For my birthday last year, I asked my friends and family to get tickets for a Demolition Derby in Dixon, CA, which is a small town about 75 miles east of San Francisco.

I will admit that after making this plan I realized that I actually didn’t even know what a Demolition Derby was- I mean, I guess I could have figured it out if I thought about, but I didn’t. I think that’s because I couldn’t have imagined how utterly fun and awesome it is to watch cars crash into each other. So now I know: more or less, a bunch of cars drive around in dirt crashing into each other, until only 1 car is able to move. Pretty straightforward.

Some things we learned:
1. You’re not allowed to hit the driver’s side door on purpose. Anywhere else is OK.
2. Drivers wear helmets and they only carry a small amount of gasoline to prevent fires.
3. If you’re driving in dirt, you don’t actually need tires or wheels- you can do pretty well even when you’re down to the axle.
4. Ideal demographic for DD is Y chromosome, age 3-10. Not to say the adults and females didn’t enjoy it, since everyone did LOVE it. But nothing matched the unbridled, nay, unhinged, enthusiasm of the little boys who were in our group.
5. If someone invites YOU to this type of event, you should definitely try to make it, because it’s pretty much insanely fun and awesome and different.

(These photos are about half mine, and half from my friend Carolyn Laub, who was kind enough to share.)

The DD was a special attraction of the Dixon May Fair. Previous night’s entertainment: ZZ Top.

The cars and trucks line up on the dirt to show themselves off before the crashtastic action starts.

The dollar bill car was an early favorite, until he was decommissioned by a busted radiator.

Try as he might, 68’s driver can’t resuscitate this victim.

Dead cars pile up on the berm while the remaining vehicles continue to smash around.

At the end, since only 1 car is still able to drive, heavy machinery carts the remaining carcasses off the dirt in preparation for the next round.

Mmm… delicious dancing corn dogs.

The pickup truck round about to begin. The announcer is so excited and keeps saying “in my 30 years of doing this, I have NEVER seen a pickup derby, so folks, this is really something special!” So special!

A truck smokes after a front hit and his radiator blows.

When a winner is declared, the drivers take off their helmets and climb out of their trashed trucks.

After 2 rounds, this incredibly tough car finally died- but not before driving around on 1 perpendicular tire, 1 diagonal tire, and 1 bare axle.

Exhaust combined with fire extinguisher blowback flooded the open-air arena with choking smoke.

The event came to an abrupt and unceremonius end when the smoke became so overwhelming and obscuring that patrons ran from the arena coughing and covering their faces.

It occurred to me that I always take lots of photos of food and shops and streets and signs when I travel to faraway lands, but I rarely do so in my own town. San Francisco, after all, is a major tourist destination, and there are LOTS of interesting things to photo right here in my own backyard. The area around Bryant and 24th Streets, for example, is a slowly and funkily gentrifying old-school Mexican neighborhood that’s colorful in more ways than one, and it’s a prime spot for a mini photo journal.

The one, the only, the original- the garish Roosevelt Tamale Parlor sign is a long-standing beacon of this ‘hood. Cute and quaint, with great… wait for it… tamales.
Roosevelt Tamale Parlor: 2817 24th St. between Bryant and York.

Is there possibly a better name for anything than “Discolandia?” Hmm. I think NO. Love the color scheme and stark, slightly askew, sans-serif all caps action as well. No idea what it’s like inside, as woefully I’ve never actually BEEN inside.
Discolandia: 2964 24th St. between Florida and Alabama.

I have always loved the Taqueria Vallarta sign, for many reasons. For one thing, I find it so mysterious that they didn’t make one more segment on the sign so the bottom one didn’t have to share 2 letters. Also, the vertical orientation makes it completely unintuitive and tricky to read what it says. And need I mention it’s cool Mexican flag colors? Still, this case of branding gone majorly wrong hasn’t prevented them from sticking around for years and years. Probably because the tacos are good and they’re open for gorging even after the bars close. But that’s just a hunch.
Taqueria Vallarta: 3033 24th St. between Balmy and Treat.

A positive piece of gentrification- some young hipster folks saved and resurrected this decades-old icon. They brought back all the best bits (like glass jars of candy on the counter and thick homemade shakes) and updated the worst bits (like greasy blah diner food) so you can get all the nostalgia PLUS all of the tastiness. The cheddar, scallion, bacon pancakes are my favorite!
St. Francis Fountain: 2801 24th St. between Bryant and York.

This is a closeup of a taco shop sign. It totally creeps me out. Check out how the big pig is happy to be being roasted, while the little pig on the right appears to be roasting and possibly spearing his own child pig in another pot. What kinda sicko painted this thing and how did they think it would inspire me to eat carnitas?
Crazy pig painting: I don’t remember where exactly this sign is, but I think it’s roughly opposite Discolandia.

“Burbujas” (boor-BOO-huss) is inherently a funny word (meaning “bubbles) but I’ve always thought it was made additionally funny by the addition of “Mr.” Not Señor Burbujas, not Mr. Bubbles… Mr. Burbujas. The bra and underwear jauntily painted on the window and the Florida Street murals in the background add to the scene.
Mr. Burbujas: SE corner of 24th and Florida.

Soda-themed skateboard decks in the window of Mission Skateboards, a new gritty-cool skate shop.
Mission Skateboards: 3045 24th St. between Balmy and Treat. (The sign is just a circle with an M on it.)

I don’t know if it’s the trash cans, the tagging, the metal cage, the stark stenciled letters, or what… but I think “Fountain of Life Church” is stretching it just a tad…
Iglesia Fuente de Vida: next to Discolandia

I love the word “Mexica-tessen” and the funky Brady Bunch font on the lit up sign. Somehow the font plus the palm tree always make it seem like it should be in LA. You can get killer tamales, fresh masa and homemade tortillas.
La Palma: 2884 24th St. between Florida and Bryant.

Newcomer Sugarlump is a sweet cafe with a lovely back patio and a sexy 70s fireplace. You might think Tina Fey glasses and shiny Mac laptops are required for entry, but they’ll sell you an organic fair trade cup of coffee even if you’re sans specs or carrying a (gasp!) Dell.
Sugarlump: 2862 24th St. between Bryant and Florida.

I like that you can buy a bra AND send a fax in the same place.
Manuel’s Store: Incongruously right next to Sugarlump.

If you want fancier underpants hit up Candy Kitchen which sells absolutely no candy, just fancy, pretty, pricey lingerie.
Candy Kitchen: 2807 24th St. between Bryant and York.

I spent a chilly Fall weekend in Chicago with friends and wanted to share some of my favorite photos. I hadn’t been there for almost 20 years so it was a treat to spend a few days there, albeit cold and windy days!

Bertrand Goldberg’s Marina City towers seen from the river.

The fun/frightening Carnival Foods signage was the only (literally) bright spot on this overcast and rainy walk near Oz Park.

We caught a man on Halsted Street working diligently on this Barack Obama mural (just a few days before the November 2008 election.)

The comics at Second City hilariously dressed up one of the stodgy old guys carved onto their theater building’s facade for Halloween with a cape and Darth Vader mask.

Am I anthropomorphizing too much, or does this Lincoln Park house look like a person to you too?

Caramelized butterscotch and apple bacon hanging from a wire contraption during a mind-boggling molecular gastronomy dinner at Alinea.

Wolfy’s!

I call this apartment building “the frowny robot building.”

Crowds approaching Anish Kapoor’s “Cloud Gate” sculpture (aka “the Bean”) in Millenium Park.

We were driving aimlessly through the suburbs and randomly came upon this half-scale model of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, built in 1934. The parklands that surely surrounded it at one time have been oddly subsumed by a YMCA and a Costco. (And yes, we took the obligatory “pushing it back upright” series of photos…)

The sign for Empire Liquors in Wicker Park sports real liquor bottles enclosed in mesh.

Loooooved this warning posted in the awesome Old Town Oil shop.

I go to Mexico quite often, and visit some interesting food and drink towns, so I thought I’d share some of my favorite food photos and experiences in brief. It’s a fair amount to consume, so to speak, so I’ll be breaking them down by city and sharing them one by one!

First up: the gorgeous colorful kaleidoscope that is the colonial town of Guanajuato. Guanajuato is one of my favorite places in Mexico, and as it’s centrally located, it’s easily reachable from many points.

This lovely burg in Central Mexico’s state of Leon was founded in the 1500s, and funded lavishly for hundreds of years by a massively prolific silver mine just outside of town. The town is built up two sides of a ravine, and the residents favor bright colors for their boxy houses, which are packed together on teeny-tiny streets. In fact, legend has it 2 young lovers who lived across from one another used to live on a street so narrow that they could kiss each other from their facing balconies.  For that reason, the street is famously known as Callejon del Beso- Kiss Alley. Auto traffic flows mainly through an incredible system of medieval-looking underground tunnels that were constructed in the early 1900s. The result is that traversing town, whether in a car or by foot, is a transporting experience.

Food Tour of Guanajuato, Mexico

Of course I bought this- handmade chocolate sold by an ancient man outside the Mercado Juarez. He said it was made by his 3 sons. Inside the paper, I found fragrant cakes of Mexican chocolate, rich with dark cocoa, cinnamon, and big crunchy granules of sugar. It cost about 30 cents for a stack of 5.

One morning, I spotted some guys hanging out by this old truck packed with hanging cow carcasses and a trash can near Mercado Embajadoras. Nice meat hook!

I love my Best Foods, but something about that giant hot jar of mayo made me think twice about that tasty-looking corn.

The signs on these delivery scooters for a Domino’s franchise have successfully managed to make me think of both explosions and lotion, neither of which is particularly tantalizing in relation to pizza.

Looking down into the food stalls and lunch counters in Mercado Juarez from the 2nd floor.

A fabulous torta de carnitas (pork sandwich) with spicy red and green sauces, for less than a buck each from one of those very stalls.

Obligatory Mexican market photo of a ginormous pile of dried chilies.

My brother-in-law loved this squash blossom/huitlacoche/homemade cheese concoction he got from a street vendor at the Pípila, but it was a bit too overpowering for me.

This is an official street sign, the likes of which normally point you to geographical or tourist locations- but this one is pointing out the different types of local food you can get at Mercado de Gavira.

Drinking is serious business in Mexico: for my money, you’ve gotta go with a shot of Herradura Reposado (for sipping, no shooting!) with sangrita (to chase each sip) and a Modelo Especial (in between.)

This guy was selling tamales from a bucket at 1 AM (35 cents for 2.) We got one because we were intrigued by “dulce” – sweet tamales. It was a tamale with pineapple goo inside. Not bad, but I’ll stick with savory. I should have tried acelgas (chard.)

We happened upon a minor league baseball game in an amazing stadium embedded right into the middle of town, and ate lots of salty roasted pistachios and pumpkin seeds, with cheap beers of course, while enjoying the action.

The stadium itself is nestled in a pocket of houses right in town, with the back walls comprised of rough-hewn rock.

Your choice for tickets: sun or shade. Guess which one is cheaper?

To visit Guanajuato: Del Bajio airport in Silao/Leon is about a 30 minute drive from Guanajuato. Mexicana, Aeromexico, Continental, American Eagle, and Delta all fly into Del Bajio from the U.S. The town is centrally located and can also be easily reached by bus from Mexico City, Guadalajara, San Miguel de Allende, Queretaro, and many other places.

The stretch of Telegraph Avenue around the 50s in Oakland is home to an eclectic mix of businesses and buildings, and since the area is rapidly gentrifying it’s unclear how long some of these uniquely Oakland, uniquely ramshackle spots will be around. Hence, I felt the area merited a mini photo journal. Enjoy!

The Original Steele’s Skin Diving Supplies has been out of business for quite a while- but what I wouldn’t give to hang that decrepit sign in my house. What’s the skin diver doing anyway- harpooning a whale? The Miami color combo stands out against the mostly gray and brown tones of the ‘hood.

I love the name and font of this laundromat- for all of your jive-talkin’ laundering needs.

This bizarre faux windmill is wedged between 2 houses. What is it? The trash room? A secret clubhouse?

The tiny triangle-shaped Kasper’s Hot Dogs is no longer in business, and the boarded-over building falls a bit more into disrepair with each passing year.

However, just down the street from the defunct Kasper’s (with a ‘k’), Casper’s (with a ‘c’) will still sell you a hot dog, representing with the nostalgic graphics and the 1970s color scheme.

This highly personalized truck is often parked across from Kasper’s.

This sign used to point to a bunch of great stuff, I’m sure, but what?!!? Inquiring minds want to know. At the present time it marks the edge of a parking lot for a Chinese restaurant.

The pink confection of an estate that houses Hooper’s Chocolates has got to be one of the most stylistically and architecturally incongruous things around. It’s set back from the street and looks every bit like your Granny’s house.

The all-caps Hide A Way is a funky diner nestled among the trees.

Gotta love a drive-in liquor store!

Now we get to THE ICE PART! Which is arguably the more fascinating part. If you haven’t read Part One: The Snow I strongly recommend doing that now, in advance of delving into The Ice, since it contains useful information and background about the event and location as a whole, as well as a good deal of descriptive prose about the extent of the freezingness, iciness, snowiness, coldness, windiness, and so forth. So just to review, we’re in Northeastern China and it’s insanely cold and you have to dress yourself in so many layers that you can’t move or have any part of your face or body exposed and you can’t last that long outside but there’s a wicked cool ice and snow festival and it makes it all worthwhile.

Moving on… without further ado: THE ICE!

So, in case you’re wondering, let’s clear this up: pretty much everything is made of ice, with lights inside. The pathways, the buildings, the stairs, everything: all ice. I love the pathway, it is so fun to walk on, and reminiscent of the Saturday Night Fever dance floor in fact. But more slippery. You can get a sleigh ride along the path!

The Ice World is super cool because it happens at night… when all the coolest things happen, natch. Of course, it gets dark at like 3:30 PM up in Harbin so “night” is sort of a relative term. (Of course, being at night, it’s pretty challenging to take great photos.) If you look up close, the buildings are made of ice bricks, some of which have channels to hold the light tubes, which taken as a gestalt illuminate the whole building. Here’s a close-up of the light in the ice bricks.

The Ice World doesn’t hold much allure during the day- the ice all looks greenish-gray and dingy in the glaring winter sun. But as the sun starts to set, around 3:30 PM, the lights come on bit by bit and the Ice World becomes gradually illuminated from inside out. It is an amazing sight to behold, and one of the most incredible things I have ever seen. It is at its most breathtaking just at dusk, before the sky is completely dark. This only lasts a few moments so you have to be quick to get a photo!

The theme for the Ice World in 2008, which is when these pictures were taken,was, of course, The Olympics. You should realize that 1 billion plus Chinese citizens were collectively in a state of practically peeing their pants about the impending 2008 Summer Games in Beijing. They were, as a nation, proud and excited as hell. (Of course, as individuals, their Olympic fever ranged from raging hallucination-inducing temps to stone cold.) So there could really not possibly be ANY other theme for this Ice Festival.  Ergo, you’ve got your ice Olympic rings with the giant “Olympic Tower” behind. You can see little tiny people in front of Olympic Tower- the thing is maybe 8 stories tall? Taller?

They weren’t completely faithful to the theme, but instead presented a seemingly random amalgam of representative buildings from cities to hold past and future Olympics. For example, the dusk picture up top shows a Moscow building (1984 Olympics) and there was a funny London Bridge (2012 Olympics.) They also had the Athenian Acropolis (2004 Olympics):

We couldn’t figure out what the pink church (top picture) was representing. But there were also a lot of pagodas. Pink round ones… I think these are for Beijing?

And red square ones. For Tokyo 1964 perhaps?

But the best thing about the Ice World is that there are so many weird and fun activities. For example…

• You can go on a terrifying death-defying insanely fun and scary ice luge. See the Ice-cropolis? That’s the launch point. The whole curving yellow turreted path is actually the 2 parallel ice luges. It is really long and although it doesn’t look steep, it is. You can see a person in the foreground which gives you an idea of the scale.

• You can climb these ice walls with ice toeholds and non-ice ropes.

• You can hold the cutest baby snow fox in the whole wide world, but only for about 30 seconds.

• You can ride on these bicycle ice skate hybrid thingies. This was at the end of the night and I thought they looked super cool all lined up.

• While you warm up and drink really expensive and watery hot chocolate in a little clear plastic lean-to, outside the window there might be a creepy old-fashioned circus- of a type that has long been frowned upon here in the Western world, and with good reason. The animals seemed totally drugged up or something. Not to mention cold. Lions live in Africa! Not Siberia!

• You can take an expensive sleigh ride around the central ice pathway.

• You can try to walk across these bizarrely constructed and clearly ancient perilous chain bridges which totally seem, and feel, like death traps. When a bunch of people are on them, the planks move in a most unpredictable manner and I was shocked that no one broke an ankle.

And just in case you were wondering… there are a few snow things in the Ice World, like this giant Buddhist statue made of snow that people can pray in front of- also photographed right at dusk.

So if you’re ever in or near Northeastern China between January and March… I recommend making the detour and seeing it for yourself. It’s pretty frickin’ amazing.

CLICK HERE for Part One… The SNOW!

The Harbin Snow and Ice World (henceforth known as HS&IW) is a giant world of snow and ice, in Harbin, China. Whoa! I bet you didn’t see that coming from the title, eh? They gather the best snow and ice carvers and constructors from all over the world for the biggest, coldest, neatest, frozenest festival you will ever see.

According to this sign, it’s actually called the Har Bi  Sno  Wan  Dic  Ebig  Wo  Rld!

Harbin is cold. Obviously it has to be pretty cold, or it wouldn’t be such a great choice for the HS&IW. I mean, I have been to cold places before, but this place is way colder. It’s on the same latitude as North Dakota, for example, but it’s much colder in Harbin. It is the capital of the Northernmost and Easternmost province of China, Heilongjiang province. Go north, you’ll hit Siberia. Go south, you’ll hit North Korea (ahem, DPRK.) Go east, you’ll hit Mongolia. So that might clue you into the bleakness a bit. The temperatures while we were there, in January, hovered between about 12 F at the warmest point of the day, and dipped to nearly -20 F at the coldest. But those figures belie the additional cold wreaked by the biting, bonechilling, boreal winds that alight from Mother Russia’s icy bosom, seemingly enveloping even your very bones and veins in pure numbness. Why, it’s so cold, some of the rickshaw drivers light trash can fires inside their rickshaws and drive around with lit fires under the steering wheel! See?

Yeah, it’s on fire, but he did it on purpose. Moments later he slammed the door and sped away in a plume of lung-choking coal smoke.

There are actually 2 parts to the Snow and Ice World- SNOW, and ICE. This post is going to cover the snow, with the ice covered in a separate post. Obviously there is a little overlap, but not as much as you might think. The sun is day, the ice is night- kind of like a yin/yang thing. You see, the daytime is the perfect opportunity to go out to Sun Island, a huge outdoor park, where they have all manner of giant sculptures made out of snow. They are amazing! And they are really big. I have tried to include people (usually strangers, the occasional myself or Ross) in the following pictures to give a sense of scale, because without the people I could be showing you super closeup pictures of mini-marshmallow carvings, right?

See, with people in the photo you can tell this thing is enormous. Without the people, who knows, it could easily be a cake topper, or a Barbie house, or made out of legos, right?

The incredibly random-seeming theme for the snow world in 2008 was something to do with the burgeoning friendship between China and France. (It seemed random to me anyway… but maybe I’m not following world news closely enough? Does it have a relevance I’m missing?) So, among hundreds of others, you’ve got your Parisian Chinoiserie goddess montage at the entrance… already getting pockmarked with pollution after only a couple of days by the roadside. (For reference, that Snowffel Tower was around 4 stories high.)

The life-size Arc de Triomphe for 2 lanes of traffic to pass under…

Napoleon “un”…

and Napoleon “deux”…

This awe-inspiring behemoth, which also takes the official prize for largest snow sculpture in the whole world…

You’ve got your Rodin… or should I say Snowdin?

The tres classy “China Beer & French Wine” sculpture…

And so forth, ad infinitum. Truly, there are hundreds if not thousands of sculptures ranging from a little bit bigger than me to as big as a building.

Now, that’s all well and good, but let’s get to my favorite part. We were actually there just as the HS&IW was getting going- it starts officially on January 5, and we arrived on January 6. So we had the great fortune to see some of the snow sculpting in action, and were able to chronicle the steps it takes to create these enormous snow sculptures. Which I frankly think was cooler than even just seeing the finished sculptures. These pictures are not time-lapsed over one snow sculpture, but rather an amalgam of folks in various stages of creative repose, working on their structures.

• First, bring in truckloads of snow encased in plywood shells, and move them in place with cranes.

• Next, remove the plywood and get it out of the way so you can size up the structure.

• Working from the top down, go ahead and start the rough-shaping process. It helps to grab 20 or 30 guys with shovels to help out. Oh, and you’ll have to get rid of all of that snow before carrying on as well.

• To add colors, sculpt special colored ice blocks into the appropriate shapes (in this case, purple for grapes and green for leaves.)

• Also, you might need to put up a scaffolding at some point.

• For fine-tuning of faces and such, get an expert to work his magic with a small shaping tool.

Neat!

There are activities at the HS&IW as well. You don’t just look at the snow stuff. Allow me to share some of the odd activities in which you can partake, for an additional fee…

You can:

• Get a ride in a dog sled, but the dogs were fighting a lot. Some of them weren’t even huskies, they were like golden retrievers or something. Also, the dogs didn’t seem to be under their masters’ control too well. Hmm.

• Sit on these weird bicycle/ice skate mashup gadgets things and pedal around the ice. I call them “bicicles.” Get it?

• Take a ride on a yak. Looks lumpy.

• Warm up in an ice and snow log cabin-shaped cafe (not snow inside, only snow outside) and drink expensive yucky “chocolate milk tea.” However unpleasant and overpriced, this is an absolutely necessary activity because of the freezing temps outside.

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• Take a photo with a teletubby and/or Santa, or get a snapshot of a man in a chicken suit posing in front of a giant snow head, natch.

CLICK HERE for Part 2… The ICE!