Sarai has been hard at work the better part of this year on a new business venture and a few days ago she announced it: Colette Sewing Patterns. It’s clothing design, but with a twist: Instead of manufacturing and selling the clothing herself, she’s designing and producing the patterns, which will be sold to people interested in making their own clothing.

The site just contains a blog and some basic info right now but the store will be launching in January when her first line of patterns is finished. She’s been working really hard on this and it’s really exciting to see it coming together. Read the announcement on her blog and check it out.

We were at home for maybe five minutes, just long enough to change and get out the door again, but about a minute after getting there we heard our next door neighbors yelling. On our way to Stacy’s house we saw people in the streets everywhere, yelling, talking on cell phones, and one guy in his front yard firing off a roman candle. Even the solitary people walking on the sidewalks all seemed to be on the phone.

It was pretty obvious what was happening and when we arrived at Stacy’s and asked, “Did we miss anything?” everyone just stared at us. It turns out McCain had just conceded and Obama was declared our 44th president. We missed the announcement but were there in time to hear McCain’s concession, Obama’s acceptance speech, and partake of the delicious Sarah Palin memorial baked Alaska, which was splashed with high-proof rum and set on fire (from my favorite Berkeley ice cream shop, Ici).

A couple weeks ago Sarai and I were wondering if we’d ever see an atheist elected president. We decided this was unlikely, unfortunately, but a year ago I might have said the same thing about any non-white Christian male. I’m still in something of a state of shock.

On the way home we drove past the Berkeley Obama campaign office and the street was packed with people, yelling, cheering, and high-fiving the honking drivers as we slowed to work our way through the crowd. Closer to home, we found an impromptu street party a block from our apartment and after parking the car we walked over to check it out. It was basically a smaller version of the one at the campaign office and consisted of two separate groups of people who converged on this completely random small intersection, plus assorted passers-by like ourselves who just stopped by to hang out. This went on until about midnight when it started breaking up and we headed home.

(more street party pictures)

In other California news, Proposition 2 passed. It could be better, but anything that will improve conditions in factory farms is a good thing, even if it still leaves lots of problems. Proposition 4, the attempted end-run around abortion rights, was defeated, but barely.

Not all is rosy, however. Despite electing our first black president, bigotry is alive and well, as evidenced by the passing of California Proposition 8, which enshrines a “man and woman” definition of marriage into the state constitution. So much for the “liberal left coast” I hear so much about. On the other hand, this is so blatantly discriminatory that I don’t see how it could not be overturned. Gay marriage bans were also passed in Florida and Arizona, and Arkansas banned same-sex couples from adopting or participating in foster parent programs. My only hope is that the next eight years (there, I said it!) will see this country dragged into the 21st century, kicking and screaming if need be.

Despite these few setbacks, today is a beautiful day.

When I bought my bike about a year and a half ago, I wasn’t really sure what I was looking for in a bicycle. It was the first bike I’d owned in my adult life and I barely new one type from another. Explaining this to the helpful people at our local bike shop in San Francisco, Sarai and I ended up coming away with Trek hybrids, as a good all-purpose bike.

It was good enough for a while, until we rented road bikes up in Sonoma one weekend and discovered just how much nicer they are. Granted, the ones we rented were nice racing-style bikes, the kind we looked at briefly in the shop before seeing the price tags, and there’s no way we need something that high-end. Still, the form factor and weight of these bikes made our hybrids look like giant, clunky monstrosities. My Trek weighs in at 30lbs, mostly due to the wider wheels, thicker frame, and 18 gears, of which I used maybe three. This is a lot of bike, and it just isn’t very enjoyable to ride. Sarai felt the same way about hers.

So yesterday we took a trip over to Manifesto, a local bike shop specializing in single-speed road bikes and picked up a couple new ones.

I bought a 2008 Lager, which is SE’s mid-range road bike (the low and high-end models are “Draft” and “Premium Brew”, respectively). It’s a single-speed bike with a “flip-flop” hub, meaning that the back wheel has a regular gear on one side and a fixed gear on the other, so it can be converted to a fixie just by turning the wheel around. I’m not really into fixed-gear bikes but it might be fun to play with some time. For now, I’m happy with the freewheel, and I kind of enjoy having just the one speed. I had no idea what to do with 18 speeds on my hybrid so it’s kind of nice to not have to worry about it and just ride. I’ll pedal harder if I need to going up hills, or faster going down. This new bike is a full ten pounds lighter than the old one and cost about the same. It was nowhere near the price of the fancier road bikes we’ve drooled over in the past but riding it feels similar (to us, anyway) and is much easier than our hybrids.

Sarai got almost the same bike as me, but picked out a white 2009 model instead. I would have preferred black, but the 2008s only came in brown and the black 2009 had a lot of ugly red trim. I’m more into minimalism, so I went with the more subdued brown and spent an hour or so this morning de-branding it, removing all the stickers and badges with the brand name and such from the frame. The seat is still branded but I’ll probably replace that eventually anyway. I also swapped the bullhorn-style handlebars for traditional drop-bars.

I haven’t ridden it much yet but I love it already. I don’t ride as much as I should but I think having a bike I actually like will help with that.

Update: Manifesto put a picture of us and our bikes up on their Flickr account.

The trip was wonderful. Renting an apartment was much nicer than staying in a hotel, and I think this is going to be our first choice for accommodations from now on. The apartment was tiny, maybe 400 square feet (if that) but just fine for a short stay like ours. The privacy was nice, as was being able to do laundry at home, but the best part was the kitchen. Eating out every day when traveling gets really tired so it was good to be able to do our own cooking. We mostly ate lunches out and went out for dinner or pastries a few times, but most evenings we bought veggies, bread, and wine from neighborhood markets and cooked up simple dinners, each time making enough so that we had leftovers for a few days. We saved a lot of money this way and didn’t end up with that slightly unhealthy feeling you get from eating out too often.

Réaumur Sébastopol Metro station

Vegetarian food is surprisingly hard to come by in Paris restaurants, so another benefit to eating at home was that we just didn’t have to worry about it. One oasis of good vegetarian food was Bioboa, an organic lunch place near the city center; we had veggie burgers here twice. We didn’t eat much French food aside from a few crepes and brie sandwiches, and didn’t try any frites because they were mostly served with steaks.

We stopped by a couple of Paris’s world-class bars while we were there: the Bar Hemingway at the Ritz hotel, and Harry’s New York Bar.

Château de Versailles

We stayed in Paris longer than we’ve stayed in any one city before, and it still wasn’t enough time to do everything we wanted. We did see quite a bit though, from the usual stuff like the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower, to a giant permanent flea market and the Cimetière du Père-Lachaise, where we visited the graves of Balzac, Molière, Edith Piaf, and Oscar Wilde. We looked for Jim Morrison’s grave but couldn’t find it. The map we had wasn’t very good.

Vélib’ bicycle rental system

The language barrier was surprisingly tough. We’ve always done ok in Italy — we can often eke out the meaning of written Italian and can speak a few handfuls of words, enough to get by — and we’ve managed alright in places that speak even less English where we don’t even know a single word of the local language, but this trip was harder than we expected. While we don’t speak any French, we did learn some basic words before the trip, but French pronunciation is hard. They do speak a lot of English in Paris, but it’s frustrating to have to use it, even for simple things. The stereotypical view of Parisians is that they hate people who don’t speak French; we didn’t find that to be true, but things definitely would be easier if we knew at least a bit of the language.

This has strengthened our resolve to learn more Italian. Although French or German would be more useful, Italian is relatively easy and we’ve got a foundation there already.

Paris is an amazing city and, along with Florence and San Francisco, one of the most beautiful I’ve seen. A return trip is a ways off still, especially since we’re determined to know more French next time, but we’ll definitely be back eventually.

More pictures

Paris sure is beautiful. Maybe we won’t come home.

Here are some of our standard accessories:

Books

A travel book, of course, for help finding vegetarian restaurants and interesting stuff outside of the obvious, and a notebook for addresses, directions, things we want to do, and so on. I like Time Out books as guides, they seem more useful to me than some of the others. I usually carry a regular Moleskine for writing but I’m trying to pare down the stuff I’m carrying to a bare minimum, so I considered just using 3×5 index cards for this, but notebooks are far more useful so I’m sticking with it. My usual travel notebook is 5×8 inches; that isn’t big by any means but I thought about picking up something smaller when I remembered about Moleskine City Notebooks. These are just over 3×5 inches and also contain street and metro maps and all sorts of other useful stuff. Not available for all cities, but they do have a Paris edition, so we’re trying these out this time.

I had initially planned to buy a Garmin nüvi GPS unit before my next trip overseas, but this trip came pretty unexpectedly and I didn’t want to drop another couple hundred dollars on top of our airfare and accommodations on such short notice.

Time and communication

I don’t normally wear a watch, preferring to just use the clock on my mobile phone, but it’s a little silly to carry a phone around if I won’t be needing it. In the past I’ve carried my mobile phone overseas just for the clock, despite having no service, and had to deal with keeping it charged and converting the time on the fly. Dumb. A watch is a fraction of the size, can easily be set to local time, requires no maintenance, and also tells 24 hour time by way of a second series of digits around the face. I still don’t like wearing a watch so I’ll probably just keep it in my bag or pocket.

I probably won’t need a mobile phone, but I like to have one just in case. Our iPhones are useless overseas so I’ve kept around my unlocked GSM RAZR for this purpose. It’s small, light, and I can buy a local SIM card if I decide I need it.

Power

The big black thing in the photo is a universal power plug adapter. It’s got a great design — It’s extremely light and compact, and accepts plugs from all over the world and has a series of prongs that slide out the other end to fit the wall sockets anywhere we go. It doesn’t do voltage conversion but the type of things we need to plug in while traveling — camera, phone, and iPod chargers — all have DC converters that can handle up to 240 volts, so we don’t need it. The one thing this doesn’t do is accept grounded US plugs, like the one on my laptop. For this I picked up an Apple adapter kit that supplies all the plugs I’ll need, anywhere I go.

I’m struggling with how much to pack. The apartment we rented in Paris has a washer and dryer, so I could conceivably just bring a weekend bag and wash my clothes every couple days. We’ll be doing this to some extent, probably packing for four days, but I keep feeling like that’s still too much when I could get it down to three, which would allow me to bring a smaller bag. I’m a little obsessed with traveling light.

While browsing the shelves at Flight 001 in Berkeley, Sarai suggested that the reason people love travel accessories so much is that they help make an otherwise unbearably dehumanizing experience — ie, flying coach anywhere — a little more fun. If only we could get bumped to business class across the Atlantic again, like we did once a couple years ago. That’s what flying should be like.

Not long after we return from LA, we’re flying to Paris for another week and a half. It was beginning to look like our one trip out of the country this year was going to be Vancouver in November, after Sarai finishes up a few days in Seattle for work, but we thought no, that hardly counts (although it’s not as bad as a staycation). So we decided to bite the bullet and take a real trip.

We did quite a bit of shopping around for airfare. I thought Paris would be one of the more expensive of our choices but we actually found some pretty decent rates. More expensive than it would have been this time last year, naturally, but not as bad as the fares looked when we gave them an initial cursory glance last month. It beat out Buenos Aires, Tokyo, and Australia, and matched London.

In the spirit of slow travel, we’re renting an apartment for a week and a half rather than staying in a hotel, which is saving us a little additional money as well. We won’t have hotel amenities like free breakfast and maid service, but staying in an apartment means we’ll have a kitchen, so we can shop at the famous Paris markets and cook our own food, which will save further money over eating out, and the washer and dryer mean that we can pack light and just wash our clothes while we’re there. This is a working trip for me, so the included wireless internet means I’ll be able to get some work done with a minimum of hassle and additional expense. But the best part about this is that we’ll be living in a regular residential neighborhood in Montmartre, not a hotel filled with other visitors. For an added bonus, our apartment is just a few streets from Sacré CÅ?ur. All told, we’re saving a little bit by not staying in a hotel, more by cooking for ourselves a good part of the trip, and getting immense non-monetary benefits on top of it.

This morning we were woken up around 6:00am by more of the same meowing and crying, this time coming from behind out apartment. Going into the kitchen, I saw this very same kitten on the stairs outside (the same stairs pictured in the link above). He was so small he could barely get from one step up to the next. I don’t know what he was doing on the stairs all alone anyway; there’s nothing for a cat up there. His mother was nowhere to be seen.

So, as I’ve been known to do, I bravely went out and caught him. We went to the pet store as soon as they opened for liquid kitten formula and, after feeding him, Sarai gave him a bath and painstakingly cleaned off as many fleas as she could. In just a few hours he completely warmed up to us, cuddling in our laps and purring his head off. He’s now sleeping on a towel in a box I set up for him.

Basil and Colette, needless to say, are not amused. We have no intention of keeping him though, and Sarai sent an e-mail out to a bunch of people at work first thing this morning asking for any takers. The local no-kill shelter is completely full, so it’s important that we find someone.

Sarai has more pictures on Flickr.

Update

Just as I was finishing writing the above, Sarai told me that he has a new home! He’ll be going home with one of her coworkers tonight.

We did lapse for short period though, the weekend we spent in Santa Rosa to go hot air ballooning. Seed was a good find, but outside of that our vegan eating options were pretty slim, so we decided not to worry about it for the weekend and picked up the vegan diet again when we returned home on Sunday.

We were talking about this experiment last weekend with Stacy, a vegetarian who occasionally keeps a vegan raw food diet, and she asked if we felt any different, physically. I had to think about it for a minute and found that I really didn’t. This is a little surprising in a way, but also not, as our regular diet isn’t particularly dairy-heavy to begin with.

Anyway, as I prepare to spend a week in LA soon, I’m reminded of my last trip there in May and my photo safari out to Venice to see these canals for myself.

It was actually more interesting than I expected. Venice is known for being a bit eccentric but I expected an area built around waterways like this to be one of the fancier parts of town. Instead, I found what looks like a really low-key, unpretentious neighborhood. There were a good number of big, fancy houses, but an equal number of small, older, and quirky places too.

The canal neighborhood is made up of four parallel canals, with connecting waterways at either end. There are small alleyways alternating with the canals, so each house faces the canal, with a road behind it. Most houses had boats tied up out front on the water.

It doesn’t compare to Venice, Italy, but it’s interesting in its own way.

More pictures