Lunch break

The summer, when there’s no school, is the major down period at work. I spend my days away from the usual high school home base and at our Japantown office, doing paperwork, organizing my calendar, checking my email obsessively, clicking on photos of my friends on MySpace, spinning around in my chair, and, really, just counting down the hours and minutes when I get to go home. This also means that I can take my lunch break away from my office, not have to worry about students showing up unexpectedly and having to stop eating or having to eat in front of them, and that I can lunch breaks longer than my usual twenty minutes at my desk.

This week, my coworkers and I journeyed over to Chinatown for congee on Monday. Wednesday I had leftover lasagna in the upstairs conference room with Billy and Alex, when two of our summer program students came in with Diego to see us goofing off (Billy was playing with a plastic helicopter-type toy and there was scads of candy across the conference table) and we then proceeding to chat them up.

Thursday Eleanor met me for lunch and we walked over to Fresca on Fillmore, where we had a scrumptious and leisurely meal. We ordered the rotisserie chicken with French fries and the steak salad. The large portion of literally half a chicken, a mound of fried potatoes, and a green salad looked like an overwhelming yet tasty challenge. The chicken, even the tricky breast meat, was succulently moist with rich flavors not just sitting on the skin but permeated throughout the meat. The strips of fried potatoes needed no sauce accompaniment to mask the simply elegant flavors of fresh potatoes and chopped garlic. The steak salad was good too, with strong flavors of a lemony cream dressing with buttery ripe slices of avocado, although the steak was a little tough. The tiny olive rolls that came in the obligatory bread basket were also warm and delicious with a generous smudge of the soft, fresh butter. After stuffing our bellies full of goodness, we walked back through Japantown stopping at Ichiban and the Japanese Historical Society where my students volunteered and gave us a tour of the place.

And, Friday, Billy and I split a club sandwich with garlic fries from May’s Café in the Japantown mall. It’s my safe fallback meal. We ran into our students again there, where they offered me some of their red bean pastry shaped like a fish, and they said they would join us for lunch at the office. Billy’s ranch dressing and yellow mustard concoction went surprisingly well with the fries. Our reasoning for sharing a sandwich was that it would act as our lunchtime snack, since we would be heading out to a barbeque later in the afternoon.

And, we did just a little after our lunch snack. We went over to Dolores Park, where the other youth organizations were hosting a barbeque for their students. There was a pie eating contest, a relay race, and tons of burgers and barbequed chicken. I helped myself to a burger topped with plenty of crunchy pickles, and remembered what the texture of processed cheese in my mouth felt like. I also had a couple of chicken pieces, two Capri Sun questionable fruit drinks, and a brownie. It was a little chilly in the park but any reason to leave the office was a good one.