THE WORSHIPFUL PLACES

People often complain that California has no distinct seasons, unlike the rest of the country. Where the four seasons are: Hot as blazes, Strange, Icy weather, and Fixing to get unbearable. This is wrong. We HAVE distinct seasons! Allergy season, Stupid Tourists season, Tarantula Mating season, and Pumpkinsgiving Drunk season. In the rest of the country (Vermont, Ohio, Appalachia, New York) the colours during Tarantula Mating season are stupendous; here it simply means that spindly furballs will occasionally skitter across the pavement.

California: it's a state of mind. With tarantulas.
Please stay home, no need to visit.

The restaurant where I had delightful porkchops recently almost never gets tourists, because they're off the main drags, and offer a cuisine that does not appeal to those. The interior looks exactly like several eateries in the Hokkien-speaking part of the world (insular South East Asia), as it's plain, straightforward, clean, comfortable, and entirely lacking the ambiantic stage props so essential for Caucasian food comfort.

There are porkchop places at either end of this alley.

As you would naturally assume, it's one of my favourite alleys. In addition to porkchops, there's also a place for delicious Swiss Roll Cakes (瑞士捲 'seui si kuen') at one end. You can also find Swiss roll cakes just a lttle further beyond the other end. The Swiss roll cake is a peculiarly Hong Kong thing; every bakery that caters to HK expats has a selection.

After dark the red lanters above the doorway to the Ma Tsu temple are gay and bright, the hubub from the nearby restaurants on Jackson Street testifying to cheerful company, and the windows of the housing complex on the north corner showing residents in the bosom of their families. Oh, and the occasional unbalanced street person engaged in dubious activities that the children inside the buildings should not know about, because it might call their family's settlement in this strange new world entirely into question. San Francisco's public spaces, long after nightfall, are an alternate universe. Especially if the street lighting is poor.

During the porkchop time of day, dubious activities are not evident.



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