Bits and bobs before leaving on a jetplane

Finally at the airport now, waiting for my flight to Heathrow to start life in London. It finally hit me that I was leaving around two days ago, and it's just been me feeling nauseous about each goodbye, and the circle keeps shrinking with each meal until finally I'm walking David to Montgomery, hugging Mom, and then Lincoln & Dad right before the checkpoint at SFO. I'm excited about London and about working, but at the same time, it's scary leaving a place where I feel very loved.

The visa process took a long time, but I'm so thankful that I had the extra three months to spend with all the people I care about in the Bay Area. I've just been jotting down memories throughout (so bear with me for this blog dump essentially before London blogging begins in earnest). I know that while London is a perfect place to get caught up with exciting adventures, there will be evenings when I wish I could just call up Talia and laugh over Ethiopian food at Addis, or weekends that I would have spent just wandering around the Mission with David & Chris.

RAWRRRRR.

Memories like little nuggets, like buying fresh sayoong (egg puffs with an accent swinging up and arcing into the distance Yooooong!) with Mom in Chinatown. Me pointing them out to her through the bakery display and she just as excited says, "Should we get some?" Not a question at all since we had both walked into the Red A Bakery while we were talking for the sake of throwing off the Diet Resolution Police. This year, guys, I'll eat better. After buying dessert before lunch, we sit down to Hainan chicken rice, oily ginger moistening and scallions lightening the pale chicken colored a chrysanthemum yellow that had been dunked over and over in boiling water so that the flesh would cook perfectly while the skin stayed taut and tight. Then it was bathed in icewater to capture that moment.

The won ton noodles came and each morsel displaced its own sea of rich chicken broth, a soup so embued with flavor that it is a dense cappucino color with a slight particulate churn when you swish the noodles with chopsticks. A sprinkle of green onion origami loops and a few droplets of neon orange chili oil and it is ready to be shared. We slurp in silence for a few minutes, Mom wipes her mouth with a chicken-scented napkin, smiles with satisfaction, yet saying as if it were part of the ritual, "Still not quite like Hong Kong's noodles."

Nothing ever tastes as good as homemade noodles made by a sad older man with a wedge instead of a crotch. Well, or nostalgia. We are seated tucked into the back of the Hong Kong diner, a cha chaang taang, a common longhouse of ex pats from the fragrant harbor. David and I down the reheated sayung with some Duvel later, the golden banana scent washing down well with sugared and fried. Gorgeous runs to Locust and then Arguello streets, dodging baby carriages and nodding to other runners. Stretching in Grace Cathedral, colored streamers raining down over the sanctuary.

There were so many Sundays in the past six months where our sunscreen smells like summer and Dolores Park. Clare's sandwiches, armadillo Thai iced tea boba with almond milk at Boba Guys, walking through Dolores Park, past a bouncy house, smell of Tartine bread with cheese atop bubbling over us as we squeeze past the people in line for a fresh loaf. Warm toasted baguette filled with velvety roast beef, dabbed with horseradish mayo and dunked for a few seconds more than necessary in a bowl of au jus. Rabbit carved into the side.

The sandwich shop owner (the eponymous Clare?) asking if she can photograph the blue-eyed baby for a community page, and the little boy is smiling already in a sunshine grin, the Dad of course agreeing. And the punk gays with the pint-sized bulldog begging for food get photographed too in their squeeze-your-cheeks-snookums preciousness.

We don't get a picture, and it's not the either of us cares. There's just a brief flash of "What if we owned a tropical macaw and were the kind of insufferable hipsters who would take it to the neighborhood sandwich joint?" Our pearly scraggle teeth would be in a grin on the community page in an alternate but just as gentle universe.

Like walking through David's screen door in high excitement that we still had our half-sandwiches from earlier at lunch. Like Island Lodge Time (ILT) where Enlightened is actually a dramatic reenactment of Snowden story.

And final meal = clam ramen at Ramen Izakaya Goku with a side of some tears.

Lots to treasure, and it's comforting to know that it's all going to be there when I get back.

And speaking of send-offs, Talia did a ridiculously amazing job: