Day 2 of my bout with food poisoning -- nothing like it to ruin an otherwise excellent weekend. The likely culprit:: the lechon-BBQ-palabok combo at one of the food booths at the Fiesta Filipina at the Civic Center -- unfortunately, I can't remember the name, but it was one of the restaurants on Mission. Because we -- my friends Jeff and Kumi and their daughter "Baby Maia," which is what Izzy calls her, and Izzy, fortunately escaped unscathed -- were there on the second day, and ate early at 11 a.m., I strongly suspect the food was cooked the day before and left out overnight and sitting in the hot sun.
At least I slept like a log last night -- none of the fevers and chills and nausea and lack of appetite of the day and night before. But I'm still not completely settled in other ways, which I won't go into here -- suffice it to say that I'm taking a big chance going to the office today. (But I did manage to drag myself out of bed yesterday to have lunch with my friend Cherie, whom I haven't seen in years -- unfortunately I started feeling dizzy before lunch ended, and had to run back home.)
Fiesta Filipina was a bit of a bust -- it's never as exciting somehow as the Yerba Buena celebration, or the ones that used to be held in Union Square. The usual booths were there: the banks, the remittance agencies, the video stores, the assisted-living condos, the spinal examinations, the funeral homes, and so on. But one difference that one begins to see more and more were those specifically for the second generation: the two hiphop radio stations, and tons of "Pinoy Pride" clothing booths.
In any case, there wasn't much for Izzy to do; she got a free balloon from State Farm but it slipped from its stroller moorings. The day before, however, we were at the Bay Area Discovery Museum in Sausalito (which I discovered, much to my surprise, was only 15 minutes away from where we lived), and Izzy had a grand time.
It wasn't because of the main exhibit, "Do You Know The Way To Sesame Street?," which (as I told Izzy) would be doubly exciting because there were two generations of Sesame Street viewers to enjoy it. (It premiered in the US about 13 months before I was born, but I don't think we had a TV in the Philippines until 1974 or so.) I'm not sure she particularly liked sitting in Big Bird's nest and sitting on the stoop of the 123 Sesame Street (yes, part of the set is recreated in the museum) though; the exhibit is really geared to the adult, with mini-biographies of the cast, a video of the pilot episode, clips of Paul Simon singing "Me and Julio down by the Schoolyard" with the kids (what!? No Stevie Wonder doing "Superstition?!"). I think she was also a little freaked out by this interactive section -- we had seen something like it already at the Children's Museum of Boston, with the Arthur cast -- where you sit in front of a screen and it projects you and Elmo (or Zoe, or the Count) on the monitor, talking to each other.
The highlight for Izzy, really, was the big gravel box outside, where she shoveled rocks into a Tonka dump truck. That and the Niman Ranch hotdog she had for lunch (she's been unable to digest hotdogs before -- she's deathly allergic to soy, and there might have been something in it -- so I was pleased to see that the cafe food, being in Marin County after all, was aggressively organic).