Nearby Adventures: White Center

On the short three block downtown radius in White Center, you can find a Halal shop that seems to serve mostly Ethiopian or Somalian clientèle, a handful of Vietnamese pho places, a Cambodian cafe and a Cambodian supermarket – as well as a few other markets that have a staggering variety of Asian and Mexican groceries, a few shops where you can buy quinceanera dresses, several taco vans and a couple of Mexican restaurants (a new one is opening in the old Indian restaurant), a pawn shop, a classic grill that clearly used to be a drive-in, a biker bar … and oh, I’m sure there are several things I’ve forgotten. There’s also an awesome hardware store where the cashiers are those lovely older ladies that wear bright lipstick and call you “Dear.” All this is a mere two miles from my rather white bread neighborhood.

Yesterday at the Cambodian New Year’s Street Festival, a bunch of strapping white firemen stood in front of the taco van with a handful of very pretty brown skinned teenage girls to listen to the Buddhist monks chant blessings over the crowd. The announcements were in Khmer and English and were followed by traditional Cambodian dancing and Prach Ly, a Cambodian American rapper. We poked our noses in a handful of markets where you could buy little gold Buddhas and candles with the Virgin of Guadalupe on them. It was cold and windy, so we bought lattes in a cafe decorated with a huge dayglo painting of a decaying Cambodian temple scene.

Sure, White Center has too many empty store fronts and there’s an obvious community in need of support. But I love going down there to slurp big bowls of pho, to watch the amazing variety of people go about there business, and to believe in the old myth of a melting pot America.

Side note: I can’t speak for the beef pho, but the chicken pho at Pho Tai is delish.

[tags] White Center, 98106 [/tags]