The Solano Stroll

From our house, we get to Solano Avenue by turning right at the first corner, walking down Indian Rock Road to the park where people practise rock-climbing and go to drink beer and watch the sun set, then taking one of the many paths in Berkeley, incorporating lots of steps (a bit like those scattered about in Sydney, near Wollomooloo , for example). There is a Berkeley Path Wanderers Association, a group of volunteers who help maintain and renovate the paths, and organise walks along some of them. Whenever I see a sign to a path, as long as I am just walking and not on a tight schedule to get somewhere, I take it, and am often rewarded by charming gardens, gorgeous views and surprising shortcuts.

Solano Avenue is renowned for its eateries and for being a generally interesting place to wander about. On previous occasions, we have eaten at a really excellent modern American restaurant called Pimlico, which Barry chose from an article on the local eating scene that he had printed out before we left home. Not having read anything about it to generate expectations, I was very favourably impressed by the food, although the description of the produce was a little over the top for the uninitiated: who knew that Blue Lake is a region that grows string beans? I was expecting beans in a lake of blue sauce, but had no complaints about the beautifully steamed beans on the plate accompanying my main dish, and realised that they are serious about locally sourced products.

We have also shopped at the supermarkets along the strip – the branch of Andronico’s (which carries more exotic and organic products than Safeway or Lucky) seemed to have a very knowledgeable guy on the fish counter, who was explaining to another customer that steelhead salmon is an ocean-farmed fish, what we refer to as ocean trout as home. They also sometimes have tasters of their “adult” chocolate chip cookies – full of dark chocolate chunks and too good to take home, where I would not be able to resist them. Another evening, we tried a Thai restaurant at random: the ambiance was good and the tod mun pla (as the fish cakes would have been called in Australia, here they were just tod mun), were excellent, but the other dishes we had lacked the freshness of flavour we expect from Thai food, so we will try another of the many Thai restaurants on the street next time. We also came across the street astronomer, a local astronomy buff who set up his 10 inch Dobson telescope in the street aimed at the very bright Jupiter, with three of its moons also visible (there had been 4 earlier; one had just disappeared around the other side of the planet by the time we stopped to take a look.) Gael, a fellow student from my U3A "Why is it so" course, told me she had seen a programme on TV or an article about this guy – it was really a great experience to share his enthusiasm. With so much ambient light I was surprised we could observe anything in the heavens above, so I was especially delighted with Jupiter. I hope to catch him again some time - maybe I could see Saturn and its rings if I get lucky.

Once a year they organise the Solano Stroll, which is a very long and well-attended block party, where many of the local organisations and stores have stands on the street, bands play, dance troupes are out, and the local High school chorus performs every hour on the hour. The ukulele band was a bit more unusual than the various rock, jazz and folk groups, but I was impressed by the large number of groups of what looked to me to be very young kids, early to mid-teens, who were doing a good job of live performance. Performance venues such as Ashkenaz, which presents World Music , had stands, and so did old and new community organisations including the ACLU (American Council for Civil Liberties.)

The character of the stands changed as one progressed down the hill from Berkeley to Albany. Up the top where we started I was astonished to encounter more Jewish organisations than Buddhist, and more of both than Christian organisations. I was able to find people who knew where to buy kosher chicken, which I hope will be tastier than any other I have encountered here so far, and there were many kinds of Jewish New Year services on offer, but as I will be celebrating the Jewish holidays with family on the East Coast, I didn't sign up for anything.

The vegetarian and vegan food options diminished in favour of more standard street food offerings as one descended, also. There were many green organisations, promoting recycling, green energy alternatives, solar power etc. Also there were many political stands for the various candidate standing for local or state elections which coincide with the Presidential elections, and a lot of Obama merchandise and opportunities to register to vote. The photo below is of a life sized cardboard cut-out of Obama. If I had not lost Barry by the time I got there, I’d have got him to take my photo with it!

Unfortunately due to my taking too much video of Morris dancers early on (unintentionally: with my sunglasses on I can't see the screen very well and didn't realise I was still in video mode) my camera battery went flat before I was even halfway down so I couldn't begin to capture on film the variety of merchandise, propaganda, activities and consciousness raising on offer.

I enjoyed talking to the people manning the stalls and looking at the produce, though I was so not- hungry that even the smell of marinated chicken grilling didn't tempt me, and I didn't see any gelati which might have been a temptation in the warm afternoon sun.

I stopped at a jewellery stall which had very nice mostly silver stuff set with semi-precious stones, and as I was scanning the display cases, the stallholder said to me: "You're wearing my earrings!" "I don't think so", I replied cynically, "I got these for my 50th birthday about 15 years ago in Australia." "We used to have a store in Walpole Street, Kew, called Jeeba" she said. It closed in 1994 - indeed it was the very local store where Sue had bought me the very earrings I happened to be wearing that day, in their closing down sale! What are the odds? We had a great reminisce about Kew, and Alphington where they had lived previously (close to where I lived before moving to Kew in 1976). They had lived in Melbourne for 11 years before returning to the US to be closer to ageing parents, have dual US-Australian citizenship, and now manufacture in Davis, CA, and sell at street fairs and shows all over California and other places. A former partner in their business has now reopened in Australia on Collins, so I will be sure to look in there from time to time to see what's new in their range. They haven't made my earrings for years now, but Jeanne and her husband agreed they are very nice and maybe they'll start making that design again! I have tried to take a picture of the earrings but I am not good at using the digital zoom and they all came out looking gold rather than silver, and too blurry to make out. So you will have to imagine them, or maybe in a subsequent post you may see me wearing silver and moonstone earrings as I don't have so many other earrings with me on this trip (but no prize is on offer to the first spotter!)

One other display I particularly enjoyed was several "art cars", heavily decorated but still roadworthy cars covered with every imaginable kind of imagery, both inside and out, from many tiny figurines stuck to every conceivable surface through metallic animal features on the outside, leopard-skin and animalia interior. Our Melbourne-based friend Ralph Newmark has done his car in a kind of Latino street way, and it always occasions wonder from passers-by when parked - there was an Art Car Fair scheduled for the next week which we were unable to attend, but that would have been an eminently blog-worthy event! I have been looking for the flyer for this event but I have mislaid it - I took notes on it to remind me of some of the things I intended to blog about, and the fruitless search has delayed this post for the whole time I have been away on the East Coast.

I have posted the photos I took on Picasa so you can see the lot. I think it may include a short video of people dancing to a band.

http://picasaweb.google.com.au/bjoymarsh/2008_09_15SolanoStroll#

There is also a bit of bad video of Morris Dancers, but it is sideways and I can't figure out how to rotate a video! All technical advice will be gratefully accepted.

http://picasaweb.google.com.au/bjoymarsh/SolanoStrollMorrisDancersSept08#

Our First San Francisco Cultural Experiences and Other Activities

With a great rush of blood to the head (or perhaps the wallet?), Barry decided to book a series of cultural events in Berkeley and San Francisco. Operas, symphonies and plays are now arrayed before us like a string of pearls. Such are the wonders of on-line booking services and a debit card that it didn't take long at all to map out our cultural event future. This was before we had access to a car, so we decided to include a few matinee performances, which isn't a bad idea anyway as on Barry's non-teaching days we could have lunch or dinner in San Francisco , or maybe go shopping.

But before these musical or theatrical events began, we made sure to get into the SF museum of Modern Art to catch the Frida Kahlo exhibition. I am not sure if I blogged about the excellent Frida exhibition we saw at the Tate Modern Gallery (formerly Battersea Power station) a couple of years back, or the 100th anniversary exhibition that was held at El Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City at the start of my time there last year, or my frequent visits to the Casa Azul (the Blue House, formerly her home) in Coyoacán, close to where we lived while we were there, or this very exhibition which came to Philadelphia the week after we left in February this year (Barry gave a couple of talks on "Frida-mania" while we were there. He also wrote a piece on the historical background in Mexico for the Frida exhibition held in Canberra's National Gallery several years back, so has some form in the field.) We also picked up a DVD of the Salma Hayek Frida movie while in Mexico and watched it again shortly before leaving Melbourne: yet after all this exposure and the books and articles I have read, I still won't pass up a chance to see her paintings again. (Same goes for Diego Rivera's murals: there are a couple we want to see here in the San Francisco area - there was a small room in the exhibition devoted to their time in the Bay Area in the 1930's.)

I had heard from some SFMOMA members that the tickets to see the Frida exhibition were for a fixed time. We had tried to get into the museum a couple of weeks earlier in the mid-afternoon on a weekend, only to discover very long queues, so we booked a morning time slot, drove the car to a Bart station where we knew there was parking (only my second outing, but I am getting used to it now, as long as Barry does his job of navigating) and got to the museum just as it was opening. We had time to check out another gallery first, a special exhibition of photographs by Lee Miller, curated by her son. She had been a model, a muse, a fashion photographer, a war correspondent, and had a quite extraordinary life. She gave up her work after bouts with depression and booze, and her son only discovered a treasure trove of her original works years after her death. A very interesting exhibition and different enough to the Frida show not to overtax the same seeing muscles.

I find the audio tours that museums now put onto MP3 devices are usually worth hiring - there was a lot of extra material on Frida for example, with various artists and commentators talking about such things as the Mexican Revolution, Diego and Frida's political life and times, contemporary documentary footage, the ability to click on highlighted features of some of the works for more information on how critics have interpreted the symbolism, and so on. I thought it was a steal at $3. Timed admissions notwithstanding, the gallery was a bit too crowded to spend the time I would have liked contemplating the works. We also watched an hour-long PBS documentary which I thought was a pretty good addendum, and was not in the least bit boring or repetitive. Mind you, I had needed a salad and coffee from the cafe before tackling it.

After the museum, I opted for a little bit of shoe shopping, abandoning Barry to his fate while I found a pair of shoes to wear to Ben and Lissy’s wedding (unless I manage to locate something as comfortable and attractive with a slightly lower heel between now and January!)

Then last Thursday I met Barry at the Bart after my exercise class, and we went into San Francisco again to hear a matinee performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. As ever, the work is very impressive. I forget how good the first 3 orchestral movements are, and the Choral movement packs a huge punch when seen live. We were in the second row so had an excellent view of the soloists, if we were a bit too close to see the whole orchestra and the Chorale very well. A short symphony by Ollie Knussen preceded it, pretty interesting music and it seems he is pretty tight with Michael Tilson Thomas (MTT), the orchestra director, who had a lot to say about the work and the composer before the performance.

We were amazed at the list of sponsors and donors in the programme: there is so much money about here, it certainly shows up the poverty of the arts organisations at home! Even the categories of donors blows the mind: $15M and above ( only one person in this category), but for instance in the $1M to $2.5M category there are 27 individuals, families or foundations. There are different support societies to belong to and pages and pages of named supporters listed within their donation categories. Very few of the "Anon"s which seem to be quite prevalent in the much tinier lists of supporters of, say, the Australian Opera.

The demographic profile of the matinee was overwhelmingly over 65 and female: we felt young and fresh-faced (if poorly dressed!) Not surprising, I guess, as this must be the target audience, but there were few school groups and precious few young people at all. I used to take my mother to the odd matinee performance of the Opera or a Symphony, but I was so busy getting her into and out of car or taxi and ushering her to a seat, finding the lifts or escalators rather than the stairs and getting programmes etc. that I didn't much notice who else was attending. I haven't been to a matinee at home for years, so don't know how the audiences would compare, but I suspect there might be more students.

For entertainment on a more mundane level, we just joined Netflix. Not sure if it exists in Australia, googling shows Quickfix as a kind of clone (for a subscription fee they mail you DVD's from a list you generate, and you return them in the same pre-paid envelope at your leisure. Beats wandering about in Blockbuster and getting fined because you forget to return them on time.) We don't have a TV in this house, but do have a large flat screen to watch DVDs good for the evenings (when I am not busy blogging, that is, or studying my Spanish or the music for my choir). We have had our first three already, fourth is due today - they keep you posted by email - wondering whether we will continue to make the time to watch them - I never get around to watching half the things I tape at home!

I have found a social group to speak Spanish with. Their fluency level exceeds mine for the most part, but I can keep up. They are mostly people who work professionally with the Latino communities here, and/or live in Mexico for part of the years, and/or have travelled extensively in Latin America. They have a tertulia with a pot luck dinner (= bring a plate, for those Australians who are not familiar with the term) and discuss a short story or other piece of reading, on a couple of Tuesday evenings per month, with a North Berkeley offshoot (El Grupito del Norte) which meets without major food on non-tertulia Tuesdays. We discuss anything at all in Spanish - at our first meeting this included the art work of the host of the meeting, the Frida exhibition and another at the De Young Museum in SF of works by Dale Chihuly, (who I had never heard of, but whose exhibition I'd now like to see), a recent increase in the level of local crime, the Republican Convention which was on that night, Obama's campaign, people's experiences enrolling voters around the country, travellers' tales from Latin America...If it were native speakers, the conversation would be too fast and too sophisticated for me to participate, but with this group I can extend myself without being totally flummoxed. The photo shows some of the flowers in the garden: I have been picking them for the house, especially when we have guests.

We had our first people over for dinner on the weekend , and I had a meeting of El Grupito del Norte here last night (Tuesday) . So I have been shopping and cooking as well as picking flowers. We visited the Monterey market (an outdoor F&V plus indoor specialty groceries, wine, bread etc) on a strip where there is also a specialty butcher, fishmonger, cheese store etc to get stuff. I find the supermarket produce here is of variable quality, if cheaper - oddly, at home fresh market produce is generally a lot cheaper than supermarket, though you have to choose carefully and build your relationship with the store holders.

I have also been swimming twice a week at one of the campus pools, reasonably early on Tuesdays but later on Fridays, as the pools are only open for lap swimmers at hours they are not in use for water polo or other activities such as aqua aerobics. I am not wild about the hours but didn't realise they were so restricted when I joined up. I seem to be able to cope by having a yogurt 2 hours before, so I am neither too desperately hungry nor feeling sick due to swimming on a full stomach, but I need to take a sandwich because I am ravenous when I get out of the pool at 12 or 1 PM after a 2km swim preceded by a 2-3 km walk with no serious breakfast. Several people have recommended the YMCA in Downtown Berkeley as a better choice, but I have paid for my membership and a locker so I can leave my flippers, pull buoy, shampoo etc there with no need to cart the stuff up and down hill with me every time.

I have found a Jewish choir, singing in Hebrew, Ladino and Yiddish - first rehearsal last Thursday night and found it daunting as I don't read music and don't know most of the works, but will give it a try for the time I am here. We meet at the JCC (Jewish Community Centre, where I do my over 55 exercise class), so I'm on familiar territory, as it's only about 2 km from home. I attended a couple of sessions of a Spanish conversation class at the North Berkeley Seniors' Centre, but dropped out as it was too elementary, but someone in the class recommended the choir to me, just as someone I invited to join me for a coffee after the exercise class recommended El Grupito and at El Grupito they recommended the tertulia. Moral of the story - if you actively pursue opportunities, they will show up - now several people have recommended Spanish choirs, but I think I will stick to the Jewish one for a change.

I had my first pot-luck dinner last Tuesday with the Spanish-speaking group - there was a very short story to read which I studied but I didn't have anything much to say about it even in English let alone Spanish! The food was good and a great deal of it was vegetarian. I made a variant on a Mary Fisher salad of sliced tomatoes, thinly sliced oranges and red onion, with basil , with a last minute slurp of extra virgin olive oil and a splash of red wine vinegar. I used three colours of the heirloom varieties from the garden, yellow ones which are at their peak, green zebra which are spectacular but nearly finished, and several types of red ones which are pretty but not as flavoursome, but way better than store-bought. A grind of sea salt, some freshly ground black pepper and a tiny sprinkle of sugar on each layer of tomatoes really enhanced the flavour.

As you can see, I am still a slave to the bounteous produce from the garden here. It seems criminal to let it go to waste. Have been stuffing vegetables and making the sauce from the tomatoes, and I haven't used a bottled pasta sauce or can of Italian tomatoes yet! Made a pasta sauce for dinner the other night from the ripest, splitting tomatoes, both cherry (2 colours) and yellow and green varieties from the garden, baby eggplants, capsicums and a few sliced button squash. Also chucked in a couple of what the Mexicans call tomates (in Mexico City, where they call our tomatoes jitomates), or tomatillos elsewhere. These have a papery skin round the fuit, and in this case are purple, though green is more common. I have also used them for making really good salsa as they have quite a complex flavour, more intense and sharp/sweet than a tomato) - plus heaps of fresh parsley, basil, oregano, thyme and rosemary -there doesn't seem to be any sage in the garden. I only added store-ought onions and garlic. The very top photo in this post is a bowl of these purple tomatillos on the windowsill, looking out over the view from the kitchen and some of the garden (not the veggie garden, that is behind the deer-proof fence just off to the left of the photo. You can see the fence in the photo this paragraph is wrapped around, along with a photo of a small pink flower in the garden which is garlic-flavoured and adds a pretty touch and a nice taste to a tossed salad, but I don't think it'd survive cooking. In the photo their pinkness is very understated. Above is a shot of some of the cocktail (cherry) tomatoes and larger ones still on the vines.

The weather has turned more normal for the season; after more than a week of 30+ (C) it was low 20's today, but that made it easier to walk home from my exploratory trip to the Monterey Market. Walking downhill is never too bad, especially if I use the pedestrian staircase/ path rather than some of the steepest streets, but it is the steep uphill hike with shopping that hurts! The hot weather has been divine, not at all humid and gloriously sunny, though I have been finding it too hot to walk home up the hill in the late afternoons when it has been well over 30! It is unusual for Berkeley to be this warm and sunny, apparently, though it is more likely in September than any other time. Mind you it drops to only 13 overnight so you definitely need a jumper if you are going to stay out till dusk.

We now have the use of a car that our landladies left us, preferably for local journeys only, for a small mileage fee, and have taken it out a couple of times. I need to go off to the DMV and take a test to get a California Driver's Licence, after mugging up on the Highway code and making a appointment on line. I will try to do it within a fortnight - a local licence is necessary to hire a car from some suppliers, and it makes the insurance cheaper.

I have booked flights and a train trip for Cleveland, Baltimore and NYC over Yomtov, and generally time is flying by. And now off to practice my Shlomo Carlebach medley and/or mug up on the Highway Code. Shana Tovah and G'mar Chatimah Tovah to my Jewish readers, and Happy Jewish New Year to everyone.

By Ferry to San Francisco

A couple of weekends ago we decided to explore a few more local neighbourhoods. We took a bus to downtown Oakland, slower than travelling by Bart but you get to see a lot more. As is so common in US cities, we observed how the neighbourhood changed, sociologically, ethnically, and economically speaking, block by block . And also topographically - as opposed to the extremely hilly area where we are living, from downtown Berkeley to Oakland it was pretty flat. Lots of churches everywhere. There were areas with many boarded-up stores , some areas with well maintained houses but more seemed run down. Mind you, we were travelling along a main road beside the elevated BART tracks, which may not be typical.

We got off the bus in deserted downtown Oakland. It was the Labour Day long weekend, and they were setting up a weekend-long musical festival in a large area just off the main street, but it hadn't really got underway at the time we were there. The stiff breeze also made it a bit chilly out of the sun. So we made our way to Oakland's extensive Chinatown (or Little Vietnam - we felt like we were back home in Victoria Street).

In our brief preliminary reconnoitre, we found cooking sauces and vegetables we have been missing, at prices a lot more like Melbourne prices than the few upmarket versions we have seen in some specialty sections in the Berkeley supermarkets. As usual in these Asian grocery and produce stores, we saw lots of things we could not identify. There was an extensive array of variants of teeny dried fish, some with sesame seeds, some sweeter, some spicier, which we sampled. Definitely will bring some home as an interesting nibble with drinks another time, Probably foolishly, we bought just a few not too heavy or bulky things - sweet chili sauce, mee goreng type packet noodles, fresh lemon grass, wasabi peas, miso soups - and carted them about with us all day.

It was too early for lunch, though yum cha (called dim sum here) beckoned seductively, so we carried on walking down to the port area, to Jack London Square, a relatively newly developed area with souvenir stores, chain restaurants and various historic ships you can take a tour of. The photos above are of one replica of Columbus's fleet, and of Barry in front of FDR's Presidential yacht, (his floating White House), the USS Potomac, which was not open for tours the day we were there.

The ferry to San Francisco leaves from a dock at Jack London Square. We checked out the departure times and figured we could wander back and maybe have quick lunch at an interesting-looking Peruvian restaurant we had passed on our way down. But first we looked around the waterfront and noticed a solid-looking ship moored at another dock in the harbour, painted red with RELIEF in white lettering on its side. As we were wondering what it was, a former seaman in the Merchant Navy who used to work on the Light Ships (which were basically floating lighthouses that anchored in places where they couldn't build a lighthouse) offered us a personalised tour. This particular boat, after 19 years of duty off Delaware and Cape Mendocino, became the ship which went out to relieve permanent light ships off the West Coast, when they needed periodic maintenance.

Whenever I meet someone who has been a worker in a particular area that I know nothing about, I am fascinated by their account of the ins and out of their working life. The detail he was able to fill in as he took us over the different areas of this (small!) boat, and painted a picture of life at sea, was really interesting - where the crew slept, vs the officers quarters, the bathrooms, the kitchen, the engine rooms, the huge mushroom anchor and the immense length of heavy chains that secured it, the mechanisms for raising and lowering it, the awful jobs and the good ones on board, how the light worked, the communications systems. He spent ages with us, and then it was nearly time for the next ferry, so no lunch in Oakland for us.

The ferry was a bit late, and there were lots of family groups spending time together. I found it too windy on the upstairs open deck so went inside and looked out of the panoramic front windows as we went sailed past the vast dock areas with mega cranes and extensive areas of containers from shipping lines from every corner of the earth. We also see these from another angle coming into and out of West Oakland on Bart rides to and from San Francisco. There are great harbour views of San Francisco, Treasure Island and the Bay Bridge. with the Golden Gate hazy in the distance. We skipped the first stop at the Ferry Building Terminal (we'd been at the produce market there the week before) in favour of the next stop, Pier 41. Then we wandered about through the crowds of tourists, avoiding the trams from around the world that run along this part of the Embarcadero (no Melbourne trams this time, but we did see and old W class tram last November when we visited). We settled on a seafood restaurant to eat a rather late lunch. We are getting used to how large restaurant servings are here, so we are now ordering "appetisers" (= first course or what Australians would call an entree) rather than "entrees" (which, counter-intuitively, means a main course here), or fewer dishes than we would at home.

After a bit more walking through highly touristy areas, we headed off, we hoped, for a long walk to the Presidio. But it was a lot further than we thought, and it was windy and chilly, though sunny. And the neighbourhood, though pretty, hilly and full of beautifully maintained typical San Francisco Victorian houses, was totally noncommercial, hence not a cafe to be seen, and no public loos. So eventually we turned back towards the more commercial areas and found a bus to take us back towards North Beach and Chinatown. Fortified by good coffee and gelati, and much relieved, we set off towards a Bart station by bus, but the traffic was so heavy that we the bus was barely moving, so we got off and walked down to Market Street and the Bart Station instead. There are so many tourists in San Francisco: never have I seen so many copies of the Lonely Planet and other guides in every language in every hand, not even in the sidewalk cafes of Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City. On weekends the last 67 bus leaves Downtown Berkeley Bart before 7PM, so we missed it and got a cab back from the station.

Public Transport and San Francisco's Coit Tower Murals

Last weekend we decided to take one of the free walking tours in San Francisco that we had learned about in a brochure we picked up at the airport. To get to San Francisco from here would be easy by magic carpet - we could fly along the line of sight directly from the kitchen window! However, as mere mortals we walked to the bus stop, took the 67 to the BART station, and got the train from there to the Embarcadero station on Market St.

And now for a really long aside about public transport in Berkeley. I really wish there was some kind of stored value multi-mode card that you could use on all the public transport here. Barry read something out to me about such a system on the bus yesterday, but I couldn't find any reference to it on the transit company's web site. As it is, you need exact change on the bus ($1.75) and another 25c if you want to transfer within 1 1/2 hours, but can only use it for a single transfer. (we often transfer to or from the 51 bus, pictured. Note the rack for bikes on the front - Bull Bars on 4WDs are bad enough, but this would certainly inflict a lot of damage in a collision!) You can also buy a 10-ride ticket, which I finally did a couple of days ago, or a monthly pass, at selected outlets, though not on the bus. Barry also discovered that as a staff member at the University of California, he can get a partly subsidised bus pass which is good for the whole year (and can get the value for the months he doesn't use returned when he leaves). We were having recurrent crises due to shortage of dollar bills and change, so at least we don't to worry about that any more.

You can buy a card from a machine at the BART station which allows multiple rides and debits the amount you have spent each time you put the card in at the end of your ride - unlike NYC, where there is a flat fee irrespective of distance travelled on the Subway and buses within a given time period - but you need to put the card through the turnstiles on entry and exit, whereas in NYC only on entry. With BART, you can subsequently add value at another machine, using a credit card or cash. But the BART system is not linked directly to AC transit who run the Berkeley buses, though you can get a transfer from a different single purpose machine before you leave the station which gives a 25c discount on the local bus in San Francisco. The New York City MetCard is much smarter as it works on the trains and buses and allows transfers. The ongoing debacle, budget overruns and non-delivery of the Myki Melbourne public transport ticketing system seems so stupid and such a waste of money - with all the different systems in place in every part of the world, surely there was one which would have worked without starting design again from the ground up.

I note that everyone flashes their pass or pays their fare on the bus. I really dislike the Melbourne ethos where people don't pay on trams because they can get away with it - it may have arisen because of a series of bad decisions about how to run the public transport system, but I think it indicates a lack of sense of ownership of the transport system which is in a complex dance with poor service, neglect and under-resourcing (both human and infrastructure) which really detracts from the system. Mind you, the buses here are not so well-patronised most of the time. Our local bus is apparently only really full when the kids getting out of school are riding home, and the seating configuration is more accommodating to wheel chairs than to run of the mill bus travellers, with few seats and those are very uncomfortable. And it stops running around 8PM weekdays and before 7PM on weekends, which mandates a long walk home or a taxi after a movie or even dinner in our non-car-owning state.

I have just joined the Berkeley Public Library, whose main branch near the Downtown Berkeley BART station is in a splendid Art Deco building with friezes (reproduced on the library card design I chose) and lots of brass. I found all kinds of great resources there, including bus system maps which will be very useful for figuring out how to get places - for example, to the hairdresser I have been recommended, or the best route to the various malls for occasional shopping forays. I finally found a reference to a stored value card, but haven't yet checked out the link. This morning I was on time for the bus due to leave about 9:05, reassured that it hadn't come early by the other people at the stop, including Brody, our downstairs neighbour, who had already been there for some time. When it still hadn't shown up, he called his wife Esther at home and asked her to check "NextBus" on the computer, which supposedly tells you when the next bus is due at your stop, using GPS information from the actual bus. When it said 17 minutes, he decided to walk but I figured I'd get where I was going just a bit sooner if I waited - but it took about 25 minutes for it to turn up. I asked the driver what had happened to the earlier bus, and he said it had broken down.

Later today I thought I would have just missed the bus home from the closest stop to the supermarket, but there were still people waiting there. We got into a conversation about what happens when a bus breaks down - one of the women had been waiting for the same bus (which many kids take to school) in the morning, and said about 20 kids were late for school. Her husband used to be a bus driver with the AC Transit company, and she says they don't bother to send out a replacement bus, so there will be problems with the schedule all day. The bus we were waiting for arrived about 20 minutes late, and I was pleased not to schlep my groceries up the hill in the 30 degree heat. When I got off, I saw Charlie, our next door neighbour, waiting for the bus down, and while I figured that under the circumstances I'd have time for a long chat with him before his bus would actually arrive, I decided after few minutes'conversation that my groceries were getting warm, and came home instead. I was half an hour late to my Spanish class in the morning, but such are the vagaries of using public transport, and I was philosophical as I got where I wanted eventually, at both ends of the day.

To get back to the main travelogue: when we arrived in San Francisco, it was a nice morning and rather than wait for a connecting bus, we walked through the streets till we reached a staircase leading up to the Coit Tower. And when I say up, I do mean up! There is an immense wall of rock to be scaled and we climbed and climbed and climbed. I stopped to take photos, not so many of the views behind us over the Bay looking east towards the Bay Bridge (where we had come from) , but of the houses that give onto the stairway and the lovely gardens (and to be honest, to catch my breath!)

Here is a link to the many photos I took of the murals: http://picasaweb.google.com/bjoymarsh/CoitTowerMurals

I have been trying various methods to get many photos up on this blog in a reasonable amount of time. I have posted just four in line below, but if you are interested, please follow the link to see all of the photos I took. I think you should be able to look at them as a slide show.

The tower itself was built using funds set aside by Lily Coit, who had been rescued from a fire in which her playmates died by the Fire Brigade and thereafter became a great fan of the firefighters, and the mascot of the Brigade. She lived a pretty eccentric life for a woman of means in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, and left money to put up a public edifice of some kind in thanks to the fire brigades and for the betterment of the people of San Francisco . It is a simple structure atop the already very high Telegraph Hill, and the murals were put in as the pilot project for artistic work as part of the WPA during the Great Depression.

The guide walked us round the entire tower, and then up an internal staircase now closed to the public, introducing the artists who had done each of the mural panels, which are about life in California, from rural pursuits, through commerce, the press, labour movements, electrification, transport, leisure - there is crime depicted, left-wing journals on display along with movie magazines, and in some of the works we can see the Talmud and works of Karl Marx among the books on the shelves.

The politics of the artists were varied, one Fascist sympathiser of Hitler had his panel (see the lunch counter) but the majority of the artists were of a more left persuasion, and in many cases had been influenced by Diego Rivera (see the pictures of the lilies, which I took to be an homage to him). The opening of the Tower was postponed because one of the artists had gone too far for the citizenry (or possibly the conservative media of the day) to bear, and they mounted a successful campaign to remove very obvious references to the Soviet Union and the international struggles of the working class on one section of one wall. As the artists had used true mural techniques working with wet plaster , the entire completed panels had to be chipped off as they could not be painted out.

...and back to harvest time in the Berkeley Hills...

I got back to Berkeley on Wednesday night, caught up with Barry and the house, ate some tuna salad Barry had prepared and it was bedtime. Thursday I was up early to go back to my over-55's exercise class at the JCC, this time with the regular teacher. Rather more dancing-based aerobics , well-instructed so I managed to follow the routines (except for the line dancing, which I could tell was a simple routine but couldn't quite get the hang of ) and less weight work or mat work than I like, but at least it is 1 1/2 hours when I am doing something active with my body. I signed up for the new semester starting next week. Walking down to the class at a reasonable pace had me warmed up well before we started, and I got very hot and sweaty - decided I must bring a towel and wear a tank top next time! Sonya, whom I met last time and had since read some of the blog and found it unexpectedly interesting, didn't have time for coffee and is off to Amsterdam on the weekend, but we exchanged numbers for when she returns, and I met another few class members and hope I will get to know some of them better in coming weeks.

I did a very small supermarket shop for stuff I like to have in the fridge that was missing, and bought an unfamiliar fish to try also - I asked them for some ice to keep it cool while I walked home up the hill in the sun. This was my first chance to use the debit card that arrived in the mail while I was away. I haven't managed to find a way of using Oz-based credit cards or even taking cash out of ATMs overseas using Australian cards without incurring at least 2.5% on the transaction, plus whatever you lose on the currency conversion. You can avoid an additional transaction fee by using affiliated banks, but that avoidable $4 or $5 charge is additional to the percentage fee. So while Barry is working and earning locally, to the greatest extent possible we live off that cash or a local bank account. Unfortunately, in Mexico last year we couldn't get a local account with electronic access due to his immigration status, so used bundles of currency for most things. Here we have a local cheque account with on-line banking and debit /ATM cards, though the on-line banking seems less intuitive than what I use at home. Also, the "pay anyone" feature I use all the time at home to pay bills and transfer money to other people's accounts here is only relatively simple and free for accounts held with the same bank - there is a $30 fee to transfer funds electronically to an account with another bank, which is way too high, especially when looking at small transactions. Last time I looked, I could transfer thousands of dollars internationally from a Melbourne-based account for $25!

People still use cheques very extensively in the US: it seems an expensive anachronism, but maybe they have cheap labour processing all of the paper? I still recall watching how the ANZ bank processed their cheques maybe 20 years ago; despite the MICR coding (magnetic ink character recognition, those funny looking numbers on the bottom), it was still very labour intensive and involved many steps - at home I only write about 6 cheques a year for both of us and curse every time I have to deposit one, but it seems I will have to get used to it again here.

Away from matters financial and back to the land! The tomatoes are running riot in the garden, especially the cherry tomatoes which are unbelievably prolific, while the various larger heirloom varieties are ripening nicely (the yellow ones seem to be first). There are yellow and green capsicums (I will experiment and see if green ones I leave on the plant will turn red later) , several varieties of eggplants in rich deep purple or variegated purple and white stripes, a kind of cucumber which is round, yellow and slightly spiny (the more conventional ones seem to have finished), string beans which have been left too long on the beanstalk and have mostly gone yellow and overgrown, and patty pan (button) squash, which should have been picked a while ago. Some of them are huge and I assumed they would be pretty inedible, but the ones about the size of a bread-and-butter plate are still delicious steamed , though the football-sized ones need to be peeled first but then cook up fine in a ratatouille style mixture. I gave one to Janet and recommended the ratatouille approach, and she found it worked well also. I haven't used any tinned tomatoes in cooking, I just put in the cherry tomatoes which are bursting out of their skins with ripeness and chop up and add a few of the bigger ones, starting with any damaged ones. I am keeping an eye out now and will be and picking the little ones before they get too big for their boots! See a couple of these with their blossoms still attached in the photos below, along with a dark green squash of some kind, which I haven't tried yet - there are at least 4 more hiding amongst the leaves on the ground, and several more not yet big enough to leave their mother.

In the herb department, Italian parsley, thyme, several types of basil and rosemary from the garden have also enhanced my veggie stews for pasta sauce and side dishes. The various salad greens are largely the rather bitter sophisticated type - I adore rocket (called arugula here) but find most bitter leaves a bit too strong for my taste. Also I have filled vases with flowers (see the first photo of just one vase of about four dotting the house, including lots of fragrant roses) and while I am harvesting, I have been eating the ripest of the blackberries growing through Tom and Janet's fence, and the few pale orange raspberries on the canes. The mission figs (look like the blue figs in Melbourne) are not yet ripe so I can't report on flavour yet, and the apples likewise.

And remember, the downstairs neighbours are also helping themselves to the produce. I am no kind of gardener, so it seems quite an undeserved bonus for me to be harvesting all this yummy stuff from the garden ,which I have lifted not a finger to produce. In response, I do feel obliged to cook it and not let it go to waste. I can see the kind of kitchen slavery that a garden in full production could generate for an industrious housewife! Note that I have cooked all the more deeply coloured eggplants, only a couple of stripey ones are left in this picture.

Back to New York City

We had made plans to visit my first cousin Jeremy on the way home from the cottage. He has been living in Scarsdale for about a year with his American wife Tara and their four (and a quarter, as they reliably informed us) -year-old twins, Jacob and Jonathan. After cleaning up from lunch and packing, we headed off, computer-generated instructions in hand. It was an extremely scenic drive most of the way, on the Taconic Parkway which winds gently through very pretty country and is a lot more charming than the wider and straighter State Thruways, Turnpikes and Highways. A deer ran onto the road at one point, and survived as the traffic was light, but it was scary. There was a bit of road kill about, the odd skunk and raccoon and bird of prey. After a couple of hours' driving were supposedly about 30 minutes away from Scarsdale when we encountered what looked like a huge traffic jam ahead on the freeway. By quick thinking before we missed the opportunity, Lissy drove across a grassy median strip onto another road, taking a lead from several other drivers who seemd to be in the know, so we avoided getting stuck in heavy traffic the rest of the way. Ben fired up the GPS, avoided its frequent suggestions that we should get back onto the freeway system, and navigated a new route, which impressed the hell out of me.

It was lovely to catch up with the family again – the boys have lost most of their English accents in the year since we saw them last, but are cuter than ever. I had rudely invited ourselves to supper, and Tara obliged with bagels, delicious salads etc, and lots of ice cream (this was the part the boys liked best!). Ben and Lissy spent some play time with the twins and I caught up more with the grownups, particularly Jeremy, who works as a consultant to the Relais and Châteaux group of very special hotels and writes on travel and food for various publications, including the Tatler where he was the food critic.

As it happens, Scarsdale is quite close to the top of Manhattan, where I have been staying in Joan’s Washington Heights apartment. The kids dropped me off at home before heading back to NJ to return the car and get the train back to Grand Central – I was irrationally delighted because with my generally excellent (not!) grasp of geography, I had imagined I would schlep back there with them and be too tired to come all the way back uptown after 11 at night, when subway works on my line mean the trains don’t run all the way and I’d have to walk quite a way or wait for a shuttle bus after a very slow local train ride. What a bonus to get home early and check my emails and make a few calls to get the last couple of days’ activities set up.

On Monday I went down to the Financial District to visit Ben’s work place and meet his boss and colleagues. It was fascinating as a former computer person to see him in his professional context, and wonderful to hear his boss tell me how brilliant he was (I restrained myself from saying “tell me something I don’t know” and settled for the milder statement that I would not disagree). We speculated about the first mainframe computers I worked on in Australia, England and NY in the 1960’s, which took up as much space as their office and probably had less capacity than one of the servers sitting on the floor (or maybe less than the cell phones or iPods in our pockets). Reminiscing about Computer People for Peace is always fun in New York, too! I noted with satisfaction the jar of Vegemite on Ben’s desk and recalled with regret the self-sealing experiment I am still conducting.

Then I went uptown to meet Judy Sloane, an Australian friend unexpectedly visiting Manhattan. She is staying with a recently arrived friend of hers who is consulting here for a couple of years and has taken an apartment on 56th and Broadway, smack bang in midtown, just 3 blocks from Central Park. I've never lived so centrally and was surprised how very light and quiet her corner apartment seemed mid-afternoon. After a cold drink and a catch up, we went off to wander around the Park for a while, but certainly didn't get there by the most direct route. As usual, I got totally disoriented in the Park and came out on the East side instead of the West or South side, so we ended up wandering maybe a bit longer than planned. We stopped at the Boathouse, fantasizing about iced coffee which proved hard to find, so we settled for gin and tonics instead, which pleasantly extended the afternoon. Then I had a dinner date at Jay and Ellen’s, dining on their terrace again with a wonderful salad full of good things perfect for a hot night, followed by ice-cold seriously sweet and juicy watermelon.

When I got back to Joan’s after dinner, took off my shoes and went to the fridge for a drink, I found myself paddling on the kitchen floor. Water was dripping from the ceiling in a most alarming manner. I called building security (no idea who else to call at 10.30PM) and after some investigation they reported there had been a plumbing leak in one of the upstairs apartments. Meanwhile I set up a bucket and a lot of rags to wipe the floor and catch errant drips, waiting for the handyman who was expected but rang at 12.45 AM to say he wasn't coming.

I had hoped for an early night because I was meeting Lissy and Ben before 7 Tuesday morning for a helium balloon ride (or rather, rise - it is a tethered balloon, which climbs 200 feet into the air above Central Park near 72nd St). Her firm does work for the AeroBalloon company so we were able to book a time slot for a free ride - even at 7 there was a queue. In the afternoon the queue can stretch for up to 4 hours, as only 4 people can go up in the basket at a time. It was a lovely morning and very clear, and the view of the park is fabulous. I tried to take a 360 ⁰ video but it is pretty wobbly. I’ll try and post it on a photo web site and give you a link. To upload a video more than a few seconds takes forever using this blogging software, and after trying to load one yesterday I gave up after about 25 minutes. See a photo taken from aloft instead, and a shot one of the balloon guys took of the three of us.

After we came back to earth, we went out for a very ordinary breakfast, I farewelled Ben and Lissy and went over to Elaine’s for a quick catch up and walk. We took her cockapoo (no I am not making this breed up - it's a cocker spaniel/ poodle cross), Sweetie, to the dog grooming place to be brushed. Unlike Jesse, who hates the vet and tries to bolt whenever we visit (though he has never been to a beauty parlour as I bath and groom him myself), Sweetie couldn't wait to get down the stairs and be pampered. While she was being groomed, we walked around the neighbourhood looking in shop windows (lots of places don’t open till 10, 11 or even 12, and this was around 9 AM) . The Upper West Side has certainly gentrified a lot from when I lived at no 20, less than a block from her groomer on W 83rd St, in the late 60’s – then I was mugged a couple of times , now the main danger is that you could get knocked down by crowds of people queuing for ice cream! Here are Elaine and Sweetie on the corner of 72nd St and West End Avenue.

I went back uptown to Joan’s, thinking I might catch a nap before my next set of activities, but there was by now a large bucket of foul liquid in the kitchen area and I decided to call the maintenance folk to see what was happening. The upstairs leak had been repaired but they figured they needed to make a hole in the ceiling to enable the trapped black water to escape, pledging to return in several days after it has all dried out to repair the ceiling. I opened lots of windows and doors to try and air the place, but hadn't made much progress by the time I had to head off way down to the Lower East Side to meet Vicki in Tompkins Square Park, and roam around the East Village a bit. We found an “Australian” ice cream store, where the ice cream was nice but I still haven’t figured out what is Australian about it, certainly it wasn't the prices! I caught up with her news, including the free store she runs in the neighbourhood, and took in the many changes in the neighbourhood since I last spent any time there.

On the Lower East Side, I was well on the way to my next commitment in Brooklyn , so with some time to spare I managed to fit in a tour of the Tenement museum on Orchard Street, just South of Delancey, which I would highly recommend. There is an activity centre and bookshop across the street, but the "museum" itself is an old tenement building, and the tour consisted of visiting 3 apartments in it and hearing the tales of the families who lived there. One apartment is in its 1904 configuration, one in its 1936 state, which was when the last families were evicted. Highly recommended! The records they have recovered and some testimonies are really fascinating, and though I don’t know if my family (my paternal grandparents’ siblings) who were briefly in New York before settling in the Cleveland area ever lived somewhere like that, it's not much of a stretch to imagine it.

And thence to Borough Park in Brooklyn, to see my nephew Moshe, his wife Leiba, and their 3 lovely kids, Chayale, Shifra and Yisroel. They had driven in from their home in Lakewood, NJ, for an hour and a half to meet me for dinner at Dougies, a Glatt Kosher institution, with barbecued meats, kebabs, steaks, Chinese food, kids meals, a buffet with grilled vegetables and a couple of salads. I ate too much but considerably less than I could have. Family resemblances are so strong – almost 3 year old Yisroel looks exactly like Moshe at his age; Moshe looks just like my brother (his father); Moshe remarked how much Ben (from photos in my camera) resembles his Zaide (my father)... we can’t help but comment on the similarities whenever we meet. The first time I met Leiba, it was the female side of the family we talked about, with resemblance between me and my niece Esther, and a then much younger Chayale, but tonight it was the boys. One interesting piece of news that I hadn't heard: Leiba has started a match making office, and is doing a great job by the sound of it – I think she’d be really good at it. From what I know of her, she is a very people-oriented person, generous and very warm, also persistent and resourceful. It sounds like a very nice way to do well by doing good, and I wish her every success!

To Massachusetts for the weekend

In Melbourne we don't have a weekender. I find it hard to spend 6 months of the year somewhere other than home base even in one hit, as we are doing currently, let alone broken into small snatches of time, and when I am away I often miss something I left at home. Having two of everything might be one solution, and I suppose one gets used to the driving, but I think I must be more of a stay-at-home person, especially when there seems so much to do in Melbourne at the weekends and I don't really want to be away from friends and activities.

But I finally got to spend a weekend at Lissy’s parents’ cottage in the Berkshires, near Stockbridge and close to Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The whole family, Barbara, Bernard and the kids, have been going up there since 1983. They love the house and the Beachwood community they are part of. It is quite a long drive from NJ, and for us it was an even longer trip, as Ben, Lissy and I met at Grand Central and got the train to Summit, NJ, where we met up with Lissy’s brother Drew and had dinner in a local Chinese/Japanese place. We stopped by the family home to collect Lissy’s mother’s car and pick up a few things – a really nice cheddar, which I particularly appreciated as it can be hard to come by tasty cheese in the US, some maple syrup, and a watermelon, before we embarked upon the 2 ¾ hour drive. At least the late start meant we encountered no traffic snarls on the way up.

We got in not much before midnight and spent a little time in front of a log fire with Bernard and Barbara, discussing the myriad places to see and cultural events available for such a short weekend. We even checked the weather forecast to judge when it would be safest to go to Tanglewood, the one Must Not Miss activity on the list, and how and when I could fit in some exercise. As we had arrived in the dead of night, the view from my bedroom window in the morning of the lake lapping right up to the edge of the garden was quite a surprise for me. Just a few water lilies were open, there were boats dotted about, and a few people were visible pottering about their little docks or gardens.

After breakfast Barbara dropped me at the main road so I could walk into Stockbridge without getting lost (those of you who have suffered my sense of direction will be aware how wise a move this was.) I took about an hour to get to the Stockbridge public library to meet up with Barbara again, walking the 5 km and stopping to take some photos. The lushness of the North East at this time of the year impresses me every time I get out amongst it: no brown plains here, but huge trees in every shade of green, lush fields of wildflowers, and working farms visible from the road with barns that look as if a young Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney could stage a musical there.

The main street looks like a picture book US town, lots of touristy stores and an old inn, The Red Lion, that a local entrepreneurial curtain manufacturer saved from demolition and redevelopment, and is now a hotel with a really nice looking restaurant, the public areas stuffed full of local furniture and wooden items like this rocking horse and a carousel in the same style, and antiques including for some reason a very large collection of teapots (most Americans don’t have much use for teapots, really!) We then drove a little way to an arts and crafts fair in a garden setting: 90+ stalls selling mostly handmade stuff, lots of jewellery and pottery and hand knits and milk churns, honey products, plants, and many objets to decorate your country cottage. I didn't find anything I couldn't live without, but found it very interesting. A bit like St Kilda Esplanade market or the Bazaar Sabado in San Angel, Mexico City, some of the same stuff, some local specialties. Apparently it was a weekend without sales tax. In the US, unlike our GST, sales tax is added onto the purchase price of goods after you buy – you need to be sure you have 6-8.5% of funds in reserve, and when I first hit NYC 40 years ago, it came as a terrible shock to be charged more than I expected for everything. I've got used to it now but first time travellers to the US, beware!

A tax-free day is an incentive to shop, I guess, and there was a tent sale of jewellery in another close-by shopping area also taking advantage of the bonanza. Here we did a lot better, finding a pair of earrings I liked in silver and a reddish agate, and several pairs of earrings and rings for Barbara (who has daughters and granddaughters to consider also). Barbara generously bought mine for me as a memento of the occasion, and I wore them the next day (and have them on now as I type up this draft on the plane back to Berkeley).

It was coffee time and we stopped off at a chocolate company in the same area, where the coffee was fine and I managed to resist anything dangerous to the waistline. Whatever we think about Starbucks (and its recent decision to close most of its stores in Australia is something of a testament to the strength and persistence of our own pre-existing coffee culture), there is no doubt it introduced a decent cup of coffee to much of the USA, and one is far more likely to encounter something drinkable at most coffee places since its advent. Now we need someone to do the same for tea – you still often get a lukewarm cup of water with a wet teabag in the saucer and half-and-half in a little jug or a UHT container on the side! (I have been told by Berkeley locals that the people who founded Starbucks used to work for Peet's, a locally famous store that specialises in fine teas and coffee, and I have met lots of locals who also fail to appreciate the ubiquity of Starbucks. I haven't sampled their tea in any of their cafes, but have tried a variety of their loose teas and tea-bags left here by Sally and Monica, which have all been good.)


There were some errands to run in the nearby centres of Pittsville and Lee, and we took the scenic route, seeing the local theatres and the different styles of the towns. There used to be a very big GE plastics plant n Pittsville but with the decline of local manufacturing there is less employment – I think a bit of urban renewal is happening, but it looked a lot less prosperous than the other places we visited where there is a lot more tourism and cultural life apparent at street level. We were considering picking up something towards our evening meal but a call to Bernard revealed that he, Ben and Drew had had a successful fishing trip on the lake and we would be having fresh bluefin for dinner.

The younger generation had been playing tennis and were running the few kms home when we got back. I know Ben finds it hard to fit in enough exercise while working long hours in Manhattan, so he gets very outdoorsy and active in the country. Lissy had also fitted in a quick trip to the local outlet for some essential purchases – living in NYC without a car, one misses the Mall experience. We had a late light lunch and did some lazing about, chatting and reading before dinner – Bernard (aided by the other anglers) had cleaned, filleted and prepared most of the fish (he left a couple whole on the bone, you can see them on the platter in the photo in case you want to know what a bluefin looks like). We polished them off for supper with lots of salads and headed out to Tanglewood with desserts packed for a picnic on the rolling lawns which surround the “shed”, the roofed area which seats 5,000. The kids took me for a bit of a roam through the main areas, some Frisbee tossing happened and as the sun set we returned to the picnic set up, with our low chairs, a large candle in a can (the lawn was beautifully lit by everyone’s candles, and by the rising full moon). We had ice cream and berry pie before the programme began.

It was an all Russian program, Glinka, Katchachurian and Prokofiev. I wondered if the crowd on the night would have been bigger if not for the recent trouble in Georgia with the Russians. I could only imagine how the place would look with a crowd of 30,000 as there was on July 4, when Ben and Lissy had celebrated Ben's birthday at a tribute concert for James Taylor. Reading through the Tanglewood programme, I am again reminded of the population of this part of the US and how much is available. There is too much on even in Melbourne to do it all, with our 3.5 million people, but the music, film, art dance and theatre around here, in easy reach of NYC and Boston and the many smaller population centres around, is quite breathtaking. Google Tanglewood and eat your hearts out, music lovers everywhere else!

The concert itself was excellent. The soloist in the piano concert, Jean-Yves Thibaudet, had the most beautiful touch. There are huge screens which give an excellent view from the lawn - we could see close-ups of the soloist who was wearing a rather peculiar shirt and jacket, of André Previn who was conducting and has aged a lot from the beautiful young pianist who was married to Mia Farrow, and of the orchestra. The sound seemed excellent too, but Drew, who wandered into the shed for a while, told us how much better the sound was in there. It got a little chilly later in the evening, but I had borrowed a heavier jumper than I had with me and was comfortable in that At the end of the concert, people cleaned up their areas meticulously – I didn't see a single piece of rubbish anywhere on the lawns, what a pleasure to behold. Maybe music hath charms to soothe the troubled breast that leads to littering!


Sunday was forecast to be a sunny day, and we had all managed to dodge Saturday’s thunderstorms, so we were pretty lucky with the weather. After breakfast, Bernard took me out on the inflatable boat and we putt-putted slowly right around the lake. It is quite large, and their house backs directly onto it. It has silted up a lot in the time they have been there and there is a bit of a weed problem, so that one really can’t swim directly from the garden and navigating through some areas is a bit tricky as the weeds foul the propeller. There is a summer camp on one side of the lake with its own beach, and many very large houses which have grown over the years although in the Beachwood community, you may build up but not out, so they can’t increase the footprint of the houses. Tanglewood has its own beach and the estate also backs onto the lake. There is a little island where Canada geese nest and it was absolutely gorgeous to be out there on the water in the sun (with hat and sunscreen, of course!) enjoying the lovely scenery and greenery. I shot some video but my technique is appalling and I won't impose the results on you!

I guess living where we do in Kew we have water and trees and hills all around, but Ben says living in a small apartment in the city with not much greenery outside of Central Park, he really appreciates getting out of the city, needs it in fact. I guess his years in Bondi made him more of an outdoorsy person than he was in Melbourne. Before lunch, Ben and I walked around to the town beach for a swim. As on Joan’s lake beach, there is a dock made of decking, but this also has a sandy (presumably constructed) beach with an area in front of the buoy-enclosed swimming space which seemed popular with parents of very young kids for some safe water play. There were boats of various sizes moored nearby, useful for keeping me swimming straight. As a lap swimmer used to an indoor pool, I wish there were lines in the sky to keep my backstroke straight, but apart from Ben, who hopped out and read his book long before I finished, there was no-one else swimming to bump into. The water temperature was lovely but the weeds were a bit of a worry, especially when tendrils wrapped themselves around my goggles and followed me everywhere. I found a relatively clear space and really enjoyed the exercise, and worked up an appetite for the delicious lunch (see photo of part of it).

It is a long way from Borough Park to Washington Heights, but only one change of subway, and quite a short connection so that once I got on the F train just across from Dougie’s it only took a bit more than an hour to get home. Joan says of the A train that it’s a reading train, and it is true that the journey goes a lot faster with a book or the newspaper. They were giving away promotional copies of the Daily News (I’d never buy it, Rupert Murdoch doesn't need my money) but it was an interesting read, so right wing and with such a different slant from the NY Times. They had an easy Su Doku (their spelling) as well as a difficult one: I did the easy one in no time at all but 10 at night after a very long day is no time to tackle a hard one!

I seem to be specializing in getting locked out on this trip (I locked myself on out on the terrace in Berkeley - I added this to my email notifying you of a previous post.) This morning at Joan’s I went to do the laundry in the room which is at the far end of the complex, and when I returned I couldn’t get back into the apartment whatever I did with my key. Off to the maintenance office (all the way back beside the laundry) and after several debates, to-ing and fro-ing, it emerged that maintenance staff had come into the apartment to check the progress of the leak (which I believe has stopped) and enlarge the hole in the ceiling for whatever reason. On exit the security guard had locked the top deadlock, for which I did not have a key, rather than just the lock I have been using. So he had to go back to the office and get that key to unlock the door and let me in. I was outside for about 20 minutes, not in the sun this time, and in the company of two bags of clean laundry. Fortunately I still had 1 ½ hours before the airport shuttle was due, so was able to get packed up and leave things shipshape before I left...

I have been writing this as a draft on Virgin America, where there is a power point for every seat, so I have been able to run the computer beyond its battery span. Amazing how much faster the flight, like the subway ride, goes when you are occupied, but at this point I will either go back to my Australian novel, Love like Water, which I am loving like chocolate, or maybe a brief nap: we land at SFO in an hour and a half.