We're back from San Francisco and Los Angeles.  We had a great time in both places, and I'll lead off with a few observations. 

1.  LA is not my kind of city.  Too many cars combined with too many malls.  It's like the suburban Virginia of my youth, but much bigger and more vacuous, somehow. 

2. I made a couple of mistakes in this post.  The obvious one, as was explained to my back then, is that San Francisco is not tied with Chicago for second best food city in the country, but is a clear #2 under the rubric I was thinking about then.  The second thing is that the whole rubric is wrong.  Yes, New York is the best restaurant city in the country.   But best food city?  The californian supermarkets, in February, are still packed with extraordinary local produce, even if it is somewhat limited.  Here, we have tubers.  If anything, I suspect the gap in the summer is even bigger, as our farms start working, but theirs explode.  I'm not sure what to make of this.

3. Food (still) tastes better outside.

4. Visiting a city occupied by Armenians is pretty disturbing, especially because you can't use Armenian as your super secret language anymore.  On the other hand, it is somewhat amusing to be somewhere where every second person looks like either your uncle or great uncle.

5. Why does anyone live in New York, again, when things routinely look like the below over there?  I need to work on my rationalizations for this seemingly unwise decision again.