Coffeeneuring

There's a thing called coffeeneuring. I'm not really putting forth much effort to do it, but I'm happy for the excuse to document Pittsburgh's many lovely bikeable coffee shops.

Currently I'm sitting in Marty's Market, the venture that took over the warehouse that Right By Nature took over some years back. Marty's is part grocery store, part restaurant, part coffee shop. The coffee shop part is run by a former 21st Street barista who really knows and cares about coffee: the espresso and milk foaming are spot-on, the coffee selected with great care.

The bike ride was in two parts, one from my house in Bloomfield to Coca Cafe for brunch (1 mile exactly), and the 1.38 mile ride from Coca to Marty's. Weather: cold and misty, bracing for the arctic hurricane due to strike the east coast next week. Coffee: well-deserved.

Azimuth

Azimuth is an installation art piece on the Allegheny River. I'm going to share with you some of the pictures I took leading up to the experience in the hopes that they will tantalize you, but if you're the sort of person (like me) who likes to go into things completely blind on the trust of a friend or blog that it will be well worth your time:

Go see it.

Otherwise, read on, and then go see it.

On foot, you pad tenuously down a flight of stairs peeling off the right bank of the 40th Street Bridge, down away from the stressful currents of cars whizzing past you from Butler Street to the onramp.

Things look very different.







As you approach the entrance, you already feel the beginnings of being transported to another land.



The desk attendant directs you down a narrow path to the dock. At this point, I was already sure I had made the right decision in coming to this. My soul felt like it had found something critical to its flourishing that I hadn't even realized it was missing.



And that was before I even got to the river, much less the art itself (though arguably, this is all part of the art. In the words of Strata, you are in the experience now).

I recommend going at twilight. My friends and I had the 7pm slot. As we approached the river, it looked like this.




This is just a ten minute walk away from the shops and traffic of Butler Street. Why don't I come down here all the time?

After all was said and done, though, I'd actually recommend the 6:30 slot. You'll likely get more out of the installation piece itself.

The boat approaches.




...and we're off.



There are a few more photos, more spoilers, over on my flickr set, but I won't post them here.

You should (as per the website instructions) wear shoes that won't mind getting a little wet, clothes that won't mind a scuff of dirt, and ideally not be carrying much on your person, though a small bag can be left in the boat without worry.

What I love about this piece is how totally separate it feels from our city, yet also somehow inherently arisen from it; i.e. no other place could have been the seeding ground for quite this experience. It takes you to somehow a perfect distillation of the beauty of Pittsburgh, yet the fictional layer, "Azimuth", is also completely plausible, and in the heart of the art, the isolation from specificity of place is total.

I also mused to my friends (a grad student and software engineer) that I think doing things like this is critically important for us, especially as people for whom art and fiction aren't part of what we're paid for. Sure, at the beginning of the Ph.D. they have The Grown Ups tell us that seeing concerts and art shows and other "culture" is good for us, like eating our vegetables, and somehow it's easy to develop this sense that the sort of person who actually does this stuff is just trying to suck up to some abstract notion of "well-roundedness" -- and I have, on a few occasions, roamed around an uninspiring gallery, thinking to myself, gee, I'm so well-rounded for looking at art, but, gosh, this is boring.

And then I do something like Azimuth (or Strata, which I wish was still running so I could encourage you to go, but I may still do a post on it) and it reminds me about being human. After two full days of a particularly harrowing stretch of pulling myself out of a research slump, this somehow... revitalized me. Reinspired me, despite (or perhaps due to) having nothing whatsoever to the kind of work I do. It took me out of everything, then put me back, recentered.

Go see Azimuth.

Green Pepper

I've borrowed the line from a friend that Squirrel Hill is "that place you used to live." He was talking to grad students; it's true, as far as I can tell, that we all used to live there, probably in a big house with lots of people, and then we all migrated north to Shadyside, Friendship, and Bloomfield.

But I take to missing Squirrel Hill, from time to time. It's got a youthful festiveness, at least on a sunny afternoon, with its ubiquity of froyo and ice cream, kids with dyed hair playing guitar on the street, families walking to the library, and teenagers near the thrift & record stores. Along with a dose of nostalgia, that gives me the energy, sometimes, to bike over the hill and visit some old favorites -- or, more likely, investigate the many changes to the neighborhood businesses since I lived there. The Panera, Barnes & Noble, and Dozen Bakeshop I remember on the southeast corner of Forbes & Murray have since been replaced with a waffle shop, froyo shop and I-forget-what-else.

Every so often, I hear of changes that bear investigation. A friend told me about Green Pepper, a Korean restaurant. I'd never properly had Korean food before, and I'd been thinking about it recently after a pair of friends had some to sample at their wedding and subsequently took off for a honeymoon in South Korea. So when my friend and frequent dining partner W and I were pondering where to go for dinner on a Sunday -- the constraints being it must be open, and it must be a moderate-length bike ride -- we (+1 other foodie friend, P) decided to try it.

I was not disappointed.

Bike parking was easy; Murray is lined with parking meters.

Apparently they've been around since 2010; I'm disappointed in myself for not trying them sooner.

Hip decor with k-pop music videos playing in the back.

We ordered some "mock girlie", which retrospective investigation reveals is a reading of makkeolli. It tasted to my unrefined palate like unfiltered sake; maybe a bit sweeter.

We ordered the kimchi pancake appetizer, which was deliciously sour and crispy and spicy.

My first ever bibimbap (vegetarian):

Bibimbap, for those of you who have yet to experience this delightful meal, is a huge, piping hot bowl with layered ingredients: rice, vegetables, protein (tofu in my case), and a raw egg. You have to pretty quickly get around to stirring it vigorously so you cook the egg. Some rice at the bottom is bound to scorch. This is wonderful.

With all the accompaniments, the booze, my mealmates' food, and the remainder of our pancake, we could barely fit all the food on the table. It was a glorious feast.

After we had happily stuffed ourselves, we were presented by surprise with a sort of chilled, sweet, tamarindy drink:

What's the little seed on top?, we wondered. Someone guessed pine nut, which I thought was wrong; it looked like some kind of seed to me. P and W each ate theirs, declaring "Yep, pine nut." I was still holding out some skepticism when the waiter came over and one of them asked him. "Pine nut!", he declared. I finished the meal with mine and conceded.

Welcome

This is a blog about Pittsburgh.

There are many such blogs. You may wonder why I chose to make another.

One reason is simple hubris: I want to offer my voice. In addition to being a Pittsburgher, I'm a graduate student, a foodie, an introvert, an enthusiast of geeky things, a feminist, a car-free cyclist, and runner. While that's by no means a unique set of properties, it does give me a particular perspective on the City that I don't frequently see people writing from.

Another reason, or perhaps the other side of the same coin, is that I want to share my experiences with those to whom they might apply. I will review restaurants, but I may also review trails, shows, theaters, events, and entire neighborhoods at the same time. My plan is to write holistically: I'll describe an entire experience, from transportation to food to entertainment, in such a way that a reader could "repeat the experiment" -- provided they're similar to me in certain ways, like living in the East End and owning a bike. A lot of blogs I see -- food blogs in particular -- write about places in the suburbs, for example, that sound lovely, but I have no idea how to get there (perhaps they drove, which doesn't help me) or what else is nearby that I could see and do to make it worth the trip. They lack context; they're an isolated partial experience; they don't seem to apply to me. My goal is to provide that missing context.

I hope you enjoy it.