Lake Merritt and Oakland Hills

Having lived in Oakland for 2 1/2 years during law school, it is always fun to get back there and see how things have changed (and not changed).

While we were visiting, Kevin took us on a couple of extended walks around the area.  We started out walking up into the foothills and saw some of the areas that burned some years ago.  If you don’t remember, sometime after we moved back to Seattle, there was a huge fire in the Oakland hills that destroyed 100’s of homes.  When we visited shortly after, it was amazing to drive up there and see whole neighborhoods just gone.  Now it is mostly rebuilt, though there is still the occasional empty lot.  In some places you could tell that one side of the street had burned and been rebuilt, while the other side of the street still had the original houses.  Now all of the houses are required to have fire retardant roofs, such as tile, since the flammable roofing materials on many of the old houses contributed significantly to the spread of the flames..

On our second walk we first went through the Oakland rose garden, something we had not even realized existed when we lived there.  It was a nice little park, but could benefit from additional upkeep.  Unfortunately Oakland is a city with a shoestring budget, so many things like police and park budgets are cut short.

Lake Merritt Wildlife

Later we walked down by Lake Merritt. When we lived there it was in a sketchy area so we never went there.  Now the park surrounding the lake has been fixed up, the lake’s connection to the bay has been opened back up (it is actually a tidal estuary rather than a lake) so it gets better tidal flow in and out and so is no longer algae covered, and it feels safe walking in the area. It is nice to see Oakland slowly cleaning itself up and getting its act together.

Another thing we were not even aware of when we lived down there was that Oakland has a small traditional Chinatown area near downtown.  For lunch we thought it would be fun to get some dim sum (get some sum?).  Several of the places Kevin had found on Yelp turned out to be just take out stands, but finally we found the Legendary Palace, a large two story restaurant serving dim sum. Despite its size, the place was packed and it took awhile for us to get a table. When we did, however, we were in heaven. We had some trouble understanding what all the offerings were, so we just accepted a number of things that looked good.  Tami made sure to get her favorite “slimy noodles”. All too soon we were stuffed and had to wave off the continuing stream of trolleys bearing more food.

Kevin Relaxing

Just blocks away is an area that has been gentrified and built up with new condos for the young professional crowd.  Kevin took us to one of his favorite pubs, The Trappist.  While it can get crazy in the evening with the after work crowd, early in the afternoon on a weekday it was fairly quiet.  They had an outdoor beer garden, so we sat out there in the sun. I could have stayed there quite a while, but didn’t want to drink that much that early in the day, so we decided to press on.  By this point our feet were getting sore, so we took a bus back to the house to meet up with Melinda. We took a break, Mike snoozed on the couch, Tami and Kevin hung out on the back patio, and then we headed back out for dinner.

The restaurant Melinda had spotted in downtown Oakland, Duende, was Spanish, with tapas and paellas. We had tapas with fried oysters, stuffed squid, goat meatballs, and other wonderful things, and then finished off with a duck fideua.

Ever since our trip to Spain, Spanish restaurants have been a favorite of ours.  Unfortunately when we were in Spain our body clocks were not set to a Spanish schedule, so we didn’t generally last long enough to hit the tapas bars that open around 10 pm and stay open far into the night.  Here in the states, tapas tend to be available on a more American time schedule.  Fideua was something we also discovered in Spain.  It is kind of like a paella, but is made with short noodles instead of rice.  Typically it is made with seafood, but we often make it with a mix of chicken, sausage, and seafood.  The noodles can be hard to find, and cutting up spaghetti into 1″ lengths is time consuming, so when we found a five pound bag a few years ago, we bought it.  That bag is going to keep us in fideua for a LONG time.

Finally back at the house we collapsed in bed with full stomachs and caught up with the Tour de France (we purchased a package for downloading the videos to our laptop specifically so we could follow the Tour while on our trip – talk about junkies!).