Chicago, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania: “Fuck these smug-ass yuppies.” Choice quote: “What an odd thing to gain a sense of smug superiority for doing…nothing, really.”

New York: “Thumbs up! Fewer strollers means more room on the subway!”

Meanwhile, Smug-ass Mom from the S.F. Bay Area: “Um, like, I don’t know who you people have been hanging out with, but I was totally using a baby carrier since 2002, here’s the brand name, and all of *my* friends have been using them since then too.”

Ok, in fairness another ass hatette from Monroe, NY theorized that with “more skin-to-skin contact, more warmth…Maybe the rates of ADD, ADHD will go down”.

Yeah, maybe it’ll cut down on gluten allergies too.

A Tribe Called Quest – The Chase Part 2 (LP Mix)

The route there took a day and a half, because we were slow getting started – we forgot the permits and had to head over to the tourist bureau to get them re-issued. We were also extremely cautious with our water supply, refilling constantly at Brian’s behest – I was lugging around 25 pounds of water for most of the hike, which you can see in the photos below (those are 4 liter platypus bags strapped to my pack). In his defense, I made him carry 15 pounds of food that I didn’t eat, and I lost the stove (though not before we managed to make one pretty delicious meal the first night).

The hike ends in this unbelievably spectacular beach. It’s indescribable. We camped under a waterfall (no joke), slept on the beach, and headed back very early on the third morning. We hoofed it and managed to complete the return in 8 hours.

Anyway, I’m writing about all of this now because I finally got the pictures that Brian took with his DSLR on the trail. We thought they were lost for good when his Mac laptop hard drive started acting erratic, but he managed to recover them and I snagged them last weekend while I was visiting him in Seattle.

So without further ado, check the bullshit. I apologize in advance for the six million pictures of the same sunset at the end, but I got tired of trying to compare them, I don’t really trust my judgment or taste, and I’m too chickenshit to delete any of them because they’re all dope.

P.S. Gallery2 blows so hard. Why do I still use it? I found Zenphoto and set it up; it looks promising but there’s no automatic import from Gallery so it’ll probably take a solid afternoon to convert over and I don’t know if I care quite enough to do it despite the incredibly painful experience I just went through trying to sort through all these Hawaii pictures.

We’re all crashing with Raj, who lives in the U district. Last night we went out dancing at the Baltic Room (I think?) and capped off the night with some street meat from the crazy cart with the LCD screens. Today we walked over to the Gas Works Park, which is awesome! I can’t believe I never knew about this place – it’s definitely a pretty fun place to hang out and I used to walk around the area back in the day when I was interning at MS. Anyway, Raj lives right near the park so we walked over and killed a couple of hours around sunset, which made for some decent photo opportunities even when you only have an iPhone.

Pictures from Gas Works Park

Irene pointed out that it’s totally steampunk, which is obvious in retrospect though I didn’t pick up on it myself.

http://aclab.ca/users/norman/music/

I’m in Syracuse right now, where I had to transfer off the NYC-bound express to this Syracus-Schenectady-Albany route. So far it’s been a bit of a mixed bag. The first bus I was one was older and not as comfy, but it was good enough for me to sleep pretty much the entire way. I didn’t actually know I needed to transfer until I got to the terminal – they don’t exactly make that clear on the website, probably because they know that pampered princesses like me would take the train or fly instead if they called that out. Anyway on this new bus I’ve got wifi, an A/C power outlet, and the entire two-seat row to myself, so I’m living large.

I had to line up in the freezing cold outside the terminal in Toronto which was also really annoying; if you don’t do that you aren’t actually guaranteed a seat on the bus, though they actually have several waiting and of course people near the back of the line ended up getting on the newer/fancier bus.

The border crossing was painful; we almost made it out of there in about a half hour but then we were delayed twice as long because one girl had to be sent back to Canada (she was Chilean I believe). She was part of a group of girls, all international (Spain, Chile and Korea, wtf?!)  travelling together and apparently it wreaked havoc on all the hotel and travel plans for the entire group. There were many tearful goodbyes exchanged. Some of them are now on this bus with me, but I feel like it’s a bit too rude to ask what happened given the dramatic conclusion.

• Bar scene. Shockingly, I think San Francisco wins here. So far, I’ve seen a bunch of shitty sports bars, and a whole lot of frou-frou, loud and crowded places that look like they charge cover and have bouncers and shit. Moreover, the pompous places are also dressy of course (actually on reflection I guess only San Francisco has places that manage to be insanely pompous without an actual dress code).I think this explains why my friends here don’t seem to go out to bars a whole lot (other than sports bars to watch the Raptors games). Anyway, if you are looking for some eye candy and willing to stand in line for the privilege, then cool, but I actually like that in San Francisco you get the choice: if you wanna overpay for drinks and let out your inner douche you can hit up any number of bars in SOMA or FiDi, and if you wanna show off your tattoo sleeves you can hit up the 500 Club or Delirium. If you just want to actually chill for a minute you can go anywhere from Casa Nova to Home to Dock’s Clock or you can just bump some ATCQ on the jukebox at the Mission Bar.

  And then of course there’s a whole bunch of weirdly unique places like Bourbon and Branch or that house bar in Solano. I guess I gotta give the nod to San Francisco for this one, while reluctantly acknowledging that someone reading this is going to mock me for compromising my principles of uniformly dropping venom on the Bay.

  Although Toronto does gain points for the fact that they apparently really do last call at 2:00 AM rather than 1:30 or 1:15 or whatever like in SF.

• Beer selection. Almost a side note but it has been annoying me so WTF, this gets its own bullet. So, the beer selection at these places in Toronto is mostly wack – there don’t seem to be a whole lot of brew pubs around and your best bet is one of the Irish pub places (but then you’re at nothing but Irish pubs all the time which gets old).

Also only my tech friends will care about many of today’s items so be forewarned.

• Toronto seems to be quieter – at least there aren’t so many goddamn motorcycles.
  This is pretty topical given the recent South Park episode. I hate Harley riders. I realize it’s completely hypocritical of me, since the old Z used to set off car alarms when I started it up and the subwoofer definitely wasn’t neighbor-friendly, but hey, that’s why it got stolen right? Justice was served – I did the time for my crime. The point is, these fricking d-bags are so pervasive in San Francisco that I didn’t even realize how much more pleasant a city could sound until I got out of there. Of course for an apples-to-apples comparison I’d need to live on a lower floor right off of Queen St. So this is really only useful as a justification in favor of moving out of the Mission.
• Music and media streaming services don’t work or cost money in Canada.
  No Hulu, no Pandora, no Last.fm. Fortunately, piracy still works just fine, or so I’ve heard. I guess I should toss Google Voice into this list too, though that’s really more of a fundamental problem with GV (what the hell is it good for if it can’t ring international phones), and anyway I suspect that it will get fixed sooner than the media stuff.
• Cell phone data plans suck.
  Apparently my crazy SpeakOut wireless EDGE data hack – blackra1n plus blacksn0w plus SpeakOut $7 browsing addon plus iPhone connection profile (thanks again Eric B) – is even more of a deal than I originally realized, because it’s pretty much the only way to get unlimited data in Toronto. Unclear if this will ever get fixed. I suppose I should also figure out how much data I really use on my iPhone in SF though, since maybe 5GB really is enough?
• Online shopping is not nearly as cheap or prevalent.
  Apparently Amazon Canada is not nearly as well stocked as the mothership. Also, nobody’s ever heard of Zappo’s, you sometimes have to pay import duties on stuff (?!), and people actually buy computers and TVs in stores here because online prices aren’t much better.

• Falafel and shawerma are way the fuck better in Toronto. First, there are Lebanese, Turkish and Palestinian (I assume?) falafel places all over the place. In my random sampling of three places so far (including the place right outside my house that is open until 3AM, see #2), they were all better than Truly Mediterranean.
• Graffiti is no contest. Inspiring murals aside, Toronto’s graffiti kicks the crap out of San Francisco’s. See here or here (or many other places) for what I’m saying.

Stay tuned for posts on ABCDs versus CBCDs and relative whitenicity (hint: Toronto wins on both).