Goodbye Noe Valley

San Francisco in the evening and the nightfall...


I was in San Francisco this week, and spent half a day to completely move out of the apartment I lived in since 1997. The apartment was in Noe Valley, still my favorite part of town in San Francisco. I kept my place there for various reasons, subletting it for the past few months, but the opportunity came my way to move into a new place in San Francisco with less hassles, so I decided to say goodbye to good old Noe Valley.

The apartment itself wasn't perfect, as it was on the ground floor with little light, and fixtures were very old, some probably dating back to half a century ago (they have their own charms, but not in the sense of convenience.) The ceiling was too low, and I could hear too much of the neighbors upstairs.

Still, it was my home, and home it was for close to a decade. So, it was with a pang of sadness that I left the place for the very last time.

It was a home for me and my two cats; one now deceased and another adopted. I have great memory of this place, especially of the first 3 years while my friends from New York lived in San Francisco (they all went back.)

Goodbye Noe Valley as my neighborhood...I will still go back there for a visit, but not to be at home again.

The Edge of the World

View from my hotel room in Istanbul
It snowed and snowed and snowed...


On my last trip to to Tokyo, I flew over Istanbul to meet with our business partner for a day. I flew on Lufthansa via Munich, and on that long-haul flight, watched a German film called "The Edge of the World". The film description on the program didn't say much, except that it was a film about a Turkish family in Germany and their journey, and I thought it was more than appropriate to watch it on my way to Istanbul.

The film was about the crimes and how such crimes are dealt with by people who are not directly involved in the crimes...in this case, a son whose father became an accidental murderer, and a mother whose daughter was killed by being too involved with her lover's affairs. I was especially touched with the process of healing leading to the ultimate forgiveness by the mother.

The film was inter-cultural, but ultimately what resonated was the universal humanity. And I thought Istanbul suited so well as the backdrop for this film. It's unique mixture of the west and the east is just what I think of Istanbul: a city with beautiful European architectures juxtaposed with impressive mosques; a very liberal party town with some women in scarfs and veils; wealthy urbanites walking alongside old men pulling garbage carts.

Istanbul may really be the "Edge of the world", in the sense that it is the "edge" of Asia and the "edge" of Europe. If that was the intension of this film's title, it could not be more true.

With few films that I've watched so far in the past few months, I thought this topped...but then, the situation could not have been more perfect, as I was on my way to Istanbul on Lufthansa.