Culture
The International Maritime Center (IMC), which has been at the Port of Oakland in some form since 1964, provides a variety of services for seafarers while they are in port, such as shuttling them to local shopping centers, selling them discounted phone cards, or helping wire money home—anything to make their lives easier.
For the past five years, Fix Without Dix (FWOD), an Oakland-based biking group for girls and transgendered people, has hosted Wednesday night social bike rides throughout the city. Sunday’s race, dubbed “The Tumbleweed Race,” was their first foray into hosting co-ed races, but certainly wasn’t their first time hosting an alley cat race.
If the phrase “gourmet cheese store” conjures up an image of the food elite batting around unpronounceable words in a stodgy storefront, check out Temescal’s Sacred Wheel. The shop, which opened in January on a quiet corner at 49th and Shattuck, offers mostly local cheeses in a hip atmosphere.
Summer is the time for cooling drinks, frozen concoctions and delicious bite-sized treats, and Oakland North hit the streets to find some of the tastiest and most original summer snacks in town. Check out the best of our finds this weekend, before summer is (almost) over!
Meet the next watering hole in our new bar series, The Nightcap: Cafe Van Kleef. Back in 2000, it was the only bar on the block. Thanks to owner Peter Van Kleef and his unique way of decorating the bar, it has only grown in popularity since.
Baltimore native Katie Baum has brought the snowball across the country and given it a very East Bay spin with her company, Skylite Snowballs. “For me, it’s what you do in the summer,” Baum said. “It’s what you crave.”
The Bay Area News Group (BANG), which owns The Oakland Tribune, The Contra Costa Times, and several other Bay Area dailies and weeklies, has announced that this November it will consolidate nearly a dozen of its East Bay papers under two mastheads as part of a rebranding effort.
Non-native English speakers are learning the language and acquiring job skills at The English Center in Jack London Square.
This weekend, organizers of the second national conference of BUTCH Voices, a grassroots organizations dedicated to all self-indentified “Masculine of Center” people, had over 450 attendees at the Oakland City Center Marriott.