held strong to a dumpling-based diet.

First thing upon arrival was pretending to be bovines on a grand Christmas tour of downtown. I kept being distracted by shiny lights, but David kept us on track, constantly reminding me that the herd had moved on, that we would probably die of exposure or the wolves would get us.

#ShitCowsSay



I miss such stupid things. Like reading the New Yorker with Thai takeout as the fog sweeps across the city and pushes all the gulls out to sea. Or how we manage to talk each other into a Hot Cookie before walking up the recognized hills and then the hidden hill.

"Hey, there are four circles in this diagram, and none of them are touching."

"Oo. Tell me more."

Exiting one of my favorite places at UC Berkeley

East Bay sunsets look like holy shit, what.

"Are you guys hiding from music? It's okay, you know, to be in the same room as it."

KITTYFISH SOUP!

Santaneca is the core of the Dreaming for me, just the catfish soup with warm tortillas, and it would be the best place for naps after pupusa feeding time with curtido on the side.

And as usual, home time is heavily spent with amazing people eating amazing food.

Panchan that they don't charge you limbs for? Novelty.

We got our kink dance on, and watched a friend win a wet underwear contest.

It's hard crossing streets safely when the sky looks like this.

Christmas in particular was like training to be a foie gras bird (sorry, too soon in California?).

I had 360 degrees of food within arm's reach in a spinning chair.

And the boyfriend somehow became crown prince of Christmas Tinsel Town.

Birth of cheese is what we celebrated, and there were at least a dozen taunting my vow to stay out of the dairy trough. The house was open to friends drip-dropping by with custard pies, mushroom stuffing, beers to share, latkes delivered shining and greasy one by one from the skillet. We're grazing like ruminants, nibbling and dabbing neon jalapeno jelly onto communion wafers prior to becoming Jesus proper.

Reeking of latkes, we spend Saturday morning making coffee to go with the coconut coffee cake as Made in Heights croons away. Christmas eve itself had us watching The Family Stone with mulled wine while round with red jade. I briefly did think the Babadook was out to get me, but then the group Tinder session on the flatscreen cleared it all up.

Lightning round matches and bee-boops, and all you can mutter is, "What, I'd totally have talked to him.."



Graham's birthday was the official Christmas after-party, and then the Library for fancy little drinks before Yamasho sucked us into a vortex of karaoke and sushi. You never quite realize how repetitive some song lyrics are until you've had to sing them off a screen.

Britney, I have a newfound appreciation for your art.

Dinner with parents at Saigon in Richmond, where neither Vietnam nor Virginia were involved.

Bird's eye-view food porn

It was my first time being on a triple date for Korean food, and then a hexa-couple date for wine.

Last weekend of the year, so we made good life choices walking off the meat sweats. Through Golden Gate Park's frisbee golf courses and sunlight dappling towards the beach, towards grandmother's house we went.

Sandy-toed and squinting into the sunset, we gave up on Cliff House, picked up a lemon bar and hauled our leftover Korean home until it was time to go two doors down for Danny's booze hour.

Black Mirror and pigfucking, ugh, so much trauma.

There's nothing like the quiet that comes with the arrival of the mega injera loaded down with all our Ethiopian eats. I could eat anything really with injera, and the tej is such a nice boozy honey slick.

East bay living, I could do you, yeah.

Talia worships strange gods.

New Year's was as low key as I could have wished for, and there are jedi light batons, a countdown to fireworks by the Bay Bridge, and there's something about having your designated person for midnight macking.

We're in bed by 2 am, and I'm more than happy with my first hours of 2015.

What Bay Lights?

All we have to wake up for is an epic Southern feast, and you can smell the frying chicken from down the street. There's no point resisting the butter flood, and god, it's in my eyes. The little kid is taking the black-eyed peas traditions very seriously, and his year is going to rock. Meanwhile, we all just shave off slivers of persimmon pudding, and I'm just warm and comfortable from head to toe.

Southern spread on New Year's Day!

Round three was hot pot and it doubled as sauna time. 

And before I knew it, it was one last dinner at Limon Rotisserie before egg tart performance art with House on Haunted Hill. It's 6 am too quickly, and I'm hugging a very sleepy David.

I walk home through a spectacular sunrise to see Mom had cooked a full Chinese breakfast spread.

She walks me to BART, tells me I hug too hard, and I'm on the plane to London again.