Mistakes were made

The past few days have been a bit of a blur with lots of professional and personal activity.

So it was a bit of a treat to have a day to myself with little to nothing on the agenda. Of course even though I knew I had some unstructured time coming I didn’t do much in advance to plot a course.

I’d spent the prior day getting out on SUPs in Richardson Bay with a new friend before hiking solo up to one of my favorite lookouts in the Marin Headlands.

And even though I was up well before 0600 it felt good to take the morning slow.

With the weather shifting from hot and sunny to foggy and overcast I decided to scrap my plans for more Headlands hiking.

The clouds and fog, I presumed, would obscure the big, scenic views that define the Headlands. But it would also make for a good excuse to change things up.

I hadn’t spent any real time in Oakland in more than a year and there were a couple things I’ve been wanting to do.

One was to look at a house in a great location in Emeryville and the other was to check out Oakland’s Chinatown.

The house is well out of our price range but it looks cool and I like the location on the edge of Oakland’s Longfellow neighborhood and close to Temescal and Mosswood.

But even though the house isn’t really affordable it was still an excuse to go to Oakland and walk around before hitting Chinatown. It’s something I’ve been wanting to do for a couple years since one of my favorite Bay Area food channels on YouTube, Life of BD, featured the neighborhood in an episode.

I grabbed the egg sandwich I’d made in advance for hiking and threw it in my bag with an apricot, plenty of water, my camera and lenses and headed out to catch the ferry from Sausalito to San Francisco.

After getting some coffee at Firehouse Coffee and Tea, and getting one step closer to filling out the free beverage punch card I found on the street with only three punches remaining, I headed to the ferry stop.

The clouds and fog were a nice change of pace for shooting photos during the ferry ride. The fog completely obscured the Golden Gate Bridge tower on the northern end in Marin County but the southern tower in San Francisco was still visible.

It also provided a nice backdrop for the myriad boats out on the Bay.

From the Ferry Building it was a quick walk to the Embarcadero BART stop and on to Oakland.

I made the mistake of getting off the train at the West Oakland stop instead of going to Lake Merritt for my transfer. But it gave me some time on the platform to shoot some photos and enjoy the sandwich.

It wasn’t long before the next train arrived and whisked me to Lake Merritt where I transferred and rode four stops to the MacArthur Station.

From MacArthur Station I made the quick walk over to Emeryville to poke around.

There are a few things I like about the zone where Emeryville and Oakland blend into each other.

For starters, Emeryville’s local government is working hard to make the city extremely bike friendly, which is great for residents.

It’s also walkable to the Mosswood, Temescal and even Piedmont neighborhoods in Oakland where there are tons of great food options.

It’s also diverse, close to transit, vibrant and established.

Yes, there are plenty of people who would say it’s a “bad” neighborhood. And I saw plenty of graffiti, intersections covered with tire marks from sideshows and broken automotive glass along curbs, likely from vehicle break-ins.

But to be honest, the more time I spend in any city the less patience I have for the “bad neighborhood” slurs.

While there are plenty of public works and social services cities would love to improve for their residents, so much of the concern trolling about neighborhoods comes from outside those cities.

More specifically, it often comes from people who refuse to support state and federal level programs for cities while fighting tooth and nail for more costly road and infrastructure subsidies for low density, largely inaccessible suburban areas.

And then there’s the added twist of the knife that it’s these same, highly subsidized suburban lifestyles that are driving (quite literally) the worsening climate crisis. I include myself in that critique.

Meanwhile city neighborhoods hang on even as the political and donor classes leverage culture war fear to divert city-created wealth to exurban enclaves.

It’s a frustrating dynamic, especially given the added pressure to mitigate climate change, and there seems to be little to no will to reverse it.

That said, it’s inspiring to see people in cities continue to work, laugh, cry, live and love while creating what they can with the resources available to them.

During my walk in Emeryville I came across a small community garden bursting with tomatoes and rhubarb and raspberries and wildflowers.

The woman there said it was a cleanup day and told me a little bit of history. The site, she said, had been a gas station. After the owner died she said a descendant took it over and burned it down in what was found to be arson.

With the gas station gone and the owner in deep legal trouble, the site was transformed into a community garden.

From Emeryville I walked back to MacArthur Station and took the train back to Lake Merritt for the quick walk to Oakland’s bustling Chinatown.

While it’s smaller than Chinatown in San Francisco it was no less vibrant and charming.

For starters, even though shops and restaurants were busy there appeared to be fewer people from outside the neighborhood, a contrast from San Francisco’s Chinatown which has heavy visitation from tourists.

It was a weekend and shopkeepers and possibly even people who were just nearby residents staged their own sidewalk stands to sell produce, staples and household items.

It didn’t take long for me to hone in on a couple bakeries that had people queueing up. I stopped at two places and got noodles, a dumpling and some pastries.

Had I not spent so much time in Emeryville I could have gone to the park to eat. But I wanted to catch the 4:20 p.m. ferry from San Francisco to Sausalito so I stashed the food in my bag and headed back to the train.

It was an uneventful trip back mostly because my thoughts were with the food I had in my pack. It didn’t last long once I got in the door and had a chance to tear into it.

I waited too long to go back to Oakland and am setting the intention to make our next visit there sooner rather than later.

In the meantime, I’ll be thinking of noodles and the thoughtful, hardworking residents who make the core of the East Bay such a great place.

Enjoy the images. Thanks for reading.