Travel and Friendships

This post has been sitting in very disjointed draft form on my blog for nearly a year, and I just re-discovered it and decided to tidy it up enough to publish! I had started writing as usual about activities in Berkeley with friends, specifically some of the fun I had with my Mexican friend Herzonia who came to visit for a week. But the post also became a reflection on the opportunities for new friendships and richness in my life afforded by the kind of travel we are doing now, where we are living in a new place for 6 months rather than being short term tourists. I have taken the opportunity to get involved in various community activities and it gives me much more of a sense of what my life might be like if I lived somewhere other than Melbourne.

I recall observing how my mother’s horizons contracted as she grew older. In later life she often remarked she had more friends in Springvale (where the main Jewish cemetery is located in Melbourne) than anywhere else. She often expressed a “been there, done that” attitude and rarely agreed to try new things, which might have been a sign that she was a bit depressed. I also observed that I was heading in a similar direction. I love the familiarity of Melbourne and the comfort of my oldest friends. We grew up together and know each other’s family and personal histories, and have shared a lifetime’s experiences. I miss my friends a lot when I am away, as well as missing the landscape of Melbourne and Australia.

But these last couple of years, when we have spent 6 months at a time living elsewhere, I have had the unexpected pleasure and freedom of making entirely new friends. I may refer to my “new best friend” somewhat lightly, but my experience of being in a new city where Barry is at work and I am not has been totally transformed by my fortune in meeting new people who have opened new worlds to me. New friends have given me the opportunity to participate in new activities and meet other new friends through shared participation, rather than a shared history. I highly recommend it!

Herzonia -see top photo.

Last year, meeting Herzonia transformed my experience of Mexico City. She features in many of the Mexican blog posts from 2007. We exercised together, cooked and shopped together, and hung out a lot, always talking, talking, talking. How great that she could come to Berkeley for a week to do more of the same with me (and a lot of talking with Barry too) at our rented house.


I have posted text and photos elsewhere about our Napa Valley winery visits. We also did fair bit of wandering about the Berkeley Hills and one early afternoon took a long and at times quite steep walk with Cheyla and Nico, anthropologist friends of Herzonia’s and their extremely cheerful baby (see the photo). We walked in Strawberry Canyon, a nature reserve right at the top of the UC campus. I skipped my swim for this glorious hike – it was a crisp but sunny day and the views over the East Bay were absolutely stunning. I had known there was a pool and recreation centre up here, but it is a bit too far to walk from home. Without the prompting and the company, I would not have made it up there, and as we spent more than 2 hours on our round trip I am glad we opted to drive to the starting point, as it would probably have taken the best part of another hour mostly uphill to get back home. We were able to pick Barry up from campus on our way back, too.

Sonya (on the right in this photo)

If I have made another new best friend in Berkeley, it is Sonya. I first met her at the JCC Senior’s exercise class I found in my first week at Berkeley – she went out of her way to say hello to me as a newbie in the class and I asked if she had time for a coffee afterwards. We had a lovely chat and I mentioned my blog to her, but then I went off to NYC for a couple of weeks and she went to visit her husband’s daughter and a new baby in Amsterdam. When we next met, she had read and enjoyed some of last year’s Mexico blog entries, and one thing led to another, and we had coffee together most weeks, then she suggested I might enjoy the slightly more rigorous seniors' exercise classes at the Albany YMCA, which I eventually managed to try out after my October trip East. We took to going together a couple of times each week, and usually Sonya came by to pick me up on her way down there – again, I would probably not have found out about it as it is a bit far to walk (especially uphill going home after a vigorous hour and a quarter in class!) So it has been really different and very enjoyable to have someone to go to classes with.

After class Sonya often had errands to run so I frequently accompanied her, whether to the Tokyo Fish Market , Monterey market, Andronico’s, the Berkeley Bowl – I can always use a visit to a produce market, planned or not! And a couple of times we had lunch at a local restaurant or back home at my place, helping showcase and devour the bountiful harvest from the garden at Santa Barbara Road. (There is always scope to use some fresh figs and tomatoes to tizzy up a salad). Philip and Sonya invited Barry and me to dinner one evening at their beautiful house a bit further up in the Berkeley Hills, very Japanese by design, though it was not when they first moved in. I had dropped Sonya off once or twice when we were using my car rather than hers, and she had observed with a degree of bemusement the horrible truth about my navigational skills and inability to reliably distinguish left from right. She told me to turn right and I promptly turned left, at which point she perhaps also began to realize why I couldn't always follow our dance routines in class.

When we were invited to dinner I got some Google Maps instructions for driving and walking there from our house, and set off one afternoon to explore the neighbourhood on foot, using a combination of these instructions and the Berkeley Path Wanderers' Map, hoping to discover some new paths or steps I hadn't seen before while getting a bit more familiar with this part of the Hills so I wouldn't get totally lost again driving there in the evening. I can report partial success: some of the paths had however disappeared, and, as I had discovered some time ago when I tried to follow the paths through Codornices Park, the Paths that seem to enter a park are not clearly marked and I got quite lost wandering through some uncharted territory. I met several deer (see this one who stood still for an instant before bounding off), several other walkers , and some very friendly cats, and found my way home via some really spectacular views. It is so beautiful around the Berkeley Hills, I can see why housing is so unaffordable here!

How I got involved in new activities - Seniors' exercise classes, Spanish conversation groups and the East Bay Jewish Folk Chorus.

In the various activities I do at home, from my U3A “Why Is It So?”(formerly Geology and the Universe) physical sciences class which I love, to my regular swims and assorted senior’s exercise classes, I participate on my own. As I mostly worked full time through all but 3 of my 37 years of professional life, and spent several periods of Ben’s early childhood years overseas, I haven’t had a history of sharing leisure activities with women friends other than going to the movies, or occasional theatre, concerts etc. I didn't start out with any friends in my choir at home (Canto Coro) though I became friendly with the altos and other committee members over the time I was singing. Likewise in my exercise classes – I have often felt vaguely envious of women who seem to do these activities with their friends. Different working patterns than those of my old friends dictated that we didn't do many daytime activities together, only weekend or evening cultural events.

My involvement in activities in Berkeley has been a bit of a random walk. I noticed the JCC about 20 minutes from our house on a walk on our very first day in Berkeley, checked to see that JCC did indeed denote Jewish Community Centre, then Barry noticed in the Daily Planet (a free weekly Berkeley Newspaper that we picked up in the local deli where we ate that night) that they ran seniors' exercise classes, so I went to one to check it out. There I met Sonya - see the paragraphs above for more about her. In the same issue of the Daily Planet there was some information about a Spanish Conversation class at the North Berkeley Senior’s Centre, so I went along to one of those sessions, where I overheard Judy, a fellow student, wondering aloud where she had seen the teacher before, concluding that it was at The East Bay Jewish Folk Chorus. At the end of the session, I asked Judy about this choir, which seemed right up my alley. She told me it was about to start a new season rehearsing at the JCC. She gave me a contact number and I shortly began singing there, though it was quite difficult at first because I don’t read music and most members do. However, Achi, the director, sends out most of the music in MP3 files as well as the lyrics, so I was able to download the alto parts to Barry’s iPod and practise while walking about Berkeley exploring or heading to campus or the JCC for activities. Here is a picture taken at the choir's Sukkah party in 2008

After my August 2008 trip to NYC to visit Ben and Lissy just a week after we arrived in Berkeley, I resumed the JCC exercise class. I asked several other women in the class if they had time for a coffee, and discovered Anne who spends up to half of the year in Mexico. By this time I knew the Spanish conversation class I had tried was too elementary for me, so I asked her about more advanced opportunities for Spanish conversation. She introduced me first to the small North Berkeley Grupito del Norte, which meets informally in my immediate neighbourhood. It is a recently-formed offshoot of the Tertulia which is more often held in Oakland, and which has a more formal structure - a pot luck dinner and a discussion around some prescribed reading. In pretty short order I discovered my Spanish was adequate to participate in both groups and found myself with an activity every Tuesday evening – and also was speaking to Anne mostly in Spanish and began car-pooling to the Oakland meetings with her and Karl, a piano teacher who took some advanced Spanish Lessons with Anne, who lives nearby and is a regular attendee also.

I hosted several Grupito meetings – I like to do this and it removes the need to drive and the eminent probability of getting lost – and figured out I had just one chance to host a tertulia before we left Berkeley in 2008, so volunteered to do this a couple of weeks before we left.
Herzonia was able to be present at this tertulia, where the reading I had selected for discussion was from a BBC Mundo Spanish web site, an investigation of the drug trade in Mexico. Her presence at the meeting was very much appreciated by the 15 or so attendees, many of whom specifically remarked on the night or emailed me later on how good it was to have a native Spanish speaker who spoke with such clarity and at a speed we could all understand, who, as someone from the very place we were discussing, had a different and highly interesting perspective. We had rather too many desserts that evening, and at one stage I feared we wouldn't have enough mains, so I reheated some chicken cacciatore I had made just in case. In the end we of course had lots of leftovers, but that’s the way the Jewish mother in me always caters for a crowd!

I guess I have thrown myself in the deep end, with really great outcomes for me. I have certainly learned that wholehearted participation in whatever activity I undertake is usually appreciated by the existing members of the group – my choir and the Grupito and Tertulia people all seemed genuinely sorry to see me leave and expressed delight in the prospect of our return here next year, at which point I fully intend to take up all these activities and my friendships again. We will just have to find another house in the same neighbourhood!

This and That, Here and There

I am finally getting around to blogging again: today is February 22, 2009, and I have been back home in Melbourne for about 6 weeks. I had 3 draft posts waiting on this blog, of which most of this post is the earliest, but in my final weeks in Berkeley and while in New York for 3 weeks from mid-December to early January, and since returning, I didn't get around to making blog time. As has happened in the past, I was too busy doing blog-worthy stuff to have any time to blog! So I will try to edit and post these drafts in the next few days if I can, and add at least one post about Ben and Lissy's spectacularly wonderful January 3rd wedding and the horrendous bushfires in Victoria in the past few weeks. This will mean that there are some weird mixtures of tenses and time warps in the posts - please forgive me!

The other bit of recent news is that my 8-month-old laptop was stolen from the house in early February, and as a result I have lost a lot of the photos I might have otherwise posted. (I had backed them up on flash drives, but these were stored in my laptop bag, which was stolen at the same time! I will have to see whether some remain in my camera, though I did delete a lot after downloading .)




And so onto the first of the old draft entries, which seems to have been drafted at the end of November...

When I am writing this blog, I spend all my time in Edit or Preview mode, and usually take only a cursory glance at the published blog, and I don't regularly follow many other blogs. So I only just realized that if you click on any photo in the blog, you see it enlarged - I hope you already knew this! I just did this with the photo in the last entry of crowds arriving on campus for the game, and was most impressed with how well it picked up the people!

As the time for me to leave Berkeley for New York is approaching, there is a large rush of activities. We have had theatre at the Berkeley Rep , with another one to come, dinners with friends at their houses, our house or out, 2 winery visits, the upcoming visit of Herzonia, my Mexican friend who transformed my experience in Mexico City in 2007. The Thanksgiving Holiday happens this week, and we will be going down to Santa Clara to celebrate with Jackie and Bob Schwartzer and their extended family - Barry's cousin originally from London, Barbara Levy and husband Larry and Jackie's sister Karen will all be there, plus of course the two small children.


The play we saw last Wednesday evening was "Joe Turner's Come and Gone", which was an excellent play by August Wilson, one of a cycle of plays he has written abut the Black experience in America. The set was outstanding and most of the acting was very good, though we do sometimes have trouble with accents - especially with high pitched children's voices, or when actors don't project well and are conversing with their back to the audience. The way the production handled the mystical visions was very interesting and quite convincing - I now will go out of my way to see more of Wilson's work. I found out a bit more about him at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Wilson

where you could do the same if you are interested.

Wineries: it seems like years since I last went on a wine tasting trip starting from Melbourne. I have been around Marlborough and Hawkes Bay in New Zealand, and we went to Stellenbosch in South Africa, but it seems the routine when we have foreign visitors to Melbourne is that I take them up to Healesville to the Wildlife Sanctuary, where there is so much to do there now with bird shows and meet the wombats/koalas/platypus etc., as well as just walking around to see all the animals and the different flight aviaries, that we never get to leave early enough to visit any of the Yarra Valley wineries on the way home. Barry is more likely to take guests to winery/eating trips. So our recent trips from here to the Sonoma Valley and Russian River wine regions here have reminded me how very enjoyable it can be.

The first trip was about 2 weeks ago, when Alex Saragoza arranged to go up there with Barry and a couple of other visitors who had been in Berkeley for a symposium on Mexican Tourism. One other of the participants chose to see some friends in the Bay Area rather than go on the trip, so I grabbed the spare seat in the car and we had a lovely day of it. Not weather-wise - it was cool and overcast, with a little rain- but it was still a very enjoyable trip. Alex chose two wineries he knows well, with particular individual histories of particular interest, and where he is a member of their wine clubs. The first we visited, Gundlach Bundschu, was one of the first in the Sonoma region, established by a Bavarian family 150 years ago. It is the oldest family-owned winery in California. They have always valued their labour force, providing picnic facilities which have developed into delightful public areas over time, and in the parking area there is a large mural celebrating the workers and their contributions to the winery. The rattlesnake warning with accompanying sculpture, which I posted at the start of this entry, caught my fancy: it is prominently displayed at the start of a beautiful walk through their grounds! They also value and foster the talents of the local artists who produce their labels, and publish postcards and large posters based on their designs. The wines we tasted were pretty good, and the staff taking care of the tasters were very knowledgeable and extremely affable.

The second place we tasted was Casa Ceja, a winery whose CEO was the first Latina woman CEO of a winery in the USA - a very sharp lady, we discovered when we spoke to her. Her parents had been Mexican grape pickers who had learned their trade as itinerant workers, and who eventually migrated to California and established their own winery. The kids grew up working in the vineyards, and the CEO's brother, who we also met, is the wine maker. The third generation are now also in the family business - with degrees in fields as varied as media and marketing as well as oenology, most of them work in the winery and were very happy to entertain friends of Alex and tell us lots of family history as well as their philosophy of wine making as they walked us through the wines on offer. Again, the wines here were more expensive than the plonk we usually buy and were excellent.

I didn't try everything on offer, and only took a mouthful or two of the ones I did want to taste, but as someone who doesn't drink much at all these days, I was feeling very mellow (and extremely hungry) by the time we got to the restaurant in Sonoma where Alex had booked - it was called "The Girl and The Fig", and featured local produce beautifully prepared and very well put together. We had a platter of local and imported cheeses as a shared starter: it came on a tiered plate with assorted relishes, olives, capers, fruit and breads and was a real treat. We also had several different and interesting salads to share. One with golden and red beets, rocket and some local pecans was particularly good. We passed around tasters of each other's main courses as well, so got to sample a good deal of local produce. But by the time we had eaten dessert and drunk some more local wine, it was too late to get to a third winery after lunch - not that we would have been very discriminating by this time either. Alex, as the designated driver, was very abstemious (he didn't drink that much either!) - and I could have driven home also as I was certainly well below the local limit of .08 - in fact I think I was probably below .05, but given how excellent my sense of direction is, it is as well it wasn't up to me to get us home.

Since then, we have had another 2 winery visits, one to the Russian River district and Healdsburg, the town at its centre, which we did with Alex and this time his wife Juanita. Again, we visited two small wineries and then went to lunch, this time at a restaurant called Ravenous

(ravens seem to be the logo of this district). We met up with a good friend of theirs who has a cottage in Healdsburg, and very much enjoyed the day, which happened to be our wedding anniversary. The food was very unpretentious and very delicious, again featuring local produce. Their policy on corkage was interesting - they charged $25 per bottle, but if you purchased one bottle from their wine list, they waived the corkage on the wine you brought, so we ended up drinking one a good Kiwi Sauvignon Blanc from their list, in the typical Marlborough cat's piss style, and also drank an excellent bottle of local red of our own. Rather than photograph ourselves in the winery garden, I should have thought of capturing the food at the restaurant, but I didn't, so see us instead .

We went for a bit of a wander around Healdsburg, which is a very pretty tourist town full of interesting delis and expensive furniture and homeware stores, and some resort wear stores with classy jewellery and accessories. I admired a really different pair of brass and copper earrings, which Barry promptly bought me as an anniversary present.

Coincidentally, at exactly the time we took this trip to the Russian River winery region, I was in the middle of reading a Paul Erdman financial thriller called Zero Coupon, very appropriate both to our location and to the current financial mess the world is in. The plot includes various financial scams, betting against currencies by short selling, and a lot about high society in San Francisco . Presciently, it was published in 1993, with a protagonist who had been in Pleasanton Jail which is very nearby, who had been jailed for activities during the junk bond scams of the '80's. One blurb says "Erdman is to high finance what John Grisham is to law", a very good analogy.

Healdsburg was a major location in the book, as was the area of San Francisco we had recently visited on our Nob Hill walking tour. I just downloaded all the photos that were still in the camera's memory card to this new PC, but must have deleted all of the photos from this very interesting tour which covered the amazingly lavish buildings in the area. We heard about the robber barons and founders of San Franciso's real estate fortunes and other major figures' contributions to the landscape around Nob Hill, which only became habitable with the advent of the cable car to negotiate the very steep hills. Some of the non-wooden buildings survived both the earthquake, as there is a great deal of bedrock under their foundations, and the fire which swept uphill. There are a few grand mansions and hotels from that early period and many more recent, and the Grace Cathedral , rebuilt three times, is also well worth a look as is the Masonic Temple nearby. We were guided through some lavish features and interesting historical photo displays (lots of diplomats and movie stars!) in several hotels, but were too early to see the Tonga Room at the Fairmont in operation, where apparently there is a simulated thunderstorm that rains around the band playing on an island in the middle of an indoor pool .

We had ended the tour in the Top of the Mark bar atop the Hotel, and the only shots I still have are some of the views from the windows of the bar, which opened at 5. Until then , the elevators don't run to the top floor, so quite a crowd builds up waiting to get up there. Excellent cocktails!

Just to complete the winery visits, our third trip was to the Napa Valley, this time with Herzonia as well as Alex and Juanita, and in two cars rather than one to enable the Saragozas to go on to a special function for wine club members at Casa Ceja while the three of us returned to Berkeley after lunch. This time we took the Silverado Trail. For the wine lovers amongst you who would like to taste as well as read about the delights of the Californian wine trails, you can Google any of these regions and wineries and find out where you can buy their products. Once again, Alex had chosen his vineyards carefully. One of them, Clos du Val, even owns the Taltarni winery here in Victoria - the owner had recognized the terrain here as closely resembling that of the area producing so successfully there and had established Taltarni more than a decade before. Again we were impressed by how knowledgeable and helpful most of the cellar door staff were, and how interested they were in what is happening in Australia and New Zealand. Many of them had travelled here, and those who hadn't yet wanted to get over to Australia and try our wines, especially the smaller labels that don't export so much. More of Herzonia's visit later, meanwhile, see the picture of her with Barry, Alex and Juanita. They knew each other from many years ago, when Alex and Juanita rented a house during his sabbatical leave about halfway between Herzonia's apartment and the one we rent in Coyoacan, in Mexico City, in a gorgeous little lane called Callejon del Toro, marked by a the ceramic head of a bull in Talavera style above a doorway on the corner. Another case of considerably fewer than six degrees of separation! Juanita had recalled that Herzonia likes dried cranberries, so I had got in a stock before she arrived for general nibbles and to supplement the breakfast muesli.

Family Visit to Berkeley

Last weekend Ben and Lissy and her parents, Barbara and Bernard, came to visit us in Berkeley. Barbara and Bernard arrived on Thursday at lunchtime, and the kids arrived on Friday night, and they all left at various times on Sunday, so we enjoyed a very short but very sweet visit.

The really annoying thing was that the weather turned ugly. Since we arrived in Berkeley in early August, we have had blue skies and really warm weather, with barely a drop of rain or even a cloud on the horizon. But on Thursday the clouds rolled in, our wonderful views vanished, and rain set in. You'd think this was my own home and my own city - I so love the environment here that I feel positively proprietorial towards it, and felt personally affronted by the weather, which meant I couldn't show "my" house and neighbourhood off at their best. It would have been pretty stupid to propose long walks to look at the gorgeous views from my favourite vantage points, my favourite gardens and houses in the 'hood while it was pouring rain and the views were obscured by rain and fog. Also not great for photos! But we did do some walking about - after lunch at home on Thursday we went down to the Berkeley Marina and looked at the boats and the waterfront, though of course this would have been far nicer had the sun been shining. And on the way home we realized it was Thursday so stopped at the organic Farmers' Market which is held at the corner of Shattuck Ave and Rose Street on Thursday afternoons. It showcases local produce, and we couldn't resist some heavenly strawberries whose perfume was obvious even in the pouring rain from 2 stalls away, some really good olive bread to have with our supper, and from all the cheeses we sampled, we selected a hard goat cheese with black peppercorns which was absolutely delicious. I always mean to go to this local market and never quite get there, but as my choir practice is just a block away at the JCC, and the market closes half an hour before practice begins, I could easily go early and catch it every week if I were better organised.

That evening I went off to choir practice as usual, and left Barry to entertain Barbara and Bernard. I have enjoyed much more time with them than he has, at times when he has been at work in Australia, Mexico or here in Berkeley. I have spent several Jewish Holidays at their house in Summit, NJ, and also recently stayed at their cottage in Massachusetts (see the earlier blog post about Tanglewood). So it was particularly good that they had some time to get to know each other a lot better on this trip.

On Friday Barry had his class to teach, and I went with Barbara and Bernard to the Berkeley Art Museum just on the edge of campus. The whole gallery was given over to an exhibition of contemporary art from China called Mahjong, arranged thematically. During the Cultural Revolution, artists were encouraged to emulate the heroic revolutionary style of Soviet Art, and once the genie of these influences was out of the bottle, all manner of Western Art traditions infiltrated the previously strictly traditional approaches to art and calligraphy. Some of the pieces I liked best used porcelain figures in extremely subversive ways. There was one rather horrible piece which was a stainless steel workstation equipped with all manner of torture implements making explicit the tyranny of the modern office environment on human freedom...and many pieces which conveyed the alienation of the urban one child family from the traditional family- and village-based Chinese society. See this link for more information and reproductions of some of the works.

http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/exhibition/mahjong

It rained only intermittently and we were able to have a bit of a wander around the edges of the campus and along Telegraph Avenue - many of the usual characters and the street stalls were not about, I guess due to the inclement weather, but it did give a bit of a sense of the place. As the date was October 31, and this was mid afternoon, we saw a few interesting Halloween costumes on the passers-by to compensate for the lack of the usual characters. After our day's activities we returned home to change, and had time to enjoy the views from the window seat in the kitchen , have cups of tea and coffee, and hang about until we picked Barry up after his seminar and drove into San Francisco. These photos were taken the next day but give an idea of how we managed to find time to relax together. People always say Bernard looks like Woody Allen - what do you think?

We were invited to join Barbara and Bernard for Shabbat dinner at the home of Leron and Brent, friends of their family now living in San Francisco (Leron was a college friend of their middle daughter Amanda, who had also worked with Barbara on some Holocaust-related projects, and she was very excited to be able to return some of the hospitality she has enjoyed over years on the East Coast). I have not had much experience with GPS devices before, though I have become dependent on Google Maps to tell me how to get places. I really liked hearing the GPS voice (Tracy, though Barry thought Clytemnestra would be a better name) telling us where and when to turn, and I am definitely a person who needs one, given my non-existent sense of direction and propensity to get lost. I guess it is time to start researching brands and services, and whether to get a device for the car or get a service on my next cell phone. I don't even know whether one buys the device and it already knows the geography of one country, or whether one has to load up data for whatever country one will be travelling through. Given our life style, the more universal the better. Anyone who has any recommendations please email me!

We spent a lovely evening enjoying the meal, the company and the small children, then as soon as we heard from Lissy that she and Ben had arrived at Oakland airport (somewhat earlier than scheduled) we left and with Tracy's assistance made our way there to collect them at Jet Blue. We returned to Berkeley and caught up with each other over a cup of herbal tea, thought about activities for the next day, then inflated the airbed we had borrowed from Janet and Tom next door (Barbara and Bernard were using the convertible in Barry's study, and we had enough pillows and bedding to accommodate everybody). Apparently it was comfortable enough that Ben felt fit enough in the morning to go for a run (I equipped him with our "Berkeley's Pathways" map so he could locate the interesting staircase shortcuts and maybe avoid the overly steep gradients along Marin Avenue). He found his way back OK, if somewhat damp from his encounters with overhanging foliage.

The next morning we had a leisurely breakfast together, featuring figs from our tree and lots of fruit, bagels, lox, herring, cheeses, etc., and headed off for a brief campus tour in the pouring rain. We made our way via the Free Speech Movement Cafe adjacent to one of the libraries to the Campanile (the bell tower, donated by Jane Sather, housing a carillon of bells which has grown from her original donation to something like 98 bells based on an additional donation from the Berkeley Class of '28), where we were lucky enough to catch a recital on the carillon. A web-site says "carillion" is a mis-spelling, common amongst Australians who pronounce the term "car-ill-yon" vs. the standard US pronunciation "care-ill-on". It means the group of bells, not the tower in which they are housed, apparently another common misuse. Suitably corrected on spelling, I am proceeding to attach photos of Ben and Lissy in rain gear looking up at the bells, one corner of the carillon, and a little video I recorded through the least-rained-upon window on the booth the player occupied. It was loud but not mostly deafening, and as the views from the Campanile were somewhat truncated by the rain , it gave us an aural in addition to a visual focus. The photo of the Campanile above is one I took a couple of weeks ago, when I went up there one lovely sunny Tuesday after my swim and really enjoyed the 360 degree views.

It was a Game Day - there was a football game in the stadium on campus, and we could see streams of people in ponchos heading for the stadium -I didn't even try to take photos of the distant views but couldn't resist taking one of the crowds coming in from the Oxford Street entrance. I guess the definition isn't too great, maybe enlarge it to see them better (it all looked very clear, including the view beyond campus to the Bay,on the full screen version of the original ). Ben and Lissy had arranged to meet a friend from San Francisco for lunch, and she was to pick them up where we had parked the car, so with about 45 minutes to spare and the rain a little lighter, we continued our ramble through campus, via the deserted Sproul Plaza,which on (sunny) weekdays is jam packed with students and stalls touting every imaginable student activity, political line, club and affiliation, past the Cesar Chavez Student Centre and out to Bancroft Avenue, then on down Telegraph. Today people were scalping tickets to the game on every corner, and there were fewer outlandish costumes than we had seen on the previous day. We made our way back to the car via the side streets lined with student-housing, churches and campus-related institutions, ending up sheltering from the rain at a conveniently-sited Ben and Jerry's till their friend arrived.

The rest of us had a little bit of lunch at home and we sat around reading or resting. Later that afternoon, after Ben and Lissy returned, we spent some time singing nonsense songs from Ben's childhood. At the International Co-op Nursery School he attended for a few months while we were in San Diego 25 years ago, they had used a lot of songs from the "Wee Sing" songbooks, and I had taken the little song books and the cassette tapes home to Melbourne with us. Ben still seems to remember all of the words, and to my amazement I remembered many of them too - and Lissy had the same tape as a kid, so it was a real hoot! Laughing at this kind of stupid thing with great company would have to be one of my favourite activities. Unfortunately our tape was played so often it eventually broke, but the lyrics were firmly embedded by then. And ah, the joys of Google - any words we forgot Ben looked up on his laptop. I wonder if he will be ordering new copies from Amazon? Bernard and I managed a bit of a duet, with Ben's assistance, of Judy Collins' version of the Marat/Sade song, which I apparently played a lot and which had also impressed itself firmly in Ben's memory. A completely unexpected form of entertainment which I absolutely loved! Here are some lines from "Risseldy Rosseldy" that Ben thought were the funniest in the universe when he was 4:

She churned her butter in Dad's old boot,
Risseldy, rosseldy, mow, mow, mow.
And for a dasher used her foot,

Risseldy, rosseldy, hey bambassity,
Nickety, nackety, retrecal quality,
Willowby, wallowby, mow, mow, mow.

The butter came out a grizzly gray,
Risseldy, rosseldy, mow, mow, mow.
The cheese took legs and ran away,

Risseldy, rosseldy, hey bambassity,
Nickety, nackety, retrecal quality,
Willowby, wallowby, mow, mow, mow.

At Lissy's request we managed to fit in a quick rain-soaked trip to the funky shopping strip on College Avenue just before the stores closed, and as we were leaving we heard rather than witnessed a pedestrian being hit by a car at an intersection. He seemed more shocked than injured, fortunately. Ben joined the crowd of people rendering assistance, extending his umbrella, but in very short order a police car and two fire trucks arrived and there was not really anything further we could do so we came home and shortly thereafter went out to our much-anticipated dinner date at the Upstairs Cafe at Chez Panisse. There was a very strange system of paying for parking at the Bank of America lot across the street - it is reserved for customers during the day but they have a system where you put $5 in one tiny slot in a bank of slots identified by the number of the space you park in. It was dark and pouring rain, and the instructions were a little obscure - you had to fold the notes just so to fit in the slot and I apparently did it wrong so my wet $5 bill got stuck halfway , and when I tried to pull it out it tore in two. So I just stuffed the second piece (folded correctly!) after the piece that was already inside, using their special little metal device to push it in. Not my finest hour as a master of technology!

The ambiance and the service at this famous restaurant were really good, the bread, olives and wines were excellent, and of course the company and the conversation were scintillating, but I was a tiny bit disappointed by the food - probably a function of inflated expectations. Between us we tried all the 5 main courses on offer that night. You can check out their website and see the current menu, which features very local and seasonal produce (as does the menu at my house! figs, lemons and tomatoes, anyone?) at

http://www.chezpanisse.com/

Follow the links to the Cafe Menu - I noted , checking today's menu, that a few similar items are still on the menu, but most of it changes daily. As is so often the case, the starters were all excellent - we had various salads and their signature wood-fired pizzettes, one with eggplant and the other with rocket salad. I had a fish and seafood soup as my main: the broth was beautifully perfumed by saffron (I would describe it as having the taste of honey without any of the sweetness), but it was lukewarm and although there was enough to eat it was less varied than I'd have preferred: mostly one piece of some not very fishy white fish, a few clams in the shell, and a tiny amount of baby octopus or calamari. There were two vegetarian mains (tortellini , and portobello mushrooms with polenta) and the other two mains involved pork and rabbit, not great meat choices for Jews with traditional tastes. We passed around three desserts, which were all very good, and Barry and Ben shared the cheese platter which seemed particularly overpriced for the small quantity offered. And one of the 3 cheeses was not very distinguished. We live only 5 minutes from the restaurant by car (barely half an hour's walk from here to all of the Gourmet Ghetto, with Chez Panisse right in the middle of the strip) but in such inclement weather we weren't inclined to walk off the meal so were home with plenty of time to have a bit of a chat about tomorrow's activities and to curl up on the bay window seat with a book and a cozy throw (see Lissy and her Dad).

On Sunday we headed into San Francisco to have brunch and check out the Ferry Building. The sun was out for some of the time, so it was warm enough to eat outside and Barry took a few pictures. More emphasis on local produce and regional specialties - we had coffees and cake from various places after brunch, and I found a very Italian-oriented place whose coffee I really like. Daylight Saving ended overnight, but the clock at the place Bernard parked the van seemed not to have registered it yet, so the time stamp on the ticket seemed to indicate we'd get an extra hour for our money.

Barbara and Bernard were flying out of SFO airport and headed off around midday, leaving the four of us to wander about the city till the guided walking tour we had chosen (Gold Rush City) started at 2. One highlight was a park in Chinatown where crowds of people, mostly men, were gathering around seated pairs of men gambling (there were a couple of female groups on the periphery of the park). There was a small election rally for a local Chinese candidate who was right there singing in Chinese (we don't know if it was in support of her candidacy or just a popular song) with a band right there in the park. I guess we have Peter Garrett at home, but I don't think he sang at his neighbourhood political meetings!

This day's tour had a bit less walking and rather more talking than some of the others we have done. It was interesting seeing how the shoreline had changed. Our starting point was the landmark Transamerica Pyramid on Montgomery street, which was formerly the waterfront, but is now several blocks away courtesy of the 1906 earthquake and landfill. The tour guide had lots of contemporary pictures of ships moored or scuttled in the harbour in early Gold Rush Days, which would have been visible from the corner where we now stood, and many tales of the waves of immigrants (including Chinese, Australians and Chileans), the traces left of their settlements, the anti-immigrant sentiment and riots, and the foundation of churches and newspapers,. We saw some brick or stone buildings which had survived the many devastating fires and the quake, even if the street level has changed a lot since then, notably those that were located on natural rock rather than the shifting sands of landfill.

The area, formerly brothels, theatres and lodging houses where the immigrants were preyed upon and even shanghai'd or press ganged into a life at sea, now houses lots of design studios, architects' and decorators' storefronts, and specialty wine shops. The guide did his best to illustrate the problems of communication during the Gold Rush, how traders tried to get around these and how they tried to make money on commodities like much-prized tea shipped from various distant places like China to be sent to the hungry and thirsty miners. He explained how the semaphore on Telegraph Hill, now home to the Coit Tower but always a highly visible point, was used to indicate shipping types and movements in the Harbour. The inevitable bust following the Gold Rush boom was followed by the silver boom, with another round of fortunes made and lost; the transcontinental railroad came west to San Francisco in 1869, the first cable cars opened up the hills to new development by 1873. The fire that followed the 1906 earthquake was the seventh to devastate San Francisco.. Archaeological work is done on building sites when excavation turns up something interesting, like the remains of the Niantic, the ship which was used as the base of a building which in turn burnt down to its keel in the 1850's. This was unearthed in Clay Street more than a century later but had to be excavated very fast so as to minimise the delay (and therefore the cost) to the new building. Apparently many volunteers rushed to assist in this fascinating discovery - wouldn't that have been fun.

After the tour and a bit more wandering about, we tried a Chinese Restaurant called House of Nanking recommended by a friend of Lissy's. The food was very unusual, and the waiter suggested we leave our selection up to him. As a result nearly everything was fried (which I usually try to avoid) and rather too many of the dishes featured sweet potato, which I love but you can have too much of a good thing. There was a really good eggplant dish, however. We walked back from Chinatown to the BART station and caught the train back to Berkeley, and a taxi home from the station. We sat around shmoozing and I packed some food for the plane. The Internet informed us that their red-eye flight was a little delayed, and we drove them to Oakland Airport around 8.30 without incident, though I did get slightly bamboozled on the way home (despite pretty much retracing the route we had taken two night before in Bernard's car with Tracy's assistance. I was in the wrong lane for the turn off and then misread a road sign and turned too soon, but had Barrry's navigational skills to get us back on track.)

Over the last two weeks, we have been blessed by mostly gorgeous weather again, at least in the afternoons - today I am finishing off this post in a very sunny dining room, with the terrace door open to the pleasant breeze as the house had got too hot in the afternoon sun. I have got out of the habit of pulling down the blinds in the bay window during very sunny afternoons, and today, when my desktop weather report says it is 26, is a day when I should have thought of it! I came home by bus after my fabulous swim in the outdoor pool to be here in time for the cleaners, and have been nipping downstairs to put stuff in the washer and dryer, popped out to the garden to pick the last few tomatoes and some figs (with the profligate eating habits of the birds and the squirrels, there are a lot of part-eaten and a few extremely mouldy fig carcases on the tree, but I still collected at least a couple of dozen ripe and perfect figs. I have taken to slicing them in salads: they seem to go very well with rocket and spinach and cos lettuce, as well as capsicums and cucumbers and mushrooms, and they are serving as a kind of auxiliary tomato. Had just such a salad for lunch). But now an end to procrastination - it's time for final proof read and to publish!

Election Night

We've just come home from a small election night gathering at a friend's house - our hosts were Myrna and Garret, who are lefties like us, I guess, more to the left than most political liberals here, who don't necessarily buy the prevailing US political perspectives. But Obama's victory is to be celebrated as a sweet moment, even if they expect him to continue pursuing the cause of American imperialism and not fundamentally change very much. African Americans are no longer the largest minority here, having been displaced by Hispanic immigrants (whether legal or not) and their descendants, and Obama, although his skin colour is "black", is a member of the intellectual elite. His victory speech, so parallel in its structure and even its sentiments to Martin Luther King's famous speeches, had me in tears (mind you, I am a big sook and have been known to weep during Telstra commercials telling you to call your family). He speaks so well - such a welcome change after Bush. If I knew more about the incumbents in the Senate, I might have been able to seize upon one sweet symbol like Howard's losing his seat at our elections last year (which we listened to on-line in the middle of the night on our anniversary weekend in Acapulco).

We had dinner at our friends' house and cracked a couple of bottles of champagne when the result was clear and McCain conceded graciously. It was just small party of 6 - nice to be invited rather than listening at home alone. Though we don't have a TV in this house, now we have borrowed a rabbits ears antenna from Janet and Tom next door, so I guess we could have picked up couple of broadcast channels or watched the whole count on-line.

I didn't take my camera so don't have any photos, but I am sure there was lots of coverage of Obama's victory speech in Australia as well. And his victory speech is available on YouTube as well as the New York Times :

http://elections.nytimes.com/2008/results/president/speeches/obama-victory-speech.html#.

Poor Obama - and our own poor Kevin, coming to power in time to inherit the financial mess left by years of deregulation and neglect of infrastructure spending - I guess what goes up must come down, and rightward swings are followed by leftward ones as we regress towards the mean.

San Francisco Opera and a Walking Tour of the Castro

The photo above is of Barry in front of the SF Opera, with a poster from the performance of Simon Boccanegra that we saw in September. The opera itself is not Verdi's most enthralling, but it was an excellent production with great singing, and the second and third acts succeeded in wringing the usual opera tear or two out of me. We were sitting up in the gods, a lot further from the action than we usually sit in the State Theatre in Melbourne, so that possibly lowered the impact.

When we go into San Francisco for a matinee performance of the Opera or some other afternoon activity, we try to fit in a morning guided walking tour of some area of the city. We came across a brochure for these tours at the airport, and are working our way through them, though in just 5 months of occasional weekends in San Francisco, we won't be able to do all the ones that we fancy. We choose partly on timing, as so many of them seem very interesting. The guides go through hours of training and all three we have encountered have seemed credible and very knowledgeable on the tours we have taken. So we are now great fans of these free tours. Anyone planning a visit should check out their website, http://www.sfcityguides.org/ , to see the range on offer. When Ben and Lissy come to visit in a couple of weeks, we hope to do one with them also.

On the day of this matinee we chose the tour of the Castro District. As the guide said as we looked at the large Catholic church and heard its history, this is "the gayest parish west of the Vatican." We started at Harvey Milk Plaza under the large rainbow Gay Pride flag, and heard how the original design had included a band of hot pink, but flag makers couldn't produce the colour, so the design had been modified. We ambled about the district, seeing a monument to the homosexuals who had been killed during the Holocaust (see it on my Picasa album whose link is given below: it is a series of grey pillars) and our architecturally savvy guide took us on a specific route where she showed us examples of the various styles of Victorian and Edwardian houses, giving us their names and distinguishing features. It is now about a month since this trip and I have forgotten many of the details, but the styles do not align exactly with our Melbourne versions. Although some street frontages are under local preservation orders, our much vaunted heritage colours, burgundy, dark green etc., barely appeared in the paint jobs, they seem to be able to paint them any shade they fancy. If you are interested, take a look at the album on Picasa: you'll see shades of beige but also bright pink and blue as well as the yellow on I've shown here. We were shown typical designs by well-known architects, like the sunburst on this one, which predated Art Deco by several decades. One of the shots of a house being renovated shows the rock on which these hills stand: there was not so much earthquake damage to the houses here in 1906, but of course the fires took a huge toll. I found it interesting that most of the street trees are Australian Natives - paperbarks, bottle brush and various eucalypts. The guide was delighted to have Australians on the tour who recognised the trees: they ask questions and love it when the tourists venture an opinion. My recognition of trees was better than Barry's estimation of house prices as we responded to her questions! I don't know how come they chose these plantings, but I am always very charmed to see the tiny shimmering humming birds feeding on the flowers of the Australian natives, a bit like us learning to eat transplanted Vietnamese food, I suppose. The link to the full set of photos is http://picasaweb.google.com.au/bjoymarsh/2008_09_22TourOfTheCastroAndStreetNearSFOpera#

We saw areas which had been owned by various colourful historic San Francisco luminaries in the volatile financial times after the Gold Rush and heard tales of some of these extraordinary characters. We heard a lot about Harvey Milk, who according to Wikipedia was the first openly gay non-incumbent man in the United States to win an election for public office (he was on the Board of Supervisors), and was subsequently murdered in his office along with Mayor Moscone. This crime led the gay community into unprecedented political activism, and there are Harvey Milk memorials all about. One other thing I learned about him is that he was the person who first introduced a pooper scooper ordinance. I guess I have him to thank indirectly for the little zippered plastic bag storage pouch which attaches to Jesse's lead (Boroondara Council now sends you one when you first register your dog to make cleaning up after it that much easier).

The grand residence below was built by the person who controlled San Francisco's water supply. There were huge scandals and his wife eventually left him and they never lived there. But what a gorgeous place! This is a side view as I couldn't get a good shot from directly in front for the trees(the partly obscured shots are on the album).

There is a Harvey Milk memorial building occupied by the Social Service department, with a wonderfully diverse mosaic mural that I took a few shots of. I missed some of the guide's chat about the place and about Milk's story because there was a car event happening in a park down the hill a block before we got there, with lovingly maintained or restored US cars of the 50s and 60's - more than I've seen since we were in Havana. I spent some time ogling the cars and the mural in the park (see the photo) so had to catch up with the group at their next stop. After the car photo there is one of the Milk memorial mural.

At the end of the tour we assembled on Castro Avenue at the site where people still gather for demonstrations and at times of significant public events. We saw the site of the original Castro Theatre, now a large clothing store, and spent a bit of time looking at the ornate Moorish design features of the current theatre which was built in the 20's or 30's. I couldn't resist a few shots of the facade and tiling. We picked up a calendar of screenings, but I can't really see us schlepping into San Francisco to see a revival when we can now so easily get them home delivered on DVD from Netflix. We saw the first public gay bars and generally got the flavour of the district before taking a trolley towards the Opera House for our 2PM performance.

We didn't think we'd have time for lunch in the Castro before leaving - we had to pick up our tickets at the box office but hadn't realised just how easy this would be. The last few pictures on the web album are of nice features on some of the buildings we walked past on our way there that I couldn't resist. We got to the theatre in plenty of time to have a sandwich in the cafe downstairs and read the programme before the performance (noting again the extraordinarily large list of donors of large amounts of money).

We usually drive to El Cerrito station rather than Berkeley to take the BART into San Francisco. The parking is much easier and there are a couple of big supermarkets (as well as a Weight Watcher's meeting) in the adjacent mall, so after we got back to Berkeley in the evening, we did a bit of a shop at Trader Joe's and Lucky before heading home. A rotisserie chook and heaps of salad seemed like a good plan for a quick dinner that night.

My Jewish Holiday Trip to the East Coast

It has been an eventful Jewish Holiday season. Just as I was settling in to Berkeley so well, with my exercise classes, regular swimming in the Spieker Pool (see opening photo) on the Cal campus, and my Spanish conversation classes, the Jewish High Holy Day season came around. I really like to spend this time with family, and as I have relatives I love in various spots around the US, I wrenched myself away from the delights of Berkeley life to spend Jewish New Year in Cleveland with Aunt Flo and Uncle Henry (he is the youngest of my father’s many siblings. You can see me with them in a photo below). The next one up is my Aunt Lillian, also shown below, who lives in Cleveland too, and then comes Uncle Moish, who lives in Melbourne.

My paternal grandmother is buried in Cleveland, having passed away there in 1949 while visiting Henry, Lil and Aunt Sid, who had been there since the late 1920’s, not very long after we migrated to Australia. Several of Dad’s father’s siblings had been living in Cleveland for more than 10 years, though his branch of the family did not move on from England when they moved from Poland/ Russia. Aunt Sid married her cousin Sam in Cleveland early in the 1930's, bringing the two branches of the family closer again. I always spent the Jewish holidays in Cleveland when I lived in New York in the ‘60s and ‘70s, and whenever I am in the Northern Hemisphere I feel a strong pull to be with this very dear-to-me side of the family.

So I flew to Cleveland on my birthday, a couple of days before the holidays, to be met at the airport and taken straight out to dinner at their favourite Japanese restaurant by Pam (my first cousin) and Stan, then back to Henry and Flo’s later in the evening, where I blew the candle out on a magnificently decorated cupcake to celebrate. The flight I took (South Western Airlines, via their hub at Chicago’s Midway airport) was cheap enough, and flew from Oakland airport rather than SFO, that I forgave the stopover. And on the last leg, I was treated to a performance of Happy Birthday from the whole plane! There is open seating on South Western, and on the first leg I had wandered all the way down the plane and ended up with a middle seat of three anyway, so on this leg I saw the middle seat in the front row was available so plonked myself down. The young, very animated and casually attired cabin crew were chatting with the woman sitting next to me, joking about her blowing out the cabin lights when they dimmed them, and I remarked that if anyone got to blow out lights it should be me, as it was my birthday. They waited till the end of the fight then asked the whole plane to turn on their call lights, sing Happy Birthday to me, and then asked me to blow hard and turned them all off except mine! When I was waiting at the carousel later for my bag, several people came up to me and wished me Happy Birthday again – it was very nice indeed. And my other seat mate was a disabled Vet, who is a wheelchair athlete and downhill skier, with custody of his autistic son and college-bound older daughter, with whom I had a very interesting conversation all the way to Cleveland, so it wasn't such a bad way to spend my birthday after all.

If you look at last year’s blog entries from this time of year in Mexico and again in Cleveland and NYC, you will see my honey cake recipe. In Berkeley the week before I left I made 2 small practice cakes, but think I overcooked them a bit due to using small loaf tins which were in the house rather than the full sized tin I use at home. In Cleveland Aunt Flo and I made a cake which, thanks to her perfect oven and the correct-sized tin (using high school maths I was able to calculate that a 9” round pan of the correct depth would work just as well as my usual 8”by 8” square pan , as a radius of 4.5” gives almost the same surface area as 8 by 8). We had some at Pam’s after dinner on the first night of Rosh Hashanah, and as ever I am a great fan of my own coking. Pam’s dinner was delicious and the cake lived up to the standard of her cooking. And we took some home for the odd nosh over the next few days, contributing to a sweet New Year.

The Synagogue-going is always enjoyable at their Temple, as they seem to have more than the average quotient of musical members who sing beautifully. Uncle Henry leads parts of the service and is also in the choir, who sing beautiful arrangements very well and with appropriate feeling, and work very well with the Cantor, who has a lovely voice . The choir serves as an adjunct to the congregation's participation, not a substitute. I always feel free to join in rather than leave it up to them.

For once, I didn't go to the Rock’n’Roll Museum and Hall of Fame: I was just too busy, catching up with cousins for meals and lots of walks in the Shaker East Park, which has been set up in what had been a reserve for a rapid transit service which was never built. On one side of the main Road Henry and Florence live on, the Park has a wetland in the middle and on the other there landscaping is different. There was deer there one evening when I was walking. Of course I didn't have my camera with me that time, though on subsequent walks I decided to take some photos of the fall vegetation. My cousins Michelle and Jeffrey (Lil's son, who is a font of wisdom on the history and politics of the development of Cleveland) joined me on successive beautiful autumn mornings - Michelle gathered a large bouquet of wildflowers, we collected some windfall pears from a large old tree I found set back little from the road, and Jeffrey and I took a couple of photos of each other.

Naomi, Henry and Flo’s younger daughter who lives in Tampa, Florida, was scheduled for very major surgery on the second day of Rosh Hashanah, which thankfully went very well. Of course all of the family had been very concerned, and as the call came in with good news, a huge cloud lifted. I felt very privileged to have been around to help my aunt and uncle cope over this difficult time – even if I was only a diversion to keep their minds off the worry for some of the time, and an ear whenever possible – that is what family and friends are for, really, and I am glad I had chosen to spend the whole week there. On the last day we made another honey cake for Henry and Flo to take to Naomi when they visit her after Yom Kippur – it freezes pretty well so should be nice and most when it thaws out in Tampa.

I also spent time with another cousin, Fran, and her husband Jerry. We did a bit of shopping and had lunch at the Cheesecake Factory, which is a chain which serves a huge variety of food (I had Vietnamese rice paper rolls) quite apart from the cheesecake desserts which none of us had. Unlike almost everyone else I know in the US, Fran is a McCain supporter , so for the sake of balance I will show you the (deserted) storefront in the suburbs where they are trying to recruit volunteers and the poster Fran collected from there to put in her garden.

My brother Yaacov lives in Baltimore, with his second wife Miriam and now a larger extended family. As well as his daughter Esther, her husband Dovid and their 7 children, his wife Miriam also has 3 children and 11 grandchildren. Seeing the photos taken just after Yaacov and Miriam’s wedding with the three generations (including the Lakewood NJ branch -Moshe, my nephew, Leiba, his wife and their three children) was quite some sight! I guess photographers of the Orthodox Jewish community in Baltimore must get good at taking these large family groups – the photos were lovely!

I flew to Baltimore from Cleveland, and only managed to spend 24 hours there, but managed to see my niece Esther, Dovid and the 5 kids who are home, as well as (once again) making a couple of honey cakes with Miriam and going with her for a swim at the JCC, before heading for New York by train. I have included photos of Esther and three of her daughters, and also of the wonderful individual fruit and vegetable salads Miriam fed us as part of the evening meal while I was there - I really wouldn't have needed to eat anything else. Perhaps this will offset the impression that honey cake is all I eat! I did have a taster before I left (strictly for quality control) but headed off to New York without over-indulging.

It is a lot shorter drive to the station in Baltimore than to BWI airport, and the Amtrak train ride from there brings you right into Penn station in mid-town Manhattan, a short taxi-ride from where Ben and Lissy live. In fact it is not a long walk, but I had a suitcase to contend with. Over the next few days I walked to Penn station twice and Grand Central once, perfectly feasible carrying a light overnight bag (and once, also – you guessed it – a honey cake. On my first day in NYC I acquired a hand-held mixer, some foil cake pans, some bi-carb and a few extra spices in addition to the supplies they had got in for me and made a couple more honey cakes, one to take to Lissy’s parents for the meal before Kol Nidrei and one for Ben and Lissy, which is disappearing quite fast, but not as fast as it used to at home when Ben had friends over to help!) I must say the apartment smelt lovely: a spicy honey cake is really the smell of Rosh Hashanah to me.

Lissy invited me to join her and her mother to the first fitting for her wedding dress. I met her at Penn Station after work, took the train to a station near Barbara’s work, and she drove us though the wilds of New Jersey suburbia to the fitting, with a delightful and highly skilled seamstress who certainly knows her onions. My lips are sealed on the details, but I can reveal that it will be absolutely gorgeous. Barbara dropped us at another station where we picked up the train back to NYC. It is so nice to have a soon to be daughter-in-law to do this girly stuff with, especially as I don’t have a daughter of my own. How lucky am I to be included , and that the timing worked out so well!

On the afternoon before Kol Nidrei, I again met Lissy at Penn station and we went to Newark, this time to be collected by Bernard and ferried back to his and Barbara’s home in Summit. We were in time to help a little getting the pre-fast meal onto the table, and were joined by Drew (Lissy’s brother), Ben, Barbara’s brother Isaac, his wife Melanie, daughter Andrea, son-in-law Brad, and baby grandson Yaacov. Most of the festive meals I have shared with Lissy’s family have been at Isaac and Melanie’s as they are more observant and don’t drive on Jewish Holidays, but it was nice to be part of the large gathering at my future machatonim's house (I have often bemoaned the fact that there isn't an English word to describe the relationship between Barry and me and Lissy’s parents. They will be Ben’s in-laws but not exactly mine, so I am afraid I must use the Yiddish term, and apologise for the lack of a glossary! And once again, the honey cake went down well.

Their synagogue service is not quite as musical as the ones at Uncle Henry’s shule, but still has quite a few familiar tunes. Since I have joined the Conservative congregation Kehilat Nitzan in Melbourne, I have mostly been overseas during the High Holy days, so I can’t really comment on how it compares, though we do use the same version of the Machzor, the prayer book for these days. I occasionally join a group of singers from Kehilat Nitzan singing at old age homes around Melbourne on Sunday afternoons, so can testify that there are lots of people who really enjoy singing. This includes the Rabbi, who leads the singing with his guitar, so I am looking forward to participating in more musical services there when I get home.

We all spent the night in Summit, and returned to Synagogue for the Yom Kippur services the next day, with a break in the afternoon where we mostly took a nap or read quietly. At the end of the service, which finishes with a blast on the shofar, and at this synagogue with a parade of all the children holding small lights, the synagogue provided orange juice and cake to break the fast (after the appropriate blessings). We all returned to Isaac and Melanie’s, the same crowd as the night before, to break the fast. Many cups of tea and several varieties of herring and cheese later, Ben, Lissy and I took a limo back to their apartment. Lissy had thought she needed to travel to Washington very early the next morning to attend a meeting with The Library of Congress, a History channel collaboration she is currently working on, but very late it was decided she would not attend, to show proper concern for cost control in this era of economic gloom. It was not an unwelcome outcome for her - after all the activities over the last few days, getting up before 5 AM to make the train was not the most desirable outcome. I was astounded to see her at home around 8.30 the next morning – I remember seeing her around 4 in the morning and assuming she was off as planned, but apparently she had told me then that she didn't have to go – clearly I was a lot less conscious than I thought!

In my various walks around NYC I stumbled onto different neighbourhoods I’d love to explore more. There was an area in the high 20’s/low 30s around 6th and 7th Avenues where there are wholesalers of haberdashery, handbags, beads and all kinds of jewellery, now mostly run by Asians, it seems, that seemed quite fascinating. So much stuff! Quite apart from the many Koreans on the street selling “silk pashminas” for $5 on street corner stands (of course I bought one).

On Friday I went to Grand Central to get the train in the other direction, up the Hudson to Westchester, to visit Emily and Bob. Emily has wanted a screened porch for many years and it is finally under construction, along with some changes to the decking to accommodate it, and felt she needed to be around for the tradespeople doing the construction. It is always wonderful to be with Emily on her home turf: there is always locally grown produce, heaps of home cooking, friends dropping by, research to be done on ecologically sustainable options, and currently she is also going to Pennsylvania on weekends, door knocking to campaign for Obama. As one of Bob’s presents for her recent birthday, he had this poster made, and Emily and I mounted a couple of them on display boards she had salvaged using Velcro (what a wonderful invention!) You can see the porch under construction in the background. Apart from trimming the baking parchment to line honey cake pans, I haven’t done much craft lately (or ever, to be truthful) but I enjoyed helping on this, and we laughed heaps when the lines for cutting seemed to miss each other despite our earnest efforts (lucky we drew lines rather than cutting right away!) or when the somewhat aged Velcro wouldn’t come off its backing paper, or when the phone rang when neither of us had a spare hand. Judy Boehr, who is Rachel’s mother and visited us in Melbourne earlier this year, joined us for lunch (Emily made polenta with fresh corn and a spicy tomato sauce) and we had a good catch up. Rachel (our former house-sitter who had been working for Oxfam in melbourne) has returned to the US to campaign for Obama also. She is in Ohio, but we were both too busy to manage to catch up between Cleveland, where I was, and Youngstown, where she was based while I was there.

Emily and I managed to get time for a walk around the farm part of the Rockefeller estate near where they live. The weather was absolutely perfect for a walk – low 20’s and balmy sunshine. We looked at the fancy restaurant which serves a lot of local produce, and resolved to get there for a splendid meal with our husbands some time in the future. The building is called the stone bars, you can see why from the pictures, and the garden was beautifully planted, including this plant with its blue berries or seeds, which I have never seen before, and is so pretty it brought to mind some very unusual artificial arrangements I have seen, in which I would have thought that shade of blue and the prolific growth was totally synthetic!

We caught a movie (Rachel Getting Married) at their local art house Cinema, the Burns, after a salmon dinner. I used whatever ingredients I could find from the bountiful cupboards and fridge to make a teriyaki marinade, and cooked it with mushrooms, and Emily had a local purple cauliflower –( talk about improbable shades of blue) and what we would call a sweet potato but are called jewel yams here. It’s another vegetable which is improbably smooth and unblemished compared to the Australian version, which I also noted at Aunt Flo’s. I don’t know how they get them like that! They look as if they have been stroked and pampered in some way, though they don’t taste very different to our Australian/NZ sweet potato/kumara. We liked the movie, with some excellent performances and great music, but found the cinematography a bit jerky, maybe a reference to home movies of weddings – but especially as we were a bit late and I ended up very close to the front, it was difficult to watch. It gave Bob a headache and he had to retreat to the back of the theatre part way through.
Emily was off to do her door-knocking around 7 AM the next morning, and dropped me at 79th Street and Broadway a little before 8.

It was another gorgeous day so I was very happy to amble all the way down and across town, through Central Park (see shot I took of the Bethesda fountain while passing) and down Fifth avenue, for a couple of hours including a stop at the Rockefeller Center to see the ice skaters (see video at end: I recommend you first turn down the volume!) and get a coffee, retuning to Ben and Lissy’s before 10.30. I finished packing, we went out to brunch then came home and the airport shuttle collected me about 1.30, way too early for my flight. It was the fastest trip to JFK I have taken. We took the 59th Street Bridge ( I couldn’t resist humming Simon and Garfunkel’s song as we drove over it) and later seemed to take some weird little streets to get to whatever major highway we needed – I was trying to finish off a novel so I could put it in my suitcase at the airport, so wasn’t paying much attention. And once again, I have used the excellent power point provided on Virgin America to spend a lot of the flight typing the text for this entry into Word before editing it into my blog and adding the pictures. How’s that – I have good things to say about 2 airlines, and no complaints about my Continental flight from Cleveland to Baltimore, which was very cheap also. Mind you, this flight is a bit bumpy: the seat belt sign keeps coming on somewhat foiling my plans to get to the bathroom! We are over Kansas – let’s hope we don’t encounter any wicked witches or monkeys and end up in the Land of Oz!

I think I will publish this post out of sequence: there are a couple of things we have done in Berkeley and San Francisco that I wanted to write up first, but I may never get around to it at the rate I am going.