Year of the Dragon
Started: 2024-03-10 21:23:09
Submitted: 2024-03-11 23:17:43
Visibility: World-readable
Ringing in the lunar new year in Chinatown; also the Conservatory of Flowers
To celebrate the Year of The Dragon we attended the Chinese New Year Parade in Chinatown.
I wanted to eat at Enjoy Vegetarian (the same place we ate last year), but their open hours for dinner overlapped with the parade, so instead we headed there for lunch, then headed out to Golden Gate Park on a bumpy #5 bus, crowded with everyone in the city trying to get to the park on the bright sunny spring afternoon, which turned out to be the warmest day of the year so far.
Our objective for the middle of the afternoon was the Conservatory of Flowers, which advertises itself as "the oldest public wood-and-glass conservatory in North America". (This carefully-calibrated superlative which makes me wonder about older private conservatories or those made with materials other than wood and glass.)
Inside the conservatory the space was divided into five large rooms, each calibrated to a slightly different tropical climate. We entered into a large atrium where the trees towered high above us that I could barely see the roof far above. Most of the trees had a label, and some had more information about the history of a particular specimen on display. The main atrium had a slow-growing pygmy date palm that was more than a hundred years old, climbing gracefully into the canopy on a spindly trunk before branching out into the delicate fronds characteristic of the date palm.
The first room to the left of the main atrium was packed with potted plants, with a sign explaining that this was representative of a Victorian potted plant conservatory where planting individual plants in pots allowed each plant to be moved into and off display to curate the desired effect for the indoor garden. I admired each of the plants I saw, but there were so many of them on display I couldn't give each one the attention it deserved. I wanted to take inspiration from the garden for my own indoor plants, but I lack the chaos energy necessary to pack potted plants as closely together as this garden did. I still buy my plants individually, and there's no way I could scale up to this level (but I still want to try).
In the potted plant room a conservatory staff member invited us to smell a plant that "smelled like death", which turned out to be a small flower (its shape reminding me somewhat of a point-to-point microwave antenna) growing from a thin stalk that emitted a pungent smell out the open end. (It was not a corpse flower, but a less-famous relative, which also used its odor to attract flies and other insects as pollinators.)
One corner of the conservatory had a couple of shelves with potted plants for sale, so I could have expanded my collection immediately, but I didn't see anything that I wanted to carry around until I got home.
The room to the right of the main atrium had two parallel walkways rising above the planter beds, as if we were walking higher in the canopy of a tropical forest. The weathered concrete making up the planter boxes gave me the impression of an old, aged installation in a tropical environment, kept from becoming a ruin only by constant vigilance. And that was, to a large extent, what it really was; except that the tropical environment was localized to the climate-controlled area under the conservatory roof, kept warm by the greenhouse (ventilated on the sides by a series of louvers connected to an automatic control motor that looked a hundred years newer than the building) and kept wet by the irrigation system that seemed like it must be lurking, just out of sight, to keep the air so humid.
The last room we visited featured a large pond with lily pads and sculptures of tree roots (built out of reinforced concrete) growing out of the ground giving air plants a perch to grow. I struggled to get a good shot of the interior spaces; every angle was crowded with plants (and often people) and I only had my normal-angle zoom lens so I couldn't get a really wide angle to capture the immersive nature of the interior spaces. (It also didn't help that I didn't realize my lens was set to manual focus until half-way through the conservatory, so I took the pictures out of focus and struggled to enhance them to the point where they were legible.)
The Conservatory of Flowers was an impressive indoor garden, packed with plants and speckled with flowers.
We exited the Conservatory of Flowers into the bright afternoon sun in Golden Gate Park, then walked to the Koret Children's Playground to let Julian burn off some energy.
From the playground we caught the N-Judah line to Union Square to check into our hotel for the night. The idea was that I could go to the parade while anyone else who didn't wish to attend could hang out in the hotel room. No one else in my family was interested in watching the parade, despite its cultural significance, so I headed out on foot to catch the parade, which had already started and was making its way around Union Square.
I swung wide around the parade route, walking parallel to the route on Sutter Street until I reached Grant Ave, then jogging a block north to Bush (past the Chinatown gate) and eventually found a place to stand on Kearny. My spot was less than a block from 555 California, formerly known as the Bank of America Building, now 30% owned by a disgraced former president who is inexplicably running again. When I arrived the evening light was illuminating the tower; as the parade progressed the shadows grew deeper and the light faded, leaving the darkened tower rising above the street, lit sporadically from within; a crenellated monolith like Orthanc looming above us.
When I arrived at the parade and found a place to stand on Kerney Street, where my view was only partially obstructed by people in front of me, there were a group of California Highway Patrol vehicles stopped in the middle of the parade route, frozen in place by the parade because the parade had stalled, their uniformed occupants standing outside the vehicles chatting. Just ahead on the street (to my left as I stood watching the parade) the highway patrol marching band marched in place and played, waiting for the parade to resume. After a few minutes a small ATV equipped as an ambulance squeezed by on the left side of the street, heading north along the parade route; and a few minutes later it came back with a patient in the back. After a few more minutes the marching band started moving, then the highway patrol officers got back into their vehicles and followed the band down the parade route. The wait felt interminable, but the timestamps on my photos and social media feed suggest it was maybe 15 minutes.
The first part of the parade was dominated by local political leaders. The public defender had a couple of people in a car, followed by the city attorney, and then a whole team of people marching behind the DA's banner, with the DA finally following in a convertible, waiving to the crowd as she passed. ("Oh, Brooke," an older white person said next to me as the DA approached, "We like her.") The parade stalled again for a few minutes while City Attorney David Chiu was right in front of me. Everyone was identified by the office they currently held, rather than any higher office they were running for. This distinction was important for supervisor Ahsha Safai, who currently represents district 11 (my old district) and is running for mayor. It was also important for Congressman Adam Schiff, who won the primary for Senate a couple of weeks after the parade, and is heading to the general election in November.
An hour into the parade a couple of ATVs pulled up right in front of me with a team of people to set off firecrackers. They waited for the right point in the parade, then (with eye and ear protection) pulled out a long string of firecrackers from a fireproof box on the back of one of the vehicles, attached it to the end of a pole, carried the pole into the middle of the street, held it above a wire cage to keep the pyrotechnics contained, and used a long hand-held fuse to set off the fuse tied to the bottom of the strand of firecrackers. The string of firecrackers erupted into a long continuous explosion (which may have only been thirty seconds long). Everyone watching the parade pulled out their cameras to record the event. When the firecrackers were finished a team of firefighters advanced on the pile of red paper wrapping left over after the firecrackers to stomp them out to make sure nothing else would burn.
Awkwafina showed up in the parade as the grand marshal, carrying a few stuffed pandas to advertise Kung Fu Panda 4. A grade-school-aged girl in front of me was very excited to see Awkwafina.
The second half of the parade was dominated by corporate and organizational floats and school groups, with a handful of few marching bands. Many of the elementary schools had tiny lion dance teams; one dressed the kids as a set of mahjong tiles. UC Davis and Cal Poly were the two university-level marching bands, plus a bunch of high school (and at least one middle school) bands.
Possibly-embattled mayor London Breed appeared in the middle of the parade, riding in a historic convertible surrounded by what looked like a phalanx of security. This level of security seemed out of place in the otherwise-friendly parade; none of the other political office holders (or the one celebrity) had any visible security at all.
There were multiple lion dance teams from various organizations, to the point where I had trouble keeping track of them all (if I could even read the description on the tiny sign they carried at the front of the group). Most of them wove back and forth across the parade route, and many of them looped back on themselves. Some groups had two lions that danced back and forth, and each leader had to guide their lion, snaking across the street behind them, facing off with but ultimately avoiding the other lion, which made me think of a PVP version of the game Snake.
My favorite local transit agency BART brought its friendly-faced avatar to the parade, surrounded by a cloud of bubbles that made it harder to photograph the vehicle than it might have been. (I tried to color-correct all of the pictures I took, to account for the amber glare of the sodium-vapor street lights, but there was only so much blue light I could pull out of the pictures before they started to look weird.)
There was a Tesla Cybertruck in the parade, which was only the second Cybertruck I've seen in real life. (The first was earlier in the day, when it passed me at speed driving north on 280.) In person it looks like a badly-rendered approximation of a truck from an early-nineties video game where they could only afford to render a dozen polygons.
Salesforce had a float that showed a dragon wrapping around their eponymous tower.
There was one last lion dance in the parade, an epic apparatus carried by scores of people that might have been a hundred meters long, lit from within by electric lights powered from a generator in the back of a pickup truck that followed the procession. This was long enough and unwieldy enough that the lion barely even zig-zagged across the street; it couldn't turn back on itself or double back (or loop under itself, as some ambitious groups had done).
And then the lion passed me, and the rhythmic sound of the gongs (cha-cha cha cha) faded away in the distance, as the smoke from firecrackers hung in the air, and the parade was over.
After the parade I walked further into Chinatown in search of a snack. (The timing of the parade meant I didn't have time to eat before the parade, aside from my large lunch earlier in the day.) Most of the restaurants along Grant Ave were closed, and the ones that weren't had long lines, though I wasn't really interested in a full meal. The street was crowded with people who had just come from the parade. The tourist shops were open, and some of them had tables set up next to the sidewalk selling a variety of firecrackers. On the sidewalk people were setting off the firecrackers the size of a grain of rice that one throws at the ground for a loud crack! At the corner of Grant Ave and Washington Street the entire intersection had been taken over for larger louder firecrackers and sparklers and fireworks. The air was thick with the smell of sulfur and the crack and pop of the firecrackers echoed off the buildings above the narrow street.
At this corner I found Magical Ice Cream, a tiny storefront crowded with people offering what they called "rolled ice cream", which turned out to be a dessert made to order by pouring liquid ice cream onto a frozen surface, mixing it with flavors, allowing it to flash freeze into a thin layer, then scraping up the layer into a roll and placing it in a serving cup.
I had the "lychee and longan" flavor, which mixed a lychee and a longan fruit in the batter and topped the ice cream rolls with more lychee and longan, plus a squirt of whipped cream. I stepped back into the street to eat my dessert, bypassing the fireworks display in the middle of the street to walk another block north on Grant Ave before looping back. I ended up walking past the fortune cookie factory on Ross Alley, and a guy standing out front gave me a circle of fortune cookie, still hot from the oven but not molded into the distinctive fortune cookie shape, and I used it to eat my ice cream. The rolled ice cream was more of an interesting curiosity than it was a dessert I'd eat frequently, but I did appreciate the experience.
I caught the T line one stop south from Chinatown to Union Square and returned to my hotel for the night, then drove back to Santa Cruz in the morning.
I took even more pictures from the Conservatory of Flowers and the Chinese New Year Parade than I could include above, at Photos on 2024-02-24.
