Lake Tahoe, August 29-30, 2009

We decided to drive to Lake Tahoe for the weekend, improving on our performance last year when we didn't take advantage of our location to explore more of California and nearby states.

We drove our landlady Julie's Prius (for which we pay at 3 miles to the dollar ), and to our surprise, found a Garmin GPS in the console. Nothing could be more convenient than using the car at the house, but so far I haven't enquired with ZipCars and City Car Share to see if these options would be cheaper, so I must do some research before we take another weekend car trip. Within 3 blocks of our house there are reserved spots for both Zip and City Car Share cars, so either would be highly feasible.

The route to Lake Tahoe from here, according to directions we printed in advance from Google Maps, seemed incredibly simple. Barry proceeded to programme the GPS but when we got to the first highway change, the GPS told us to go a different way entirely. What it was telling us made no sense whatever, but as Barry was driving he thought he'd better follow instructions. I am totally useless as a navigator, and once I diverge from a set path I rarely have the faintest idea how to get back on track. But once he determined that we were being directed somewhere other than he had intended, Barry realised he had set up the wrong destination. While we were stopped in a parking lot near the freeway exit we had taken, he set up the right end address (with some assistance from me, as he couldn't find the space character on the keyboard) and lo and behold, the GPS got us back on track with only half an hour's wasted time. But as it was Friday afternoon when we left (after Barry's class) we encountered very heavy traffic from rush hour as well as road works, so instead of the 3 1/4 hours it took us coming home on Sunday, the trip there took us 5 hours. Additionally, I discovered that I get just as confused looking at the GPS screen when going around loops and doing turns as I do in the real world. If I persevere, at the end of this 5 months I should at least be able to make a decision as to whether in fact a GPS would help me find my way in the world!

The hotel room Barry had booked on the Web was a suite with a full kitchen, though we didn't use it except to make tea. There was a fireplace and all the furniture was, as advertised, "rustic" and this included the wardrobe unit also housing the (rustic) TV a very quaint toilet roll holder!

We wandered about after we got in around 7.30 on Friday night, getting a feel for the place while we looked for a nice place for dinner - a pity it was too late to really see how beautiful it is . But it did seem a very prosperous resort town. It does more business in the ski season, but is a year-round resort with boating, para sailing, water skiing etc on the Lake as well as hiking. This may explain the rather strange logo of our resort, which seems to be a St Bernard, complete with brandy flask, but also wearing Hawaiian shorts! The state line runs across the main street, with Casinos on the Nevada side, more renowned for the shows than the gambling. We didn't even have a look at either of the big two - we are saving ourselves for a weekend in Las Vegas, if we get around to it.

We ended up eating in the restaurant of one of the hotels, but ate inside as it was starting to get a bit cool to be at an outside table. I had a conversation with the waiter about the Caprese salad I ordered, which featured almost flavourless Roma tomatoes- at this time of year, spoilt as I have been here in Berkeley by the heirloom varieties and the specialist stores where I buy my produce, I was expecting something a lot more tasty. There was no fruit offered for dessert but fresh fruit of various types seemed to come with many of the richer desserts, so I asked the waiter if the quality of the fruit was better than the tomatoes, in which case could they make me a fruit platter (but if it was not, then no thank you). He went away and returned with a large plate of fruit of passable ripeness, flavour and variety, but though of higher quality than the tomatoes, it was not very special. But he had tried very hard, and I have a weakness for raspberries, of which there were enough to lift the standard a bit. I really should have learned by now that it is safest to order a steak in most places in America, and not to fool around with fancy stuff except in gourmet enclaves.

On Saturday morning we wandered down to the gorgeous lake, ogling the mountains all around, had brunch on the shore and checked out the beach. We then drove through town back to the tourist information center but were a bit disappointed with the attitude of the young man who answered our questions - he seemed not to be too enthusiastic about any of the activities on offer. This is very atypical of people working in tourism in the US. But the people selling tickets for the various attractions had a lot more to say about how to best take advantage of them. We took the gondola ride up the mountain: it is the longest such ride we have ever been on, it apparently takes you 2 miles up the mountain, with one stop for sightseeing on the way up. I have posted all the photos we took (Barry commandeered the camera for some shots) on Flickr, where you can whiz through a slide show if you are interested. It is a long time since I used Flickr and I had forgotten it unfortunately posts photos in reverse order, so it will show you the shots from our sunset cruise before the shots from the top of the mountain down, before the shots on the way up. I will have to download one of the utilities they have which might make it easier to post the shots in the order they happened!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/29461072@N07/

We zoomed up the mountain on the gondola (a view of the gondola's path up the mountain and the chairlift itself are pictured above), got off at the first stop to take some photos and check out the views, then got on the next stage. At the end of the second stage, itself a local summit, there is a cafe and a bar and various other lifts. The Tamarack Express is a chairlift which takes skiers, and the summer tourists, up to the top of the mountain, and at the level it starts from you can also take the Zip Flyer down again, which is basically like a flying fox: a soft canvas seat with safety harnesses that you buckle into and go whizzing back down - two at a time; they seem to go very fast and it is de rigeur to shriek, whoop or holler as you go. Way too scary for us! At this level you are close to 10,000ft high - you certainly notice the oxygen deficit when climbing uphill. We went for a pretty short hike along a ski trail. They do all the maintenance of the ski runs and equipment in summer, and keep hikers to the paths. There are dire warnings not to feed the rodents, as they may carry bubonic plague (I just was reading "The Shifting Tide", an Anne Perry novel set in Victorian London featuring the plague, and my book club only recently finished Geraldine Brooks's "The Year of Wonders", so I didn't have to be told twice!) I was impressed by the huge granite boulders and the fallen (mostly felled) trees littering the slopes: our companions on the chair lift reckoned this helps hold the snow in place in winter.

After enjoying the gorgeous views all the way down, about 20 minutes without a stop, we went in search of an ice cream. The place we chose was certainly an eye-opener. I had the kiddie cone, which was a hefty single scoop in a sugar cone, and very nice too. But most people were ordering the "like it" size, which seemed to be about 3 scoops of ice cream, mixed up on a marble slab with fruit, nuts, candy of various sorts, maybe whipped cream, and syrups and piled into a sugar cone basket, optionally dipped in chocolate and with crushed nuts or sprinkles. This size was the most popular, even quite small children were getting them, but the next size up, the "love it" was moving out the door too. It would feed a small nation state. I won't mention the obesity epidemic...

By the time they had made up Barry's "like it" I had almost finished my coffee kiddie cone, so I had to help him out by eating a couple of chunks of his choc-dipped basket and a taster of his ice-cream, which seemed incredibly sweet. I was having a bit of trouble with my back after the long drive on Friday and the various activities so far, and hoped a swim and a spa might be therapeutic. So we returned to the hotel, continuing to ogle the passing parade and the shops (one, called "Up Shirt Creek", had fibreglass versions of the Blues Brothers and Betty Boop out front, but they weren't enough to get me into the shop) as we walked .

The pool was pleasant but it was too warm - a bit like swimming in chicken soup, I thought - with a couple of spas, in the shade at this time of day. Barry enjoyed sitting in the spa and got into a conversation with an IT guy who works for the State in Santa Cruz, who had taken a long weekend break to take advantage of his compulsory Friday furlough (the state has imposed this form of unpaid leave on public employees to save some money, though I heard an interview on PBS this morning which seemed to suggest it actually costs more than it saves , as it defers revenue collections, delays trials and judgments and has other unintended consequences on federally funded programmes).

(I am really peeved: I have just lost a whole lot of text I had posted, probably because I inadvertently deleted it while trying to paste in a link to the Wikipedia entry about Lake Tahoe. I have got out of the blogging habit and will have to recreate this last half hour's work! But I have also lost a bunch of changes I had made and seem to be back to a much earlier version of this post, the first draft I started from. Extremely mysterious, as it tells me it is autosaving as we go, but there is no arguing with a computer, you may have noticed! )


After this swim/spa/rest time, we decided to take the sunset boat tour on the Lake to Emerald Bay. The dock was a lot further than we had thought so we only got there just as it was due to set off, but did mange to catch it. Lake Tahoe was formed by seismic shifts and slips, and after successive shifts which have changed its water level dramatically over time it is left with just one river (the Truckee) draining it (and this not to the sea but to another lake. You can check out the geology here :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Tahoe



Emerald Bay, on the west side of the lake, was formed much more recently by a glacier . The colour of the water is much greener than Lake Tahoe partly because of its depth, and also because of minerals brought down the hillsides by the waterfalls which feed it. The glacier carved out its typical V-shaped trench and shifted a lot of granite, leaving an island on which there is a ruined tea house (look carefully in the photo above) which belonged to the owner of a grand mansion at the end of the bay called Vikingsholm Castle (see below in its cliff-base setting). It was built in Scandinavian fashion by a very rich woman who commissioned architects and craftsmen during the Great Depression and supported them and their families well, rather than exploiting them. She wanted to furnish it appropriately but the various Scandinavian governments wouldn't allow her to plunder their national treasures, but with enough donations she was able to have her craftsmen study the classic pieces in the national museums and copy enough design documents that they could replicate them back at Lake Tahoe. She would not allow any trees on the property to be cleared so the house was built around the large trees already there, though she did use local timber and granite for all the construction. Several owners later, the State of California managed to convince the owners to donate the property , and they also recovered a great deal of the original furniture which had been dispersed and reinstate it, in accordance with the many photos that existed from the original owner's era.

I gather the tea house perched atop the granite island in the Bay was only used half a dozen times. With no access except by water , no permanent staff and no supply of water and electricity, everything including the kitchen sink - staff, supplies, fuel, silver, china, and all the food an drink had to be brought in and carted by hand up the steep hillside. And as she loved blueberries these were brought in from somewhere like Vermont for the occasion...ah, we don't do tea parties like this any more!

Our cruise included drinks and copious nibbles, billed as hot and cold hors d''oeuvres, but the sunset (like the food) was not very interesting. I'd expected the colour to be more spectacular because there was a bit of smoke about from the wildfires (local name for bush fires) around California. But it was very nice to be out on the water or down below warming up in the very cozy sitting rooms and chatting with people we'd met on board.


We went back to the hotel for cups of tea and read novels and watched a bit of TV, then on Sunday morning I headed down to the lake again. On the way my glasses came apart: I retrieved the lens but had to go back to the hotel front desk to beg some sticky tape for a temporary repair. Then went back to the lake, somewhat more gingerly, and went for a 45-minute walk along the shore , dodging under individual jetties. Just beyond the public beach the really nice lake front houses began, with lots of nice toys like boats and jet skis in the water, and I kept walking till I saw a pretty amazing looking place full of angles and wood and glass which I subsequently figured out must be the club house for a lake front golf course. Very spiffy indeed. By this time a considerable breeze had sprung up and though I was game for a paddle, the water was a bit too cold for a swim. Oddly, though the lake was pretty choppy, the sand was not being whipped up by the wind into my eyes or even against my legs - it was quite coarse particles
and maybe a bit damp.

I decided to go back to the hotel for a swim in the pool instead. Then we utilised our late check-out, went to a supermarket and found a temporary glasses repair kit for the grand sum of $2.99, and went to a local place recommended for brunch, where as soon as we entered, the screw on the other arm of my glasses also fell out. I left the sticky tape on the arm where it was, as it seemed reasonably secure at least till we got home, and Barry mended the other arm of the glasses with the tiny screw using the tiny screwdriver and the tiny magnifying glass in the kit. Then I could read the menu and order brunch, which was very welcome by then.

We drove back without incident, utilising the "go home" feature that Barry found on the GPS. Once we hit the familiar outskirts of Berkeley I ignored its directions and chose my own route back without getting lost at all. As we approached Berkeley, fog was descending from the hills - it had been gloriously sunny on the road till then. The neighbours upstairs had been taking care of the cat, and she did seem quite pleased to see us when we got in, though it is a bit hard to tell with a cat as skittish as Chiquita. I actually started on my blog post the very next day, but it is hard to make time and space: Barry has totally occupied the study and says I am not allowed to share the desk, so I need to use the kitchen table, which is not so convenient. Have I mentioned we don't have a dining room table? There is a table on the deck we could bring in for a dinner party, but the dining room is in fact currently furnished as a second sitting room. There is an octagonal table being used as a side table in the main sitting room, and maybe I will bring it into the dining room and set up my computer there - but the wireless signal may not be strong enough. I will experiment while Barry is away at his conference in Bilbao next week. That is space - and time feels a bit short as I have resumed activities including 4 exerise classes a week, hopefully 2 swims, Spanish conversation groups weekly (every second week including a pot luck supper and some reading to prepare), and just got started again with the East Bay Jewish Folk Chorus. The choir is performing at the Solano Stroll, which I wrote about last year - this year's is happeoing a week from tomorrow, Sunday September 13, and I need to master the music before then. There are 6 songs, 5 of which are new to me (though I know the tunes , but not the alto parts, of a couple of them). I have the music on the iPod and the computer and the sheet music with words on paper, so I need to practice lots. So I am off to do some listening and singing now.

Back to Berkeley, August 2009

Well, here we are again. Barry was invited back for another semester as a visiting professor by the History Department at UC Berkeley. First, we established that he would be paid money rather than IOUs . California is a bit short of money these days, so the Governator instituted a system of IOUs for certain government payments, and as Berkeley is a state university, we thought we had better check before going ahead with our plans to return. This year we are renting the ground floor of an early 20th Century house on Walnut Street (street view above, a bit of the garden beside). We are directly across the road from the Jewish Community Centre, one block from the Gourmet Ghetto, close to supermarkets and just a 15-minute walk from the Cal campus. We don't have the space, magnificent views and wonderful veggie garden of the house on Santa Barbara Road we rented last year, but we are much closer to BART (the rapid transit system which takes us into San Francisco), downtown Berkeley and all it has to offer, and we do have a cat, Chiquita (see below) for company.

The house is pretty cluttered and we feel very much at home, but one drawback is the absence of a dishwasher. There is a nice garden but not so full of edible things as the garden I so enjoyed last year. There is a Buddha and a small pond, but I couldn't get Chiquita to keep still so I could get her in the same picture.

Thursday afternoons the Berkeley organic Farmer's Market sets up one block away. I just did a quick swing through and bought some fish, but though I took my camera I completely forgot to take any photos - bountiful displays of fresh fragrant produce will do that to me! A short while later after Barry returned from work I went back to the market with him and got him to pose with some tomatoes.

So far I haven't been to the Berkeley Bowl, the nearest thing to Vic Market here- there is a new branch now as well as the old one, and I will be going in the next couple of days. The prices at the Farmer's Market are a bit exorbitant, though the quality is very good - I am hoping the Bowl will be more reasonable and also have very high quality produce. The supermarkets have variable quality stuff, but if you choose carefully you can do well. By the time I multiply prices by 2 1/4 (to convert from lbs to Kilos) and add 25% for currency conversion, the prices seem roughly comparable to prices at home. Notably, chicken is much cheaper here and turkey, which we don't see much at home, seems relatively cheap too.

The real bargains were to be had in Oakland Chinatown - the exhibition we had planned to see in Oakland was closed on the weekend, so at a loose end in Oakland we went for a wander in Chinatown instead, and bought a few sauces, snowpeas and ginger - didn't really want to cart peaches about with us, even at 80c a pound! We chose a Vietnamese Pho place for lunch, inviting a young couple we had been speaking to in the queue to share our table with us. They were both doctors in the Stanford area, and were interesting company. We even debated the health care issues - for non-Americans, the debate is really weird - where else would they characterise the provision of universal health care as communist (though some say fascist, or too expensive and requiring an increase in taxation, and defend their system as the best in the world, while it is clearly the most expensive in the world and serious illness bankrupts many. There are 48 million Americans without any health insurance, it seems, and most people get their cover through their employer, and lose it when they lose their job - and many small employers don't provide it and many low-wage workers, the working poor, don't qualify for cover. Meanwhile, some genuine communists actually had a table at the nearby Oakland Art and Soul street fair : I was so taken by this unlikely sight that I took a photo.

On Saturday we took another walking tour, this time of Adolf Sutro's estate at the very western end of San Francisco, known as Land's End. He is yet another colourful character amongst the many in SF's history, but little is left of his railroad, magnificent indoor swimming baths and indeed his estate. After the tour was over we walked on a bit along a path past the USS San Francisco memorial (dedicated to the ship that was lost in Guadalcanal during WWII. The path leads to one end of the Golden Gate Bridge, and I'd have liked to walk all the way (less than 2 miles) but couldn't convince Barry. It was very blustery and quite chilly, though I took a photo of the bridge which shows its top lost in fog but maybe you can see how there is blue water and sunshine on the far side, looking east back to Berkeley!

Other things we have done: saw "Julie and Julia", the movie about famous US chef Julia Child, in which Meryl Streep has a wonderful time pretending to be 6ft 2 , and this afternoon we saw a documentary entitled "Yoohoo Mrs Goldberg" about Gertrude Berg, who wrote and starred in "The Goldbergs", the first sitcom on US TV, which followed on from her very successful radio serial in which she portrayed the mother of an immigrant Jewish family - it ran from the Depression through the '50s, but the TV programme was basically killed by McCarthyism, which got the actor who played her husband (Philip Loeb) onto the Black List and the show never really recovered. We had never heard of her but she sounds like a most amazing character.

I tried out the downtown Berkeley YMCA, which has a good pool with a spa and better hours than the Uni pools, but decided I'd prefer to rejoin the Rec Centre on campus so I can swim in the outdoor pool - I think I must have got hooked on outdoor swimming. I also joined a pedometer programme they have going, but so far have been using my own pedometer rather than the one I can pick up at the Rec Centre as part of the programme. I have been getting in my 10,000 steps most days, after a long break in my time at home in Melbourne when Jesse, my preferred walking companion, was unable to manage long walks in the last months of his life. I have also been going to the Albany Y senior's exercise class 3 times a week with Sonya, so I hope to get off a few kilos over the next couple of months. Time to post this and watch some telly!

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.