Day 6: When Less is More

EAT:
There are two main ways that people tend to judge the food scene in a place. One method is to go to the best of the best restaurants. The Zagat becomes your bible. You ask for recommendations at every turn. Yelp for four star ratings. And in this method, you certainly learn what it means to eat well in a place.

But the problem is that no one eats at Chez Panisse every night. Le Bec Fin is saved for special occasions. Balthazar isn't going to tell you what families with two children and a dog eat like. And so to get the non-touristy take on food, you gotta go with option number 2.

In this option, you judge the food scene on the low-end options. The holes in the wall. The little eateries on the corner. Hospital food. Now this tells you a bit more of how much people care about what happens on their plate.

So on Monday, I ate where most people choose to avoid: the college cafeteria. I had chatted with some Stanford students and the general consensus was that the food there wasn't that great. Some said it was "good," others said "decent," but no one was wowed by it.

At least no one other than me.

The menu was far more interesting than I would have guessed from the lackluster reviews I had received. They had offerings like mushroom pizza with truffle oil. But just because a description sounds good doesn't mean you're not going to get a plate of reheated frozen vegetables. So as I ordered my sweet potato and sage soup and my latina salad (with black beans, corn, jicama, lime juice and queso), I tried to dampen by expectations.

When I got my soup I braced myself for the worst. The main cause of my nervousness was that the soup was white in color, which is somewhat troubling since sweet potatoes are typically orange. But I took a sip anyway, and it was amazing. The pieces of fresh sage floating int he soup provided a burst of earthy flavor. I suspect it was also heavy on the heavy cream, which created this rich, comforting texture that made me want to go back to the Intercontinetal Hotel and curl up by the fireplace. The salad was also well above average with its light, spicy dressing, although probably not something that I would write home about.


DRINK:
I met a friend for happy hour drinks at Elixir in downtown San Francisco. I asked what wheat beers they had on tap, and the bartender said they didn't have any (which was puzzling as it looked - and tasted - like my friend was having a wheat bear...but hey I'm not a professional so I will trust his word on it). I then asked what was local, and he mumbled something about a Berkeley beer that I didn't catch the name of. I ordered it, and after one sip I wish I had heard the name. The beer tasted a bit like urine and I would love to avoid having that experience again. For my next round, I got the non-wheat wheat-tasting beer, which was a satisfying way to close up my last night in warm weather San Francisco.

YOGA:
So for my last yoga class in San Francisco, I wanted to mix it up by trying a style of yoga that I had never done before. My first thought was to go to a Bhakti flow class with yoga personality Rusty Wells who is rumored to teach these wild, somewhat eclectic classes. However, Rusty doesn't believe in renting yoga mats because he finds it unhygienic (which it usually is), and that made it logistically impossible for me to go there as a yoga tourist on this trip. My second thought was to go to a Dharma Mittra style class at Yoga Loft. Failure. The class was cancelled. So I ended up taking a beginning Hatha class at Yoga Loft instead.

Generally, I really enjoy fundamental classes. Getting back to basics helps me refocus my attention on some alignment issues that I have gotten lazy about. It's a nice check in to make sure my foundation is strong. However, this class was baffling to me. After two sets of lunging sun salutations, the teacher had us turn our mats so that they were parallel to the front of the room to do standing poses. This choice was strange and unusual as we could have just easily moved our bodies to face the right side of the room while leaving our mats where they were. It seemed like an unnecessary addition the class.

Then over the course of the class there were some other inefficiencies. She had us get up on two separate occasions to grab additional props and then had us also leave our mats to return these props before continuing our practice(as it so happened it turned out that keeping these props neatly by our mats would have been better as they would come in handy later in the class). Again, bizarre.

But perhaps the most unsettling part of the class for me was all the chit-chat. The teacher talked and talked and talked about every pose. And as she was waxing on about the importance of minute movements of the thigh bones, I was wondering if any of these newbies had any idea what she was talking about. By the end of the class, we had done no more than 10 poses.

This class made me look forward to my return to New York for my teacher who is less talk and more do. Like his teacher Pattabhi Jois, he teaches with an understanding that yoga is "99% practice, 1% theory."