No TWILF, but some great tacos!

Still recovering from the news of the closing of Castillo, our late-night taco joint in Mar Vista, I've decided to search for the ultimate taqueria in my new neighborhood, SF's Mission district. There is no shortage of Mexican food here, but I really haven't made much progress yet in exploring the local "taco scene".

I was working from home today, and decided to go for a stroll at lunchtime. I wanted to eat somewhere close-by and stopped by Taqueria Castillito (little Castillo in spanish!), which is just a few blocks away, and located conveniently next to blockbuster and my safeway... Still I never entered their doors until today, and it wasn't too packed inside at late lunchtime. (a bad sign?)

I wasn't confident I'd find anything comparable to Castillo... at least not for a while...
too many good memories of great late nights... memories of tacos after exams, karaoke nights, and Rista curling my entire body weight in front of the place! (I'll see if I can find the picture.. he has demon eyes in it)

What I did find was a brand new delicious door to taco heaven...
The tacos (see the pic above) blew me away! Exactly what I was hoping for, but loaded even higher with meats. I only got two tacos, Pork Al-Pastor, and Carnitas ... both were super tasty and filling... the Carnitas were tender, and the Al-pastor was savory tomatoey, instead of greasy. I am definitely going back for the carne asada. Maybe tomorrow! =)

Rage! Finally!

Rage came on far later than we had originally planned... They got on stage around 11PM and cranked out the jams as if they had never stopped playing. The lyrics, guitar, and timing was all as dead solid as on a CD... Things got a little nuts when some kids climbed a giant tubular scaffolding structure in the center-middle of the crowd, probably about 80 feet off the ground, and were finally "persuaded" to get off the platform by security. It looked like no one got hurt climbing down, but I was convinced that someone was definitely going to eat it hard. Luckily, no drama.

Here's a pic of Rage in action!

And here's another showing the scaffolding structure the kids climbed up onto:


Heading out after Midnight, we miraculously found Bethany's car in a sea of parking lots... luckily, Fan used GPS to locate our car by scientifically determining that we were parked "in the upper left corner of a square on the map" ... Luck was on our side, and it was truly a miracle that we found the car when we did... we still had to bully our way out of the parking lot, even using Fan as a "cell phone" pedestrian screen to give us some room. I maneuvered around a truck that took a bad angle in the gridlock, and from then on out it was "elbows up - side to side" to bust out of there. I started getting tired around the 210 - I5 junction, and passed the keys on to Nam... At this point we stopped at a McDonald's drive thru and struggled to find the gas station next door... ;) After Nam, Fan took the next 3 hour stretch when the sun started coming up, and Bethany took the last one, when we just go onto 152 from I5. At this point, I woke up, realizing I had dropped my Mcdonald's orange juice on bethany's car's floor.... well played. doh!

We somehow got to work a 8:59 AM, beating all estimates, and allowing each of us to get to our respective meetings and interviews for the day... Nam and I cashed out early around 1PM, while the others were troopers through full work days... troopers!

Looking back, it feels like it was an entire week of a weekend, but it was a blast! I was proud of us all for working like a team and all driving at least a couple hours on the stretch home...
We all survived, but Bethany's car now reeks of orange juice, which I have sworn to get cleaned while she's in temecula this week. ahh.. redemption soon!

on the crazy train to coachella and back!

Fan, Nam, Bethany and I hit the road to southern california on friday just before traffic time, and didn't stop until we landed in Santa Barbara. We visited Nam's cousing Fong, and played beer pong and flip cup into the later hours of the night with a gang of kids from UC Santa Barbara. A couple years have passed since I've seen my nemesis, UCSB, the one school that rejected me for grad school. This time, however, any hard feelings were drowned in good times... we ended up at an international student party, and had a really great time. Saturday involved getting up and hitting the beach to see how the beached college kids live. Lucky for us, this was the weekend for sorority beach volleyball, featuring some sorority house teams from UCLA (go bruins!) and some other schools. It was a lot of fun, and left me wondering if these kids would actually ever get sick of going to the beach every day. hmmm... yeah....

After this, we moved on to LA and hung out with Mike and Jessica... We decided to hit up little ethiopia for some ethiopian cuisine, and dined into the night... Luckily, Andrew and Angela were able to stop by, and we had a few laughs before parting ways again... I must have been tired, because at some point I claimed to "never eat out", even as we were at an ethiopian restaurant...

Sunday morning, we woke up and pushed off for Coachella... our soundtrack included Chris Isaak's smash hit "wicked game", which bestowed upon us our new war cry, (nihahaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!) .... and some similarly sounding classic krooning by enrique...
We finished it off with some "elbows up - side to side" and marveled at how we stumbled on so much material in just one weekend.

When we finally made it to Indio, things were pretty insane... Fan sold off our last ticket, and kept his pride too. We were holding our breath for Rage Against the Machine, but there was plenty of time... we caught the action on a bunch of stages, including seeing the Roots, Willie Nelson (brief), Air, Lily Allen (I skipped), Air, Placebo (who rocked), Damien Rice, and some others along the way. The place was also filled with a bunch of art structures, including some functional ones that spat fire or lit up ping pong balls held by strings. It was a pretty insane display of large scale functional art. Here's the fire spitter: