About Town – San Diego – October 12, 2006

Seriously, what it is about some cities that some people get all misty-eyed and pee-in-their-pants excited about? San Diego is one of those towns. Perhaps it’s in the second tier, but it’s still, but it’s still up there. Why?

My past experiences in San Diego lead me to believe it was a confusing and overrated city, but I felt we needed to try to understand it better. SO, instead of having any particular agenda for the day, we decided to pick a couple “ordinary” places to go to, and see what what we would see as we travelled to them, and poked around the area.

Chu-Wan has put out a call on babyhome.com.tw looking for Taiwanese ex-pats living in the San Diego area, hoping to find some good, home-style cooking. The response came back, “It’s not like we live in Los Angeles. There’s nothing here.” However, a restaurant called “168” was recommended, and it turned out to be inside the 99 Ranch supermarket. They also said that in the nearby area were tea shops and other things of Asian interest, so we headed off.

We didn’t have breakfast (the free continental breakfast at the hotel wasn’t worth bothering with) so I was quite hungry. It was too early when we arrived at 99 Ranch for 168 to be open, and they didn’t have posted hours of operation, so we didn’t know how the wait would be. We tried scouring the area and discovered several tea shops (the kind that serve lumps in their tea and charge extra for the opportunity to choke yourself), a few Japanese restaurants and a lot of Korean restaurants. Most of them were still unopened and so we ended up eating at Original Tommy’s Hamburgers. Which purports to be World Famous, but we’d never heard of them. In any case, any hamburger joint that opens at 7:00AM is starting out on the right foot already.

Inside we learned the first element of Tommy’s world-wide fame: Everything is served with chili on it. Now I love a good chili cheese-dog, so I figured if their chili is that good, then I might as well try it on a dog instead of a burger.

The first problem came in trying to communicate. The woman seemed to speak English. (If you think all the service people in Phoenix are all Mexican, or Mexican descended, these days, go to San Diego, it was significantly more prevalent.) Really, her English seemed quite good, but she could not understand the customers. It went like this:

“I’d like 2 Chili Cheese-Dogs.”

“With cheese?”

“Yeah.”

“Everything on them? Chili, tomato, onion, mustard, pickle?”

“No. No tomato, no mustard.” (Who freakin’ puts mustard on a chili dog?)

“So, 2 hot dogs, tomato and mustard only.”

“No. No tomato and no mustard.”

“Tomato and mustard only, then?”

“No. I do not want tomato. I do not want mustard. Everything else is fine.”

“Oh, you want everything on them.”

“No. Everything except tomato and mustard.”

“Tomato and mustard only?”

At this point Chu-Wan chips in, “Just tell her what you do want.”

I tried that, it had similar comic results, but finally we got it worked out and I got what I asked for.

I didn’t feel so bad when the next customer came in and ordered a cheeseburger, no onion and she replied, “Hamburger with onion only.” …and he went through a similar routine.

After we got our food, we discovered the second think Tommy’s is “famous” for – “You don’t have to ask for double helpings of toppings, be cause we put double on everything automatically.” My cheese-dogs were swimming in chili and onions – particularly onions.

Anyway, final analysis: It was fair.

Apart from the Asian-themed restaurants, the area comprised nothing more than the “usual” stores and businesses you’d find in any other city. Used car dealers, corporate offices, Sears, furniture stores… nothing special.

We headed to the nearest Costco so I could photograph it and, as Michelle was being a bit of a pest, we put her in the Ikea playground for an hour (Ikea and Costco being in the same parking lot) while we wasted some time in Ikea. We hoped playing with other kids might wear her out a bit. It didn’t.

Next we headed towards Point Loma, which is part of the Cabrillo National Monument. Point Loma is the bit of California that juts out as a small peninsula down at the bottom just by Mexico. It’s also an active military base/cemetary and we go stuck during a funeral.

Sweeping views of the sea and an old lighthouse are at lands end, which are interesting. Had I lived a hundred years ago, I think I could have been a lighthouse keeper in a place like this.

We went down to the tide pools but it was high tide and they weren’t there. There were still people watching for whales, but it was a little too late in the season.

Across the harbor we could see the carrier USS Midway, which is now a museum, and on this side of the harbor a submarine was in the dock as well as another smaller military vessel. F-15s were flying training flights in the area. My telephone wasn’t good enough to get very good pictures of them, and the submarine was mostly obscured by the buildings at the dock. Although I tried to match this plane’s silhouette against US Fighters, the shape of the nose and tail just doesn’t quite look like a proper F-15. Can anyone confirm or deny this identification?

Later than night we returned to 99 Ranch and ate at 168. I had some fairly authentic beef noodle soup, and Chu-Wan seemed to enjoy eating not only her own food, but the kids as well. I was pleased to see that Michelle actually spoke some Chinese to the owner of the restaurant. He thought she was really cute and kept saying so, but I don’t think he gave us a “cute kid” discount.

Was having trouble with maintaining a solid internet connection using the wired internet in the hotel, so I grabbed an Airport wireless link someone had open in the area. (I assume he must be an Apple user.) He also had his iTunes shared. Wow! 126.77GB of music. That’s impressive. They don’t even make an iPod that could hold it. That was over 70 days of music. My 20Gb seems diminutive by comparison.

Pity he didn’t have anything worth listening to.

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