Berkeley, then Tacoma and Seattle, November 2009

After Maguie left, life in Berkeley reverted to normal for a while. One glorious autumn day I walked up Spruce Street from the house on Walnut Street we rented in 2009 to the 2008 Santa Barbara Road house, and took these typical streetscapes and views from the Berkeley Hills.











My routine included my usual four exercise classes each week, Grupito del Norte (the local North Berkeley and Hills sub-group for Spanish conversation evenings), the odd Tertulia (a fortnightly Spanish conversation with some reading to do, and a pot luck supper) , choir rehearsals, and a couple of dinner parties. To prepare for having a few more people round for meals, we moved the larger round table in from the deck, as in the autumn it's a bit too cool to eat outside. There is a sofa in there, which gets the midday sun so it's a lovely spot to sit and read, but we had to move all the other easy chairs into the other living room to make space. The table could seat 6 people, using a mixture of elegant wooden chairs and slightly smaller folding ones, but with the sofa the room was a bit crowded. It seemed easiest to set out the food on the kitchen table and get people to serve themselves -what with all the wine bottles and glasses, the table wouldn't accommodate large platters (and the house on Walnut Street had an abundance of really beautiful large ceramic serving platters, mostly Mexican, which made serving a pleasure).

We had Myrna and Garrett over with Sally and Monica (owners of the house in Santa Barbara Road, up in the Berkeley Hills, where we stayed last year) for a very entertaining evening. I made Aussie style pumpkin soup and a roast of NZ lamb (subsequently I found Australian lamb, which we thought was better), with home-made dips while we were sitting round for drinks before dinner. As Sally was experimenting with a meat-free diet, I wrapped some portobella mushrooms in foil with some garlic, herbs and a dollop of sweet chilli sauce and stuffed them into the oven for her and anyone else who fancied them. As the 2-rack oven was packed with the roast, a large tray of roasting vegetables and some bread in there to warm and crisp (challah, as it was a Friday night), fitting the mushies in was the hardest bit! Myrna brought dessert, a tiramisu cake from Costco, which I fervently wish I had never discovered. I often don't like real Italian tiramisu, maybe the coffee or liqueur components are too strong for me, but this version was divine, and unfortunately there were leftovers which I was unable to resist over the next couple of days.

We also went into San Francisco for another of the walking tours we love - this time the Alamo Square Victorian Houses. I have posted all the photos from the tour and ones we took afterwards as we walked back to North Beach for coffee on the web. (Away from the very pretty Postcard Row there are less photographed and less tarted-up groups of what we'd call terraces at home, which I snapped as we came across them on our more or less random walk back - they are the later ones if you are looking at a slide show from the web site). We learned how to distinguish the different types of houses called Victorian, and Edwardian, heard about some very special ones (several shots show a mauve house - this is where the Menuhin family grew up, though it has been renovated since and I doubt these were its original colours.) Also we saw a large house where Ken Kesey lived , which had gone from being very gracious and in fact serving as a consulate, to a single room occupancy drug squat, and eventual, if very gradual, renovation, and heard various other colourful histories. You can see them here (and in case the link won't open in your browser with a simple click, which for some reason sometimes happens, copy the link and paste it into your browser's address line :
http://picasaweb.google.com/bjoymarsh/20091107WalkingTourAlamoSquareVictoriansEtc?feat=directlink

I also attended a couple of Albany YMCA brown bag lunches, organised jointly by the Y and the library where they are held. (Albany is one of Berkeley's neighbouring suburbs.) One featured a film-maker who had been following a group of young men who arrived in the US as refugees from an El Salvador then at war, who had fallen into gang life for want of social support structures, cultural attachments or family ties. Some of them were serving various jail sentences and as the war had ended when they got out, they were deported - to a country they had left as small children, where they also had no family ties, not many language skills, no cultural attachments - and unsurprisingly, had recreated their LA Gang structure there. He showed us some extracts of his documentary and told us the stories. The other featured Carole Peel, who is a member of my seniors' exercise class. She is a portrait painter and long-term tertiary art teacher, and showed us some of her portraits of well-known folk from the Bay area (including the husband of another person in our class) and spoke about portraiture as a particular skill, and her methods of working. A film-maker who has done a documentary on Carole also showed us excerpts from her film.

We also caught anther play at the Berkeley Rep (we saw Tiny Kushner, a set of short one act plays by Tony Kushner: here is a review, though I don't agree that the final play was the best, I thought it was a bit obvious.

http://www.kqed.org/arts/performance/article.jsp?essid=26208



Barry has a colleague, John Lear, who teaches at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington. (Here they are against a backdrop of Puget Sound when we went for a brief walk together at the end of one day's wandering about Tacoma.) They first met at UCSD when Barry was a visiting scholar there back in the 80's. We overlapped in Mexico City during our 2007 stay (when John introduced us to Herzonia, in fact). His wife, Marisela, is the daughter of the Fleites family we have stayed with in Havana, Cuba, and they have one daughter away in college and their other, 10 year-old Soroa, is still at home. We remembered Soroa well from one time they were visiting our apartment in Coyoacán. I mentioned I had family in Baltimore in conversation and Soroa, then aged about 8, became quite agitated and started whispering in her father's ear. She thought we were talking about "he who must not be named" - the infamous Lord Voldemort, the baddie in the Harry Potter books! So much for the Australian accent.

John invited Barry to give a talk at UPS and stay with them - so we decided to make a long weekend of it and become acquainted with the Tacoma-Seattle area. It was pretty cold and grey most of the time we were there - on our last afternoon, when we ate at a restaurant on the Sound, it cleared but I didn't have my camera with me! Taking into account the weather and Barry's need to give his lecture, we spent much of the time in the museum precinct of Tacoma. The former railway station has been recycled as the state court building, and features a glass sculpture by Dale Chihuly, probably the best known glass artist in the US, who is from the area and who has contributed a great deal to establish the Glass Museum . There is a great collection of his work at the local Art Museum, in this precinct also, along with the Washington State History Museum. One day we had breakfast across the road from the station at an upstairs café offering "Australian muffins" on the menu (I hopefully wondered if they had Vegemite to go with them, but they had never heard of it - any more than we had heard of Australian muffins, which seemed pretty indistinguishable from what we'd have thought was an "English muffin". Which reminded me to say something about the dog which is very popular in the US called an Australian Shepherd, which looks a bit like a stocky multi-coloured Border Collie or rather like the dogs we once saw put on a show in the Barossa Valley, which the owner called "Coolies" . This is what Wikipedia says about them:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Shepherd

and I am pleased to have them acknowledge that they are an American breed of dog and not Australian at all!) But to get back to the café, they gave us a 20% off voucher for full-priced clothes and accessories from the store downstairs, so we stopped there, and we both really liked the styles they had in the store. I bought a few items for gifts (no discount) and also a woollen embroidered jacket, red on black (already on sale, so no discount) and a wonderful autumn-toned pashmina, even though I rarely buy new clothes these days as my casual lifestyle across two continents doesn't seem to call for much dressing up. I try to get rid of something to make room when I buy something new: I have a few tops that are going into holes which I should chuck out, but they are such favourites (and the holes are so far so tiny) that I can't bring myself to! This shopping expedition was quite unexpected: our wedding anniversary was coming up so Barry encouraged me to buy the stuff, but in fact I can't remember the last time I shopped for clothes for myself with him, but a year ago around the same time of year, he bought me the earrings I liked in Healdsburg, in the Russian River winery district, again as an anniversary gift.

There is a bridge running from the former station to the Glass Museum, lined with a display of Chihuly's works (see the photos above: the display reminded me of the wonderful back-lit display of Swedish glassware they used to have in the David Jones Little Lonsdale Street store) and with a ceiling that resembles a brilliant coral reef: I also shot this piece of video overhead to give you a flavour of how lovely it is. I suggest you turn the volume down on your computer first as a lot of people were talking and there was traffic noise also.






In the rich tapestry of Tacoma's cultural life, there is a Dickens Festival, and we happened to be there over that weekend. Marisela was involved with a Flamenco dance performance and Soroa was dressing up for the Dickens costume event, but we didn't observe any of the performances because on the Saturday they were on, we went into Seattle to have lunch with a Mexican Art Historian colleague of John and Barry's, Deborah Caplow, who teaches at a University in Seattle and also happens to be a distant cousin of Barry's. Soroa and Marisela are pictured here as we saw them in the evening after we got home from our various activities. The other photo is of John and Barry in front of one of the many art glass stores in the very nicely restored downtown area of Seattle. From Deborah Barry got an email address and phone number of a closer cousin he had known 30 years ago but had lost touch with. Once we got back to Berkeley, he followed up and has begun working on a family tree for his father's side of the family, about which he previously had very little knowledge. We also met up with a coupe of friends of John's who were in town for a soccer match, a union organiser and a history teacher, both recently retired . The 5 of us wandered about downtown Seattle and later had a coffee in a former hotel where Japanese Americans had lived before being forcibly removed and interned during WWII, a rather unpleasant chapter in US history (there was a bit about this episode in the State History Museum that we visited on another day. Also some interesting archival stuff, too little, about the Wobblies (Industrial Workers of the World), whose history in the region I found quite fascinating. I of course was enchanted to hear contemporary recordings of old union songs, of which I am inordinately fond.)

On the freeway from Tacoma to Seattle, a journey of about 35-45 minutes, for miles and miles we were driving past Boeing plants and Boeing Field, where they build and test their aircraft. The scale of the facilities was very impressive, and you can see why a drop-off in the US aviation business would lead to massive unemployment and problems in the region. I guess having Microsoft nearby as another major regional employer helps reduce dependency on this one industry.

On the plane and while we were in Tacoma, I was reading a Penguin I got for 25c at the library sale, called "My Turn to Make the Tea", by Monica Dickens. One evening when I was talking to Soroa about her homework and the sub-teen fiction she was reading, she asked about what kind of books I had read when I was young. I explained that from children's books we graduated directly to adult fiction, and how much the world has changed since the 1950's. It seemed appropriate to leave her the book when I had finished it - it describes such a vanished world, post-war austerity in provincial England, rooming houses and writing with pencils, just one unwillingly shared typewriter in a local newspaper office, actors and young couples living in lodgings with peculiar landladies. And Soroa was really chuffed when she asked if Monica was related to Charles Dickens and I was able to say she was his grand-daughter! I hope she will enjoy reading it in a year or two.

Dealing with US Insurance and Banking Bureaucracy

I may have mentioned in earlier posts my sense of desperation at the level of debate in the US about health care reform. Dealing with the insurance bureaucracy has been a real eye-opener to at least one source of the very high cost of health care here. Many Americans seem unaware how far from world's best practice they are here.

Through Barry's job at Berkeley, we are entitled to medical coverage, and as we went through quite a process in 2008 to choose an insurer and a plan, we decided to stay with the same supplier when we returned in 2009. It seemed to me (this is from memory) that what we are paying for the two of us, on top of the University contribution, which Barry thinks is abut 80% of the cost of the coverage, is considerably more than half of what we pay in total for our top private hospital and medical coverage, including all ancillaries (chiropractic, dental, optical, massage, CPAP machine, orthotics etc) in Australia.

It took months for them to get our address correct and send us our cards, though they had other details they could only have got from the very forms we filled out our first full day in Berkeley in the History Department at the University, and the money was certainly being debited from Barry's pay. It seems that some details on the forms go through Payroll, others through the part of the HR Department that deals with the insurers - many players handle the pieces of paper at Berkeley, then many more handle them at the insurer. When calling with an enquiry, the people we spoke to often said they weren't authorised to deal with that piece of information (for example level of coverage, name of our doctor, or even our address), and we had to call another department. I wonder who sold them their computer systems! In fact I sometimes wonder whether they even have them. The first doctors we were assigned to in 2008, far from being the ones we had nominated on our forms and who worked at the University Medical Centre, were in South San Francisco, about 30 miles from Berkeley where we lived and Barry worked. At least this time we got the doctors we nominated, close to campus. Both of us had minor problems (Barry had hurt his wrist and my left arm was not working properly) and as they were not improving we each eventually saw a doctor, had X-Rays etc.

Making my appointment was not easy, but as Barry had pioneered the process a couple of weeks earlier and offered his wisdom, it only took me 3 phone calls to get an appointment! There was a myriad of forms to fill out, and rather a long wait, but the doctor was extremely thorough and referred me for an X-Ray and (based on the outcome of the X-Ray), diagnosed the problem and referred me for physiotherapy. I saw the physio 5 or 6 times, it was easy getting appointments in advance, and he was very good, doing some manipulation and a lot of laser treatments as well as teaching me a variety of exercises. Now if I only did the exercises he prescribed regularly, the pinched nerve in my neck would be improving faster.

Once I got to the practitioner, I think the treatment was very professional, very thorough, and very good. But from my observations while waiting in the office at the physio (never for long), each patient seemed to have trouble over their insurance, and the receptionist and the physios were forever on the phone to insurers or doctors, chasing faxes about coverage etc. The co-payment of $15 per visit seemed about the same level as it is in effect at home, though we don't call it that, and that is all I had to pay, as under the insurance scheme the insurer picks up the rest of the bill, rather like bulk billing.

There is no doubt that enormous amounts of money could be saved by having better systems, perhaps standardising systems and practices, multi-skilling the people who answer phones or having a single case manager for all aspects of a person's treatment.

So much for health insurance bureaucracy. We also have a bank account with Bank of America - one that was established originally about 25 years ago when we were in San Diego for a sabbatical. We started using it as our main account in Berkeley last year, and the change of address seemed to work OK, though they never managed to print any new cheques for us (and it is hard to get by in the US without using cheques. Having transitioned away from paper-based to electronic banking years ago at home, it irks me that so much still depends on cheques. Interestingly, when you deposit a cheque in the ATM, you have to scan the cheque rather than put it in a deposit envelope, then it offers you a form of receipt with a scanned copy of the deposited cheque, but sometimes the ATM can't read the numbers on the cheque so you have to key it in anyway.) People seem to use cheques for trivial amounts of money, and often credit or debit cards also - you don't see so many notices in stores saying minimum expenditure $10 for a card transaction, whereas at home for low value transactions I have the sense we use cash more. Perhaps merchants in the US don't have to pay the banks such high transaction fees for card transactions (I assume this is why they Australian merchants don't like to take cards for low value transactions where the fees eat up their profit) - there is a lot less EFTPOS and more credit card use.

But this year, though the Bank recorded our change of address and at our request printed some new cheques with this address on them, and mailed them to us at this address, they still had our address from last year as our account address. This meant that the only way I could get a credit card transaction to work when paying for something over the Web was to use last year's zip code rather than this year's. Very peculiar, and it wasn't until I enquired about this that the third person I spoke to (after being on hold for ages at the start of the call and between each person), checked the home address on a different system than the one that issues the cheques!

Then Barry got a new debit card in the mail, with a letter saying his old number may have been compromised by some scam. But he could not activate this new card, because they seemed not to recognise Barry's date of birth as correct, as he discovered when he went down to the local branch and spoke to a person there about it. His date of birth has of course not changed in the 25 years he has held the account, so it seems odd no-one had noticed! And within a week or two of getting this sorted out, another 3 new debit cards arrived in the mail, with no explanation at all this time. Rather than once again engage in the telephone marathon, he went to the branch and cut them all up!

Then I had a further refusal of my card over the web, and again it required talking to a number of agents on the phone before one of them had the authority to tell me what had happened (I had apparently inadvertently selected the wrong month for my date-of-birth in this transaction). It seems many different aspects of transactions are managed using different computer systems which don't talk to each other, and the California-based accounts are on different systems to accounts held in other states or transactions done in other states, so no-one has the complete picture. I have not been a great fan of the Australian banks, and was especially peeved years ago when the Commonwealth Bank took over State Bank of Victoria, which had been my bank, and retired the latter's far better (from a consumer point of view) systems in favour of using their own legacy systems, but with this experience behind me I am a lot more appreciative of the relative efficiency of the Australian Banking system now!

Last Opera and a Barmitzvah

After Maguie left us on Monday evening, we still had one more opera on our subscription, on Tuesday night: Salome. We took BART downtown in the evening and just missed the first few minutes of the the pre-show talk this time. It is a very confronting opera - seeing Salome dance about with the bloody head of Jokanan (John the Baptist) is not to everyone's taste. I hadn't realised the work was based on a play by Oscar Wilde. There is more than the average number of nasty characters - Herod is horrid, Herodias is not a nice wife and mother, Salome is totally depraved - and not a lot of decent types, one of whom kills himself quite early. We enjoyed it, however - powerful dramatic music and very good performances again. The dance of the seven veils was extremely well-produced, with acres of silk employed to great advantage. One odd thing was the costuming of the Jews, who were in current-day Chassidic garb. The roles have the several Jewish representatives of different sects disputing the meaning of texts while ignoring what was happening in the land, and I can understand this from both contemporary and historical perspectives. But the costumes were totally anachronistic, in an opera otherwise consistently costumed in its own period, so I couldn't help wondering why they chose to dress these characters as if they had just walked onto the set from Crown Heights.

You can hear excerpts and see the cast list, etc. at

http://sfopera.com/o/288.asp

It was not our initial plan to have so many operas clustered together. We had to change the dates of our initial subscription because of our plan to go east the following weekend (which was Halloween, so we missed being Trick or Treated in Berkeley) once again to attend the Barmitzvah of Nate Gruber, Lissy's nephew, in Rockville, Maryland (close to Washington DC). Barry hadn't seen Ben and Lissy on this trip and figured this was the only time he could fit in a trip to their territory on the East Coast, so we flew off on Friday morning and flew home on Sunday.


We had hoped to catch up with Carmela (an old friend from my NYC Women's Group) and husband John while in the DC area, but there was a medical emergency in Carmela's family so she had gone off to New York before we came in. John was dropping his niece and family off at the airport around the time we got in, so we manged to catch up briefly just with him - he met us at the airport and drove us to our hotel (taking the scenic route!). He spent the journey discussing with Barry some details of his family history - his English grandfather and great uncle had been involved in the mining industry in Mexico in the 19th and early 20th Century. He has some fascinating family letters from this period and they discussed what institutions might be interested in these, and what sources could shed further light on this episode. I found the conversation quite fascinating. We arrived at our hotel before Ben did on Friday evening, and managed to catch up with them and other members of Lissy's family who were staying at the same hotel later in the evening. The photo above shows Nate's four grandparents, with Nate standing and his siblings and the Morcheles first cousins sitting on the floor.

We went to Shule on Saturday for the Barmitzvah, where Nate did a great job, sharing the parsha with a Batmitzvah girl, in a very full Synagogue close to the hotel. There was a lavish kiddush and much sitting around with the family in the Shule hall afterwards, then we went back to the hotel and got to spend some time with Ben and Lissy, finally choosing a selection of wedding photos for our album, as they had brought the full set of proofs with them. There were so many gorgeous photos and it was hard to choose a couple of dozen . I had found selecting them on the web, the initial plan, quite difficult: the site allowed us to compare two photos at a time, but where there were 4 or 5 similar to choose amongst, I would prefer A to B, and B to C and D to C, but then find I liked C better than A - going round in circles. Looking at the proofs was much easier! This photo shows Barry and me with Ben and Lissy and Barbara and Bernard (Lissy's parents) at the Barmitzvah.

I managed to get in a swim on the hotel pool before getting showered and dressed for the Barmitzvah party in the evening (Ben got in just as I got out, having worked out in the hotel gym session while I was swimming - I realised I haven't seen him swim since early adolescence, it is something I do a lot but have never really done with him except on long-ago family holidays. His freestyle has certainly improved - the triathlon training he did earlier in the year no doubt contributed!)

http://picasaweb.google.com/bjoymarsh/20091105FromNatesBarmitzvah

The theme of the Barmitzvah party was a casino and games, of which there were many, and although I didn't get around to the gaming tables, I did do the parent and child dance with Ben (there are incriminating photos). There was a person encouraging the dancers as well as the DJ, so there are some shots of me making a fool of myself with him, too!

I posted all the photos from my camera (mostly taken by Barry) on Picasa, so you can have a quick browse. It is lovely to have acquired such an extended family in the US, and we feel very privileged to now be included in such family simchas. We have only met Hillary and Brian (Nate's parents a few times - Hillary is Lissy's oldest sister, more than 10 years older), and we would not have expected to be invited as a matter of course, so we did appreciate the invitation and were glad to be able to attend. And we very much enjoyed the brunch at their house on Sunday, which gave us a
bit more time to chat with the family and meet a few more of them, including a cousin from the west coast who gave us a lift to the airport.



It took ages (and 2 attempts) on a somewhat slow connection to download the few seconds of video here and it is actually awful, but after all the time I had to defer going to bed till it loaded, I am leaving it in: you will see Ben and Lissy dancing with Kendall, Lissy's young cousin, who is dynamite on the dance floor!

Maguie comes to visit

Maguie Pallares is Barry's oldest friend in Mexico. They met when he was doing his PhD research in 1968, at a venue called Casa Jones where Mexican girls got to meet foreign boys, as far as I could tell, view matrimony in many cases. In her long career at Nestle, she ended up as Secretary/PA to the CEO, and still has many friends from the company - wherever we go with Maguie, people are always stopping us to say hello to her and catch up on news. Maguie has many brothers and sisters and a very large extended family. Barry has met them all, including the ones who live in Europe, and I have met most of them, including the family from Monterey and Queretaro. Maguie has always invited us to celebrate with them on Noche Buena (Xmas Eve) if we are in Mexico at the time (I am writing up this post so late that I can report we did so again in 2009!) We have spent several New Year's Eves with them also, and had many visits including a stay at Maguie's cottage in Queretaro (see in a post from 2007) . In 2005, the first time we ever rented the apartment we love in Coyoacan, I had enough space and a decent kitchen so I was able to invite a lot of the family for lunch one day - I think 14 of them came!

Maguie's 90 year old mother Romy, who lived with her, passed away in July, while we were still in Melbourne. When I heard, I knew how much Maguie would be missing her , and I suggested that a little later in the year if she felt she needed a bit of a break, she might like to come to Berkeley and visit us for a while. Maguie always looks after us so well when we are in Mexico that we were delighted when she accepted our invitation, as we loved having an opportunity to return a little of the hospitality she has showered on us over the years. And I think she was feeling a bit down, so the change got her out of her environment and we hope lifted her mood quite a bit.


Her flight came in on a Saturday morning in October. We had tickets for a matinee performance of The Abduction from the Seraglio that afternoon in San Francisco, and we managed to reserve an extra ticket as we know she is an opera fan (in fact I posted in 2007 about a performance of Turandot we saw together in Mexico City). Barry and I drove to SFO airport (with the assistance of the GPS, only getting one turn wrong) and picked Maguie up. I had done some research on parking lots near the Opera House, as with her luggage in the car it seemed unwise to leave the car on the street, and we navigated to the Performing Arts Garage shortly after it opened. (Getting anywhere by car using freeways in an American city I don't know still feels like a small triumph to me, directionally challenged as I am.)

This left us with a short while to explore the Arts precinct near Civic Centre and the UN Plaza, where the Opera House, the Symphony Hall, City Hall, the Public Library, the Asian Art Museum and assorted other grand public edifices line wide streets , just a few short blocks away from the Tenderloin, where homeless people, often mentally ill, line the streets and frequent shelters and places to get a cheap hot meal once a day. It was an uncharacteristically beautiful day for San Francisco, blue skies, no fog - October is reckoned to be the best month to visit.

Above, some of the public buildings in the general area of the Opera House: further above , City Hall, a couple of blocks away.

So we had a bit of a wander, noted a demonstration in favour of health care reform in the Plaza area, an old-fashioned kind of a demo which I found very encouraging, then had a light lunch at a cafe just a block from the Opera House. We made it to the opera in time to hear the lecture beforehand, where you often get some insights into the history of the opera, what is special about it, and get clued up on the best arias and other highlights to listen out for. You can read a synopsis and hear and see excerpts here:

http://sfopera.com/o/286.asp


It was a lot of fun: Peter Rose, the English bass, played Osmin, hamming it up very enjoyably and with a great stage presence. The dialogue was in English while the singing was in German, and we all really liked the production. But as Maguie had started her day in Mexico very early , we decided to go home rather than stay in San Francisco for dinner. Here are Barry and I at the table we set up to create a dining room, as the kitchen table really can't cope with 3 people at a time:


On Sunday we drove to Oakland to catch the ferry into San Francisco. There is a great Farmer's Market at Jack London Square near the Ferry terminal and we had about 15 minutes to wander about admiring the produce before getting onto the ferry for the ride into San Francisco. See the photo below for the brussels sprouts still on the stalk - I have seen them growing in a garden like this, but never on sale in this form in Melbourne. In the photo alongside we are approaching the Bay Bridge - I highly recommend the ferry ride. It is quite short and on a nice day very lovely. The West Oakland cargo port with all its heavy cranes and huge volumes of containers is a very impressive backdrop as you set out, then you cross the beautiful Bay itself, with the San Francisco skyline approaching, the excitement of going under the huge bridge, and the first stop, the wonderfully renovated and repurposed Ferry Building, is such an interesting destination. (It also goes on to Pier 41, adjacent to the tourist Mecca of Pier 39 and the start of the Fisherman's Wharf precinct.) We went to my favourite coffee shop in the Ferry Building, after sampling a variety of breads, cheeses, chocolates, olive oils etc., and oohed and aahed over the produce again (I probably have posted here before about the produce displays at the Ferry Building, showcasing local produce and offering samples of local olive oils, chocolates etc.) The outdoor craft market across the Embarcadero always has lovely stuff, and we wandered through these stalls, then along Market Street and up into Chinatown by a rather circuitous route - Barry had seen a photo at the craft market of an interesting building and had a fixed idea of where it was (he was completely wrong - we did in fact see the very building later, after having gone about 10 blocks out of our way). We walked into Chinatown and took it all in, then had lunch at a Vietnamese restaurant as Maguie had never eaten Vietnamese food before (it was OK but not wonderful. Apart from Yum Cha, we haven't had a really excellent meal in SF Chinatown yet - I guess we should do more research rather than choosing restaurants more or less at random.) After more time in Chinatown we walked down to Union Square, where Maguie and I had a brief look in Macy's to see if there was anything we couldn't live without. Maguie chose some very cute baby clothes for presents, while Barry spent this 45 minutes in a book shop. It was just about to start raining - we saw a really spectacular pink convertible from the 1950's stop and put up his roof right in front of us. But the rain stopped and we walked down to the BART station and took the train back to downtown Oakland. There we took another ramble through Oakland's Chinatown this time, where we bought some Asian herbs and vegetables for stir frying and some wasabi peas for snacking , then walked back to the car in the parking lot at Jack London Square and drove back to Berkeley.

On Monday, on my way to my exercise class at the Albany YMCA, I dropped Maguie at the top of Solano Avenue so she could wander down looking at the really interesting shops and maybe have a coffee before meeting me down at the Albany end, where the Y is located. The weather had looked a bit threatening but luckily she had encountered only a few drops of rain, which held off till after we had been to the supermarket (where she got some Halloween treats to take back to Mexico for some of the kids in her family) . I drove up to Santa Barbara Road, intending to show her the wonderful views and streetscapes up in the hills where we had lived for 6 months last year, but by then the heavens had truly opened and we could hardly see a thing - let alone go for a walk and admire all the 3-bridge views. So we did a little circuit of some of the old neighbourhood and returned home for a late lunch.

Tuesday is a day Barry has no teaching so we all walked the 15 minutes to UC Berkeley campus together, I went for my usual Tuesday swim and he took Maguie on a university tour. It is a beautiful campus and it was a gorgeous day again (what a pleasure swimming in the outdoor pool on such a day!) , and we all met for lunch at Adagia, a resturant I've eaten at before but which Barry has enjoyed several more times, across the road and up the hill a bit from the Rec Centre. Lovely food - they do excellent salads, Maguie had one of their specialty burgers and I've forgotten what Barry had, but it might have been fish and chips. Coffee and biscotti finished us off and we walked back via some of the bookshops on Shattuck Avenue so Maguie could find some English language children's books for some small friends who are learning English.

Over the next few days while Barry was at work, Maguie and I explored various Berkeley neighbourhoods, including Fourth Street, the Marina (see the photos - click to enlarge them, the top one shows the view looking back from the pier towards the Berkeley hills , the next one shows the view towards San Francisco - look carefully and you can see the Golden Gate Bridge from the far end of the pier- and the bottom obe shows some boats in the Marina), and College Avenue. I know the Rockridge area at the far end of College Avenue, which is in Oakland, as my hairdresser is there. I have wandered about the very interesting clothing (new and recycled), shoe and homewares /bric-a-brac stores and had coffee in several places, and have often bought cheeses and fresh fish at the rather expensive Market place (which a few weeks ago had a special on Australian cheeses, featuring such thing as Roaring 40's blue and Timboon cheddar) and usually pick up something at the Trader Joe's store near the BART station. But in another section of College Avenue, the Elmwood district, still in Berkeley, there are some wonderful food places which I have driven or taken the bus through but hardly ever walked around, including a fabulous Italian produce and deli store (A. G. Ferrari, check out their website at the link below for their food menu and some very Italian recipes. It reminded me of some of the specialised Italian supermarkets in places like Auburn Road or Station Street Fairfield in Melbourne. I picked up some arborio rice and some grana padano after tasting several varieties).

http://www.agferrari.com/



At one of the funky clothing shops in the same stretch, we took advantage of the sales to buy a T-shirt each - I found one in an unusual shade of bottle green that I really like on me, so was very pleased with myself, and as the day had turned very sunny I put it on in place of the long-sleeved top I had started out with.

We checked out the ice-cream store Gail had read and emailed about called Ici, where you could see the staff making the ice cream and mixing in all kinds of good stuff in the back. Unfortunately there was no large display of flavours (they change every day) or pictures, and the ones I tried to take through the glass had too much reflection. I had a pistachio and praline kind of flavour, and Maguie had a ginger and pear, I think, but they were pretty expensive. Now make your mouth water - look at their web site!

http://www.ici-icecream.com/

On the other hand, on Shattuck Avenue there is John's. which sells a single scoop of many perfectly acceptable flavours in ice-creams and sorbets for $1 a scoop. I don't think Ici's at 3 times the price are actually 3 times as good. On nice days the queue is understandably very long. Here you can see Barry and Maguie enjoying theirs on another day we were walking back from wherever we had been. Other Berkeley stuff we did included looking at the very fancy interior design shops, kitchenware places, a few clothing stores and some antique kimonos in a store along Fourth Street, and having a Mexican lunch at a very nice cafe, and coffee at another very nice place a few doors away after our wander though the shops. It was much easier to park during a weekday afternoon than on weekends, which is the only other time we have been there.
On Thursday morning Maguie came to my exercise class at the JCC - I had checked this would be OK with the instructor Naomi, who said certainly. I think she enjoyed the class, though from my experience, doing a totally new exercise class is always a bit bewildering - and that is in my native language!

On Saturday we packed in a lot. Barry and I were invited to brunch by a colleague of his from the History Department who lives just a couple of blocks away, and Maguie did a bit of independent exploring of the neighbourhood while we were out. Then we headed into SF by BART, and queued up at the turntable to take the obligatory cable car ride all the way to the far end of Fisherman's wharf. It was a lovely day again and quite worth the wait, especially as the buskers entertaining the crowd were very good. The two photos in this section are from Maguie, as I don't think I had my camera that day. You can see what a gorgeous day it was from this shot of the cable cars waiting up Powell Street, taken while were waiting in the queue. There was a crew change half way through our ride and we enjoyed a lot of jolly banter from the operators and some other passengers, and in the wonderful sunny afternoon, the sweeping views of the Bay and the city were magnificent, though I have none to post here.

At the end of the ride, we took some photos against a backdrop of the Bay Bridge, and then walked down from the Ghirardelli Square area to the Hyde Street Pier, where there are restored ships of various types and from many eras that used to ply the seas to and from this port - paddle steamers, tug boats, barges, sailing ships - we didn't do any of the tours or even go on board any of these floating museums, but absorbed the flavour. Although the area is totally thronged with tourists, it is still very charming and the seafood lunch we enjoyed at one of the tourist trap restaurants was very good and value for money. People-watching from your cozy table while enjoying seafood chowder is such fun.

We walked from the Wharf into North Beach, had a great coffee and some cake at Cafe Greco, then continued on to the BART station as we needed to be home by 6.30 at the latest. Maguie and I wanted to go to a concert that Anne Shapiro was giving just a few blocks from home that evening. I met Anne through my JCC exercise class last year, and she introduced me to the Tertulias I like to attend to practise my Spanish with other non-native speakers. Maguie had met her on Thursday at the JCC and was interested to hear her concert. She sang songs in Spanish and German, accompanied on piano, and a guitarist and a cellist completed the programme - with supper at the end with some wonderful cheeses and bread as well as fresh figs and other local fruit, crackers, cakes, wine etc. , which we hadn't really expected.

The hinge on Barry's Mac Book Air had broken late in the week, and many cables pass through the channel at the back affected by the break - apparently this is a design fault in the early models, which Apple only acknowledged and agreed to fix under warranty fairly recently. There is a non-official Apple store on Shattuck Avenue where they specialise in diagnosing problems, so we took it in there a few hours after it happened, and the very helpful techie looked up Barry's machine and ascertained it was still under Warranty, and told us we'd need to take it into an Apple Store and see a Genius (for which one needs to make an appointment). He advised us to go to the downtown SF store which is across the road from the Powell St BART station rather than drive to the Emeryville one, where access and parking is notoriously difficult. So we made an appointment then and there using his computer (as of course Barry's was not working properly) for the following Sunday. We timed it for a couple of hours before we would be going into SF anyway to see our next opera, and they booked it in for repair and said they'd notify Barry when it was fixed.

This production of Donizetti's The Daughter of the Regiment was absolutely delightful, excellent sets and very spirited performances. You can look and listen here, including to the famous Aria with ts nine High C's which showcases the young tenor star Juan Diego Florez, though I was more impressed by the soprano Diana Damrau. If you look closely you will see that the sets are made of maps of the terrain, very interesting I thought. In the pre-opera talk, the lecturer played at least 4 different tenors singing the same aria and asked the audience to identify them - which many people did (the only one I recognized was Pavarotti) .

http://sfopera.com/o/287.asp

So after this bit of fun, we went on to seek out some dinner. I got a bit creeped out walking through the somewhat scary neighbourhoods on the way there, as darkness was descending and I didn't feel safe on the streets, though we were not hassled at all. Coming from the Opera, with expensive cameras and electronic toys in our bags, I just felt a bit provocative and exposed. We were not exactly sure where we were going - Barry likes this, I hate it. We had been looking for somewhere Indian, I thought, but as soon as we found this likely looking Chinese place in the vicinity of Union Square I voted to stay and eat there rather than wander further afield. We mainly ordered yum cha (called dim sum here), which again Maguie had not experienced before. Since we first tasted dry-fried string beans in New York's Chinatown about 30 years ago, Barry and I almost always order them if we see something which sounds like it might be a similar dish, with crisp, squeak-when-you-bite-them vivid green beans with garlic, a little chili, maybe some Chinese sausage or pork tossed in the wok with them. We routinely rate the dishes we try against that first experience, which we remember as a perfect 10. We found some on the menu here, and they rated maybe a 6.5-7.

We came back to Berkeley by BART again, and got ourselves ready for Maguie's last day in Berkeley, when she and I visited College Avenue. We then picked Barry up after his teaching and office hours were done and went right back to have a very early dinner at the Rockridge end of the street, then Barry decided to accompany her to the airport by BART rather than brave the Bridge traffic at that hour. We really enjoyed her stay and we hope the change of environment cheered her up a bit and re-energised her for her return home to Mexico City.

Apologies for spelling errors in this post: I am writing up this final part in Mexico on Herzonia's LAN, and I believe there are some settings so that the spell checker thinks I am writing in Spanish. So just about everything shows up as a spelling error , disguising the real ones!

Some Berkeley-San Francisco Cultural Life

Berkeley was not to be outdone after my East Coast theatre and music experiences. Rather than photos, I have included links to some video clips in the text below.

The day I flew back to Berkeley from New York we had tickets to see Il Trovatore at the SF Opera House. I needed a suitcase for my 3+ weeks away, as that time had included some Synagogue and other occasions when I couldn't wear my usual jeans and a top and also had transitioned across seasons, so I'd needed both cool and warm weather gear. My flight got into SFO around 2 and I had established that the cloak room at the Opera House doesn't open till an hour and a half before the performance(therefore 6PM). Since 9/11, left luggage facilities seem to have disappeared, and I didn't fancy walking around San Francisco schlepping a suitcase. I also certainly didn't want to go back to Berkeley to dump my luggage only to turn right around and come back into SF, so I had been somewhat exercised by the problem.

There is a shuttle service I have frequently taken to and from the airport, so I called them from New York to ask whether they would take unaccompanied luggage, expecting that they wouldn't. But they agreed to take it from the airport and deliver it to my door in Berkeley for what they would have charged me, as long as there was a person at the other end to accept delivery. Like all these services, you have to call them when you have claimed your luggage and they arrange to pick you up at their assigned dock with their next available vehicle, which usually takes longer than it ought, and it worked out fine, leaving me free to take BART into downtown SF to look for something to wear to the Barmitzvah at the end of the month (not enough time for a museum).

In the end I only had an hour and a half at my disposal, as Sonya and Philip, whose niece Susan was visiting from the East Coast, had suggested we all go out to dinner before the Opera at Jardinière, a highly recommended restaurant very close to the Opera House. Check out their web site, which shows off the decor and some of the food, though not the menu from the night we were there, of course.

http://www.jardiniere.com/

They had arranged to pick Barry up at home in Berkeley and drive in together, and luckily the suitcase arrived literally moments before they did (he had a fail safe plan whereby the upstairs neighbours had agreed to receive the suitcase if it arrived after he left.) He called me just as they left Berkeley, and Philip suggested that as the traffic around 4 PM might be difficult, I should aim to get to the restaurant before 5 to ensure we secured the table. But as it was a longer walk than I had expected to get to the Opera precinct from the Westfield San Francisco Centre where I had been, and the traffic on the Bay Bridge was unexpectedly light, in fact they arrived before I did!

(I mention Westfield because as a shareholder in this Australian shopping centre development and management company, I like what I see of their shopping centres - maybe my shares will recover the value they have lost since I acquired them some years ago! It is a luxurious modern centre, anchored by Bloomingdales and Nordstrom, and I guess the new Chadstone is in a similar vein. The Powell Street BART station is right in the basement so it is very easy to get to.)

We had a delicious meal - with a lot of negotiation, the three women decided to share a number of starters (here they call mains "entrees" , which is confusing for Australians) , but I often find starters more interesting than mains. It is sufficiently long ago that I have forgotten exactly what we had, but there was a seafood dish , a beautifully balanced salad and a soup amongst other things, and our tasters of each other's mains were uniformly good- lots of fish, maybe Barry had duck, did Philip have venison or pheasant, I seem to recall it was game? I need to take notes! We did have several desserts including really outstanding sorbets and ice creams and a crumble, and probably something chocolate...all paired with excellent wines, but not so much as to make me fall asleep at the Opera.

It was new production of Il Trovatore. The famous Anvil Chorus was very spectacularly staged, and overall the singing and the orchestra were excellent.

Go to or cut and paste this link, where you should be able to look at and listen to video excerpts , including the Anvil Chorus.

http://sfopera.com/o/284.asp

I have found some of the performances this season a bit static and a bit too dimly lit, but this was a bit more lively with a very good set. The programme as usual was jam packed with information about the history of the work as well as a piece from Nicola Luisotti (the Musical Director of the SF Opera, in his first season) about it, the usual biographies of the performers and members of the production team, the season's new resident fellows etc., pages and pages of stuff about the sponsors and key contributors, in addition to the synopsis and cast details. We always feel like the poor cousins - it is rare for any of the performers ever to have sung in Australia, though occasionally the director in an expatriate Aussie. We are used to Opera Australia performances where it seems from reading biographies of the singers that the majority are locals and have perhaps appeared in a few European productions - yet we think they really sing as well as many of these very international singers, and I often think the productions are even better (especially ones which take advantage of the State Theatre's larger stage rather than the many which seem to be constrained to fit the small stage at the Sydney Opera House), though maybe the orchestra is less distinguished.

Philip had parked on the street very near the restaurant (and should have fed the meter once before they went off at 6 or 7, but fortunately had got away with it) so the car was just a block from the Opera House, and it only took about half an hour to get home. As we came into the dark dining room Barry tripped over my suitcase that he forgot he had left right in the middle of the floor, but I left unpacking it till the next day and crashed after a very long day still on East Coast time.

On the next evening we went to one of the plays we had booked from the Berkeley Rep season, American Idiot. Here is a link to a youtube preview of the show: turn your sound down a bit!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egGARtwaFEo

I had never heard of Green Day, the rock and roll band whose music the play was based around. The ushers were handing out earplugs at the door, and I used them but they weren't very effective. The action was centred around several young people as they moved out of school and small towns into the big city, through drugs, the army, moving away from home, unplanned parenthood, falling in and out of love... usual coming of age stuff. It was very high energy, rather interestingly staged with multiple video screens and an industrial style set, and though not exactly my cup of tea, it was better than I had expected. Next year I think I had better book the theatre events myself rather than leave it to Barry!

Much more to my taste was Michael Moore's film Capitalism: a Love Story. It was great to watch it in Berkeley, where there were lots of cheers and jeers from the audience as well as laughter and groans and sporadic applause. Ben saw it in Manhattan where there was not a peep from the audience! Vintage Michael Moore, self-indulgent and a bit scattered, I thought, and a cop out at the end where he proposes "democracy" as an alternative to capitalism (but he had just been critiquing the limits of the electoral system and who funded Obama's campaign, for example) but good to see on a big screen in the US anyway. So eyes, ears, mind and soul all stimulated in a single week - it was exhausting!

East Coast Trip Part 1, Cleveland and Baltimore, September 2009.

Seasonal produce on display at the Farmers' Market in Ossining, New York, Fall 2009.




In what is becoming routine when we are in this hemisphere, I caught up with my family for the Jewish High Holidays . This means visiting Cleveland, where my father's two youngest siblings live, and Baltimore, where my brother and his wife and his daughter, her husband and her 7 children live. The activities are pretty much as before, in last year's blog entry for this time of year as well as entries from 2 years ago. In fact my brother referred me to my own honey cake recipe which I had forgotten that I had posted here two years ago when I started the honey-cake baking marathon, if you want it check entries from late September 2007. I printed it out from the blog for Miriam and me to follow when we set about making one at their house for the visiting family to eat at Sukkot.
So I got to Cleveland a few days before Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year), and had a lovely time in the kitchen with Aunt Florence baking honey cakes and figuring out a few different vegetable dishes to cook, including roast veggies (potatoes, sweet potatoes, multi-coloured peppers, red onions and asparagus). We arranged them all beautifully for Yomtov meals after due consideration of what would fit in the oven or microwave and what would look gorgeous on which platters. And of course there were heaps so there were leftovers to turn into a roast veggie salad the next day. There was also a bit of driving about with Uncle Henry to collect prepared food from the different stores they had been ordered from (and Aunt Flo orders the Challot for the Shule as well so there were a lot of those to be collected as well).

Yomtov dinner the first night of Rosh Hashanah, also Shabbat, was at first cousin Pam and Stan's. Aunt Flo and I had prepared some of the food to assist Pam, who is a special ed teacher and as a working woman has less time than we retirees did, but she had worked her magic with the chicken soup and kneidlach (aka Matzo Balls), which were fluffy and delicious. I am a failure on the kneidllach front. Everyone I know who makes good kneidlach gives me her never-fail recipe (and its antecedents, mother/ mother-in-law/grandma/ aunt etc) and mine either fall apart or come out hard, which was the style my English mother made - a fluffy kneidl is a revelation to me. My son Ben says he makes fluffy kneidlach using the packet instructions from a mix , but whether I use a mix or make them from scratch, they are never anywhere near as fluffy as those they make in the US. Maybe my hands are too cold or too warm? In between, we visited Aunt Lil, and cousins Fran and Jerry, and Michelle and Jeffrey and his daughter Leah came by at various times for a quick visit too. (Photo above shows Uncle Henry, first cousin Fran, and Aunt Flo.)

Each day I managed to fit in a walk: about 12 minutes' walk along Richmond Road from where my uncle and aunt live, there is a recently constructed linear park that runs along Shaker Boulevard. There is a constructed wetland and a walking/cycling/running track weaving around it, and I am always amused to see people driving up with their dogs to walk them. In all the many times I have walked along Richmond Road to this park, I don't think I have ever encountered a pedestrian other than a few school kids walking home the few doors from their bus stop. though it is a very pleasant area. Oddly (or maybe not so odd given my sense of direction) I had not realised that the side entrance to this park (and the car park situated by the picnic facilities and toilet block) is on the street where Fran and Jerry live. This year I discovered this because I took a walk with them (Jerry is in wheel chair and the access is quite good) and we were right there. If I do the complete circuit on both sides of Richmond Road and walk back home, it takes a bit over an hour and is just short of 10,000 steps (maybe around 7 km) . Additionally I went for a swim with Aunt Flo while she had her aqua therapy class. The JCC's indoor pool was being renovated, and they had kept their outdoor pool, which they normally close when schools resume early in September, open. It was a bright day and very sunny, but there was a stiff breeze. I was fine, doing laps the whole time so mostly submerged, but I think Aunt Flo was pretty brave as she was half out of the water most of the time. I suggested she get one of those cover up T-shirt style tops (we call them a rash suit at home, and in fact a toddler having a lesson was wearing one) that would keep her a lot warmer, even in the indoor pool. Kids wear them at home for UV protection at the beach as well as to protect their skin if they are dumped by the waves, but I don't see anyone wearing them in the pool at Berkeley (maybe I should get one myself for our last few weeks here - it can't keep being so warm and I do swim in an outdoor pool!)

And again I didn't get to the Rock and Roll Museum - I absolutely must get there again next time I am in Cleveland. I did attend a lot of synagogue services, always very enjoyable at their Conservative Temple as the cantor has a gorgeous voice and the Yomtov choir (of which Uncle Henry is a member) blends with him beautifully. The congregation loves to sing along, and this year a routine involving a Mexican wave travelled right across the sanctuary during the chorus of one of the piyutim (a piyut is a hymn usually extolling the virtues of Hashem, often an acrostic each line of which begins with a letter of the Hebrew Alphabet, sometimes in reverse order) sung to a Chasidic tune, "V'yitnu lecha keter melucha" with lots of "ya da dai's". Apparently some of the more po-faced members of the Worship Committee thought it a bit frivolous when one large and high-spritied family started it off last year, and before yomtov brought it up as something that maybe should be discouraged - but the Rabbi came down on the side of participation and enjoyment and in fact this year continued the Mexican Wave across from the congregation to himself and the President, and others seated on the bimah joined in too. After many solemn prayers on Yom Kippur this joyful melody breaks the tension and the leaping up and down oxygenated our blood to carry us through the rest of the service awake and somewhat refreshed!



From Cleveland I flew to Baltimore for a couple of days, and went swimming with Miriam at the JCC, where, though I don't think there is a formal agreement for reciprocity, showing my membership of the Berkeley JCC got me a couple of day's passes. It is a very good deal, as the JCC here in Berkeley is a cultural centre more than a sporting facility and doesn't have pools, gyms etc. , and membership is much cheaper than at places like the Baltimore or NYC JCCs. One evening we also went out to dinner at the Royal, the Iranian Glatt Kosher Chinese American restaurant that has also become a standard event when I visit. The kids really enjoyed the buffet, especially the chicken wings, and it is a pleasure to see them eat! This picture shows my brother Yaacov and his wife, Miriam, at the restaurant, where Yaacov always orders chicken-fried steak. Australians please note, this seems to be a thin piece of steak breaded and deep-fried like KFC. I haven't studied the matter carefully, so am not sure how different this wold be from a schnitzel made from somewhat aged veal. Miriam had a grilled chicken salad, most of which she took home, as the servings are very large indeed.




For my niece Esther (pictured with her youngest daughter, Leah), not having to prepare and serve a meal for her large family and, better yet, no washing up, is a real treat, even if no food were involved. Similarly for Miriam. In a strictly kosher household there is a lot more fuss over food. For meal preparation and service, tablecloths are changed or covered over as well as ensuring the correct choice amongst multiple sets of cookware, implements, cutlery and crockery needed, trips to the extra fridges or storage places downstairs , different sinks and dishwashers, quite apart from the rituals of hand washing, ensuring the appropriate blessings are made before eating each type of food, the grace after meals etc etc. It is a very different experience to a meal in a secular household, except in most households it still seems that most of the burden (or pleasure if you see it that way) falls upon the shoulders of women. I certainly need to add that this is my take on things, the observant women in my family do not complain at all about it