HEADING EAST: JULY 16, 2006

To Chinatown:

On this brilliant and scorching Sunday, we first rode to Chinatown. A number of people who we surveyed wondered whether Chinatown was part of downtown or East Oakland. We thought what better way to find out than to ask people there! The area was full of hustle and bustle---Oakland’s Chinatown covers about 8 city blocks, roughly from 12^th to 7^th Street and Harrison and Broadway. It is less tourist-driven than San Francisco’s Chinatown and is filled with myriad shops, tea houses, herbalists, grocers and restaurants as well as many residential buidlings. Chinatown is now a pan-Asian community including Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, Filipino, Japanese, Cambodian, Laotian, Mien, Thai, Samoan and others. Check out the excellent Wikipedia entry to learn about Chinatown's history and development.