San Francisco Opera and a Walking Tour of the Castro

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Jewish Holiday Trip to the East Coast

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.