Monthly Archives: July 2011

Oaksterdam Marijuana Tour on Thrillist

Posted on by under What Others are Saying

Thrillist covered our Oaksterdam University marijuana tour!

From Animal Science to Canadian Studies, there’s a major for virtually everything these days, except teaching a disorderly group of Madison Prep delinquents who’ve placed last in the Virginia Military Games eight years running the real meaning of Payne. To see how people learn without giving Damon Wayans cupcakes filled with laxatives, check out Oaksterdam University’s new monthly public tour, launching today.

Oaksterdam U is an honest-to-god cannabis college in Oakland with a complete pot-based curriculum (including Horticulture, Political Science, Biology, Canna-Business, Methods of Ingestion, etc.) all taught by marijuana-specialized academics who — starting this month — will help lead the campus’s first public tours of the facility, which’ll likely start in the vent above the bathroom stall with everyone holding silenced PP7s. Accommodating one group of 50 every 30 days, these hour-long tours’ll take you from seed to smoke, exploring the campus, growing lab, glass-blowing school, and dispensary, while previewing courses in legality, cooking, hash-making, and bud-tending, presumably taught by former Special Assistant to the Commissioner Frank Robinson. And because no tour of an institution of dank higher learning could end any other way, you’ll finish off the sojourn with a trip to Oaksterdam’s gift shop which is stocked with tees, stonerware, chronic cookbooks, smoking receptacles, and definitely not Miley Cyrus, you haters!

Oh, and if you like what you see on the tour, you can sign up for any of 15 classes, labs, and seminars that range from a weekend-only course-load to an includes-all-15-classes, 13-week semester, though that workload might prove to be a Major Pain.

A Vayable Idea: A Talk on Homelessness and Community Mixer

Posted on by under Events

Last night we had a wonderful event at 111 Minna! Over two hundred people showed up, and we were really delightfully surprised about the great turnout! We love seeing people from our community connecting and mingling with one another!

The event featured Milton Aparicio, our amazing and inspiring guide who lives in a homeless shelter and works tirelessly every day trying to improve the lives of other homeless people. He gave a great talk about realities of homelessness and what we can do to improve the situation. You can check out his walking tour of the Tenderloin here!

Thanks to everyone for taking some time out of their evening to come support us! We’d especially like to thank the people who most graciously and generously made this possible: 111 Minna for letting us use their venue, ZeroCater for donating the delicious food, and Hospitality House and Glide for providing amazing services for the homeless.






Guide of the Week: Learn About Homelessness from Milton Aparicio

Posted on by under Guide Stories

This week’s guide of the week is Milton, who offers educational walking tours and immersion experiences about homelessness. He is a dear friend to us, and we keep in touch every day about ways to educate the public about social and economic issues that affect homelessness.

His story is best told through the above video, but we also want to take some time to tell you the story of how we met him. One afternoon June, our Ambassador of Community, was working at the Glide Foundation soup kitchen, putting forks and napkins on trays for the hundreds of people who poured in for dinner. Working alongside her was Milton, and as they talked, she discovered that Milton himself was homeless but volunteers at Glide every day trying to help others in poverty. Once the entire Vayable team heard Milton’s story, we were all inspired and wanted to get to know him better. The next day, he took us around the Tenderloin, where he told us about the stories of hope and despair that plague so many people in our own city.

As a homeless person himself, Milton has insight on the homeless community that you simply can’t find anywhere else. He embodies what Vayable is all about: he has a unique perspective, has lived an amazing story, and gives you access to a world many people have strong opinions about yet do not understand. We learned about the complexity of the issue and reasons why it’s so difficult to do social reform.

We are humbled and grateful that he is offering his knowledge and time to show the world what it’s really like to be homeless. If you want to meet him in person, you can come out to our event next Wednesday at 111 Minna, where he will be speaking.

Guide of the Week: Create a Farmer’s Market Feast with Sheila

Posted on by under Guide Stories

Our very first guide of the week is Sheila! She offers an experience where you create a feast from the San Francisco Ferry Building farmer’s market! This weekend we at Vayable went on it, and it was tons of fun!

Neighborhood in SF: SoMA

Day gig: Events Ninja @ 500 Startups

What’s your favorite restaurant in SF? Hmmmm….. I haven’t discovered my favorite sushi restaurant yet. I’m going to have to go with Plant on the Embarcadero - they have delicious burgers! I also love Shangrila on Irving Street for top rate Chinese food.

How did you get your start cooking? When I graduated college and started working in NYC, I found that I loved exploring the ethnic foods markets and cooking my own meals. I looked forward to making dinner for friends after work and eventually I started putting this passion for cooking online - thus was born Good Looking Home Cooking.

Tell me about your time cooking through Italy:

One day at work in NYC I got an email from a man named Livio who is the proprietor of a villa, Cefalicchio Country Home, in Southern Italy. He had found my blog and invited me to come and work at his restaurant on the villa for the summer months. I didn’t have to think too long before deciding that I would resign from my job in NYC and buy a one way ticket to Italy. Cefalicchio is a gorgeous country home on a sprawling vineyard. It has a beautiful, newly renovated professional kitchen and a bountiful farm and garden. I had the pleasure of working under the head chef, Elena, and from her I learned a tremendous amount about cooking Southern Italian cuisine and working in a professional kitchen. She taught me how to make a divine three-cheese gnocchi, fried zucchini blossoms, ricotta cheese cake, and a long list of other delicious meals. I quickly came to love proscuitto, Adriatic figs, fresh ricotta cheese, Burrata, and homemade pasta to name a few. I also learned that steam burns suck, and cutting proscuitto is super dangerous! Yep, I had my more than fair share of cuts, burns, slips and Italian/English miscommunications.

Working at Cefalicchio also gave me a strong appreciation for fresh and local food. The Slow Food movement started in Northern Italy, and Livio came from the Slow Food University. It’s gaining ground in the US but we still have a long way to go to help farmers sustain their businesses and encourage everyone from kids to large restaurants to buy and cook locally. Every ingredient that went into every meal at Cefalicchio came from within 25 kilometers. You can taste the difference. In the morning, the gardener, Fabrizio, would bring in buckets of produce from the garden. They would be filled with bright green Adriatic figs, delicate orange zucchini blossoms, or shiny red plump tomatoes…whatever was in season determined our menu. When the summer months dried up at Cefalicchio I ventured to northern Italy to stay with friends I had met along the way. Italy is beautiful in so many ways and since we can’t teleport ourselves there regularly - we’ll have to get together to cook delicious, slow, local Italian meals :)

What’s your favorite dish to cook? My favorite dish to cook is fish. Specifically Ono - Maui style. there is nothing quite like preparing a meal of freshly caught fish with Hawaiian sea salt, and some fresh vegetables. It’s simple, pure and full of flavor and aroma. My second favorite dish to prepare is salmon - salmon is incredibly versatile. Every Friday growing up my Dad would prepare a delicious Shabbat meal of salmon with vegetables, wine and bread. We once talked seriously about opening a restaurant called “Fish, Bread and Wine” and we would just serve various combinations of these three items. That may happen one day, but in the meantime, I’ll continue experimenting. Something fun to do with salmon is crust it - I’ve made blue corn chip crusted salmon, pecan crusted salmon and even wasabi pea crusted salmon!

If there’s one piece of advice you could give to the amateur cooks out there, what would it be? I hear so many people say “I can’t cook” - my one piece of advice is this: Everyone can cook, just be patient, experiment and enjoy it. Don’t try to rush yourself, cook slowly and savour the entire experince from cooking to enjoying the meal with loved ones. That and buy good olive oil! …hmmm, that’s like 4 pieces of advice

Here’s the recipe booklet from our adventure with her last weekend:

Create_a_Farmer’s_Market_Feast.pdf
Download this file

From Hipsters to Tacos: A Comic Book Tour of the Mission

Posted on by under What Others are Saying

By Jenna Paul-Schultz

The group met up at Mission Comics. We’d been promised a drawing tour of the Mission, led of Alfred Twu, one 0f the creators behind the recently released Comic Book Guide to the Mission, and Vayable, a start-up that aims to be the Etsy of tourism. On the site, individuals offer everything from seeing the sunset from a sailboat in the bay to a limo tour of Bay Area pot clubs organized by a “Medical Marijuana Concierge” to the opportunity to live like a homeless person for 24 hours, organized by a man who offers to “help you find food and at least some semblance of shelter.”

“Let’s head over to Dolores Park first,” said Twu . “We can check out the hipsters. Maybe draw them, too.”

There was the couple eating dinner at a portable picnic table set up on the grass, with a whole meal spread out before them. There was a girl dancing alone to the music in her headphones. (“Getting ready for Burning Man?” another member of the tour commented.) And then there were the classic hipsters lounging on the grass, bikes sprawled behind them, sunglasses perched on their noses: perfect characters to star in our brand new comic strips.

It was unclear, though, how many of them were real authentic hipsters, and how many of them were on Vayable’s “Live the Life of a Hipster” tour.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/inthemission/detail?entry_id=92957#ixzz1RqXUMcnQ

 

 

Kicking off Vayablog Guide of the Week

Posted on by under Guide Stories

Hello everyone! We are kicking off a new series of blog posts that features a new guide or experience each week! Guides will tell their stories about their backgrounds, personal involvement in the experience they provide, and the things that them passionate about sharing with others. If you went on a particularly moving or amazing experience through Vayable, we also welcome your posts and stories!

If you want to be featured in the coming weeks, please email us, and we can go from there.

Why Going Homeless for a Day is a Vayable Experience

Posted on by under Vayable Perspective

Last summer I met three of my best friends at the beach in the south of Spain called Zahara de los Atunes, an old tuna fishermen’s town now frequented by Spaniards in the know. We played in the ocean, lounged on the beach, jogged along the beautiful Andalucian coast, and indulged in lengthy meals of gazpacho, seafood and paella. This trip was all about leisure, relaxation and escape. Memorable? Absolutely. Transformative? Not in the least.

Last weekend I joined three others to explore the underbelly of my own hometown: the Tenderloin district in San Francisco-located in the heart of the city and frequented mostly by the poor, disenfranchised and homeless. But like at the Spanish beach town, it was a local, Milton, who brought me here. Milton lives in a local shelter in the Tenderloin and is an advocate for others living without. He walked us through a day in the life of someone living on the streets, lacing our experience with personal anecdotes and deep knowledge of the history, politics and economics of homelessness in San Francisco. He showed us where he serves meals to others, where children receive support and social services, the strategic locations (hint: near the steps of City Hall) to find an outdoor place to sleep, and finally, the shelter where he lives.

When I speak to people about travel experiences in the abstract, the conversation first goes to snorkeling in Hawaii or eating gelato in Italy (both amazing experiences, to be sure). But when I ask people to about their personal travel stories, they recount the experiences that are not only memorable, but transformative and resonant: exploring Angkor Wat with a local tuk-tuk driver supporting his family on $10/week, joining strangers for a local home-cooked meal by an amateur chef, or spending a week in a Bedouin camp in Jordan.

This kind of travel is what travel writer Tony Hiss calls Deep Travel, that feeling that sneaks up on you when you’re in motion, suspended from thoughts of reaching a destination. This experience is not informed or enhanced by infinity pools or 1000 thread-count sheets, but by losing oneself, even momentarily, in the moment of motion and discovery.

On the surface, there is little to be desired about experiencing poverty on the San Francisco streets alongside someone who is living it day-today. Yet, when I reflect on the travel experiences in my life that have most moved me, inspired me and made me feel a strong sense of connection to the world around me, none of them look so appealing at glance: riding a train for two days to spend a week without plumbing on a desolate Hopi reservation; spending five days in the Sahara with nothing more than the clothes on my back and a wool blanket; sleeping on a tiny cot in a stranger’s house in Tallahassee.

And this is what rests at the heart of Vayable: experiences that put us in motion, that give us a strong feeling of connection to the world around us, and that resonate beyond that single moment of pain or pleasure.

-Jamie

To book the homeless experience on Vayable: http://www.vayable.com/experiences/318-spend-a-day-homeless ** All proceeds go to the homeless.