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

East Coast Trip Part 2 - New York, September-October 2009

I am opening this blog with an extremely amateurish video I shot with my camera from the fixed balloon ride I took with Ben and Lissy in August 2008 above Central Park. After all, New York City is the setting for some of this post and Central Park is an iconic site, and it has taken me a while to figure out how to post it - apologies for the quality. The mumbles are me, Ben and a WOW from Lissy. You may have to cut and paste this link into a browser window to view it.

http://picasaweb.google.com/bjoymarsh/20091127#5409001863334413458


One of the reasons I love visiting New York, beyond the fact that it IS New York City, after all, and Ben and Lissy now live there, is because of the old friendships from my days in NYC from 1968-1972. It is wonderful how I have been able to re-energise so many relationships from those passionate times, forged initially through activism in Computer People for Peace and my women's group. Jay and Ellen, Joan, Emily, Judith, Elaine, Vicki - I love to catch up when I am in NYC. Some other friends from that time are not still living in the City but I do my best to see Carmela, Laura and Judy when I am wherever they live now. And especially when I manage to get more than just an hour or two - it is really nice to be able to hang out with friends in their own space, and share their life at their pace for a little while . It does a lot to regenerate the friendship, as I discovered several years ago when I got to spend about a week at Emily’s in Briarcliff Manor, on the Hudson just north of New York City, when I first had the chance to have a more leisurely visit after I retired, rather than the typical frenetic rush when there is only a week to spend.

During the NYC part of my trip East this year, I stayed with my old friends from Computer People for Peace in the '60s, Jay and Ellen Bitkower. Jay and Ellen still live in the same building where they lived in 1969, though they now have a much larger apartment spread across 3 floors, which has undergone several very significant renovations to accommodate their growing and now departed family. It is a marvelous place to stay, within easy reach of the Broadway subway, better yet the express stop on 72nd Street (which makes it just a single stop to Times Square) , a short walk to Riverside and Central Parks for great walks, a block from the JCC and the great supermarket Fairway, the famous deli Zabar's, no end of excellent restaurants and clothing boutiques, the discount stores Loehmann's and Filene's, etc. etc. There is a Weight Watcher's meeting a block away (a plus for me) , the Museum of Natural History is an easy walk, and you can walk across Central Park or take the crosstown bus to the Met Museum. It isn't so close to where Ben and Lissy currently live (downtown on the East side) but with good connections I can get the 50 blocks downtown (these blocks are 20 to the mile) and 6 or 7 much longer crosstown blocks in under half an hour. The photos were taken last year - one is of Jay and Ellen and the other of Ben and me, both taken in August 2008 on a sunny Sunday afternoon on their deck - yes, this is in Manhattan.

Ben and Lissy had been in Argentina and returned a few hours after my arrival, so as soon as they were available I whizzed down there, bearing leftovers Ellen put together from Jay's birthday party the previous weekend which made a wonderful lunch for the three of us without needing to go out and restock their fridge. We caught up on happenings since April, when they left Melbourne, and mapped out plans for family activities during my stay. Ben and Lissy were both between jobs, so for once we were able to set aside time during the day to do things together. We had dinner at a local Indian vegetarian place before I headed back uptown.

On Friday, after a swim at the JCC (utilising the reciprocal membership rights they extended for my Berkeley JCC membership) and a bit of pottering about, I headed down to their place again to bake honey cakes for them and for Lissy's parents before a Shabbat dinner to which we also invited Rachel Boehr (who house sat for us in 2007 while she was living in Melbourne and working for Oxfam, and returned to the US to campaign for Obama in 2008. She considers Barry and me to be her "Aussie parents") . The JCC has a great gift shop and I couldn't resist taking this and several other photos of the very non-traditional menorot they had for sale, including the shoe menora which could be titled "Sex and the City meets the JCC". I spent Saturday afternoon with Ellen and her daughter Jennifer - we went downtown to catch a concert but had got the date wrong, so we enjoyed the street life around Union Square (including the farmers' market and another street fair a bit further downtown) and checked out Trader Joe's. Barry recently discovered that Aldi, the German supermarket chain that we know about since it has opened stores in the last few years in Melbourne, owns Trader Joe's, and there are some family similarities, though Trader Joe's stores seem to be a bit better organised than Aldi's seemingly randomly arranged Melbourne stores. There are 2 branches I use close to Berkeley, one near my hairdresser so I am usually there without a car, and the other at a nearby mall where we drive to stock up. It is the one place I know of locally which stocks kosher chicken, whose flavour I prefer - much US chicken seems to be tasteless, even the organic and free range versions. Due to NY state licensing laws, the liquor is sold in a separate outlet in NYC, not like here where "2 Buck Chuck" , a range of quaffable wines under the Charles Shaw label is sold for $2 a bottle alongside all their other liquor and ordinary groceries. All the stores stock Australian and NZ wines, sometimes even exactly the labels and vintages we're familiar with, though more often under more generic Australian labelling. Though I enjoy trying new wines, I must admit I buy a lot more NZ Sauvignon Blanc and Aussie Shiraz than I should - it seems patriotic and my taste has been formed by these wines (though as a Foster's shareholder I guess I should buy anything under the Beringer label to improve my dividends) .

I realize I was so overwhelmed by Ben and Lissy's January wedding that I have never blogged about it, and though it was a very significant event, and a truly wonderful and joyous occasion, I probably never will. But here is one photo of Ben and Lissy and both sets of parents taken in the Park Avenue Synagogue by a family member on my camera just before the ceremony on January 3, 2009. This can remind you of what Lissy's parents Barbara and Bernard look like, though usually we are none of us quite so glamorous!

Sunday I headed off to NJ with Ben, where Lissy collected us at the station and we had our pre-Kol Nidrei meal at Barbara and Bernard's and headed off to shule. I spent the night there, and Yom Kippur again was spent in shule, though as their Temple is undergoing renovations, the local High School was used to house the various services. NJ, or at least this part of it, has a school holiday for Yom Kippur, but getting the place all ready in time must have required formidable organisation and logistics. I haven't visited a high school at home for years, but was blown away by the size of the campus here, and the gymnasium, the assembly halls etc: I guess high schools are very big! Between the regular service in the Hall designated as the Sanctuary, the lay-led service we attended, and the various children's and youth services, there were a lot of spaces to prepare and occupy. I still can't quite get used to synagogues having large car parks attached, a legacy of growing up attending Orthodox Synagogues where people either didn't drive or if they did, parked a respectful distance away!

We broke our fast as usual at Isaac and Melanie's (Isaac is Barbara's brother), and I really am feeling part of the family now after many Yomtovs spent together. They are so generous, warm and welcoming. And Melanie told Lissy when they first met Ben years ago that he was "a keeper" so how could I not love her? They were about to go to Israel to visit their daughter and son-in law Andrea and Brad, plus 2 small kids, who have recently made Aliyah (emigrated to Israel) , so there was a smaller group at table than usual - but it seemed just as much food (and just as delicious) . We decided to return to NYC that night, as Lissy had a job interview on Tuesday, so Lissy's brother Drew dropped us at the train station in Jersey City on his way home, and we got the PATH train which links with the subway home. I had never travelled on this line before and wasn't sure of the best connection, and had no subway map with me, so I had a bit of a long trek underground, but had very little luggage so it was no hassle . I have since discovered a much better connection, so if I need to do the trip again I am equipped. After 9/11, quite a lot of businesses and residents moved across to Jersey City, and in fact Goldman Sachs's training centre, where Ben would be due to start his new job in a week, is right there and we noticed it on our way to the station.

We had arranged to go to Lakewood NJ on Wednesday to spend some time with my nephew Moshe, his wife Leiba, and their 3 kids. The senior's fare on the bus was very reasonable but the full fare was more than twice as much. I got to the Port Authority Bus Station first and picked up all the tickets, but when Ben and Lissy saw what it all cost they realised it would have been cheaper and a lot faster to hire a zip car for the day. But anyway, we took the bus as arranged and Mose picked us up at the bus station in Lakewood. There are a lot of Yeshivas there, and I still have trouble accommodating to seeing large ultra-orthodox institutions and store with signs in Yiddish and Hebrew cheek-by-jowl with a heavy Latino presence and Spanish signs. Unfortunately I didn't have my camera ready to take shots from the bus as some of the weirder juxtapositions tickled my funny bone.

Leiba had prepared the most lavish and delicious lunch for us, with sushi in addition to more tradition fare of Bagels and "shmears" - egg , tuna and whitefish salads , cream cheese and lox, salad, fruit - and home made soup to start, and cake to finish.... Lissy had not met them before except briefly at the wedding, so there was a lot of catching up to do. Their 2 girls were at school and Yisroel their son at pre-school, so Moshe gave us a little tour of the 'hood before it was time to pick them up. I remember staying at a kosher hotel with wonderful food by the lake in late 1969 just after my brother's wedding, so asked to see the lake for which the town is presumably named. We took a scenic tour and I got a photo of Moshe with Ben and Lissy by the lake, and also some Canada Geese (one of which is pictured below), which Moshe asserted were not kosher, so they are presumably safe from Orthodox shooters at least.

Leiba, who is a hairdresser and works a lot with sheitls (the wigs worn by Orthodox women) has opened a Shadchan (matchmaking) business in Lakewood over the last couple of years. She is a very empathetic and resourceful person, very warm and welcoming, and when I first heard about the business I was sure she'd be great at it. With all the Yeshivas there, there is a very large pool of young men looking to get married, and in the Orthodox community young people depend on introductions to meet the opposite sex as they are hardly likely to meet them in bars or the gym or at work, for example. She told us a bit about the business and we visited her offices and looked at the applications from the girls' families and the databases of boys from the Yeshivas that she works with. There is a Rabbi from Baltimore who works with her as that is another very large Orthodox community in need of matches - in fact the community there financially rewards Shadchans who match girls over the ripe old age of 24 in addition to whatever fees are paid by the parents! It was a fascinating view of a very different culture - Lissy asked Ben if he'd seen anyone amongst the applicants who looked a likely match - well, of course, he is taken already, but he then asked her what she (or her parents) would have put on her application. Cause of much hilarity all around, of course way over the heads of the kids who loved racing around writing on the whiteboards and punching holes in scrap paper while we got our business briefing.

We returned to the house for a bit of a play with the kids - Lissy and Ben are so good with little kids, they get right into their games- and then Moshe and Yisroel took us back to the bus station for the much longer ride back into Manhattan, as it was evening rush hour and getting to and through the tunnel took ages. So I was rather late for the scheduled dinner with Joan, Jay and Ellen at our local Indian restaurant, and they at least were starving, not having experienced Leiba's lunchtime hospitality.

Another evening I met Ben and Lissy in Greenwich Village to see a new production of Thornton Wilder's Our Town. I knew nothing about it except that it is a classic American play, studied at high school or college, and was very surprised by it: I thought it must be a very modern, stripped down production but it seemed to be produced pretty much exactly as written. I guess the Australians who know as little as I did about the play can do what I did when I got home, and check it out on wikipedia at

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

We had a great meal beforehand at a restaurant called Westville, which specialised in vegetable side dishes - we had 8 small ones (I remember as I write, 2 months later, the garlic mashed potatoes, mushrooms with leeks, snow peas stir-fried with sesame and soy, baby bok choi, crispy string beans maybe with almonds, zuchinni with cherry tomatoes, beetroot with goat cheese, but must have forgotten one dish - plus a big mixed salad with some steak in it). I hadn't been down to the Village in years and determined I must explore it some more on my next trip, as I'd forgotten how interesting it is where the numbered streets' grid gets distorted, W4th and W10th intersect around the corner from the Sheridan Square subway stop, and named streets rule. As on my last full day in NYC, when Iagain went downtown and hung out with Lissy for a while at their apartment before heading to Chinatown for a Vietnamese meal with Ben after his first day at his new job, in an area of NYC I also don't know well, I was very glad to have them guide me to the right subway to get home without too many line changes.

Towards the end of this trip I managed to spend a couple of days at Emily and Bob’s. When I arrived Emily’s on Friday morning, her older sister Eleanor was visiting. I think I have met her once before, very many years ago, but certainly hadn’t previously spent time with the two sisters together. After seeing my Berkeley friend Sonya with her two sisters and now Emily and Eleanor, I wish I had a sister of my own! After Emily and Eleanor picked me up at the station, we had lunch at the Stone Barns, part of the Rockefeller Estate I probably mentioned in this blog last year. There was a special event, The Harvest Festival, scheduled for the next day, so the usual Friday Farmers’ Market in the garden was cancelled, and there were three enormous pigs being roasted on huge spits for the festival, each hand-turned by an independent operator) nearby, in preparation for the festivities, so we found it a bit smoky. The utensils, cups and plates the cafe uses are all compostable, though the cutlery looks like dull beige plastic. Later we toured the greenhouses where they grow the veggies they use in the cafe and restaurant there (and also supply several other establishments) and read all about their composting and recycling policies and practices. Very encouraging. But I am always astonished at the huge volumes of garbage in bags on the streets in the City – I guess this is another manifestation of the population as well as the general over-packaging in the US. I don’t see many people bringing their calico or other reusable bags to the supermarkets here, though most of my friends always do so. I think I see a bit more of it in Berkeley than in NYC – like Priuses! (In fact Joan even has a few green bags she collected several years ago in Australia, and Emily has so many calico bags she has been known to give them away to willing takers in the supermarkets!)

The photo shows Eleanor (left) and Emily in front of a store window in the old main street of Tarrytown , which we visited on our way back to Emily's. Emily's hair is growing back after she shaved her head in solidarity with Sondra, her best friend who recently underwent chemotherapy. Eleanor had her 50^th High School reunion on Friday Night, and Emily’s Cousins' Party, an annual event for the 30 odd cousins on her mother’s side, had been scheduled nearby in New Rochelle for the same weekend so that Eleanor could attend both with one flight in from Chicago. The same weekend it was Sukkot and the Caramoor Music Festival was on. This is another of the outdoor venues there are so many of in the US (Tanglewood is the biggest I guess, but there are many others in the summer in the Northeast. ) We went to a Friday night all-Beethoven concert by the New York Philharmonic, conducted by their new conductor Alan Gilbert, the Seventh Symphony and the Piano Concerto No. 4 in G Major, Op. 58) , with Emmanuel Ax as soloist. The traffic was really awful – we got to the concert late though we thought we had allowed plenty of time. They delayed the start so we were seated just in time, but hundreds were not . The entire row in front of our seats was empty until the interval, when we heard from the latecomers about the late-seating area which was filled to overflowing ,while a queue snaked all around the impressively huge tent with latecomers held up on the one road in, who missed the first half and were only allowed in for the second half. I gather that this was by a large margin the biggest crowd they had ever had, and despite having sent out postcards to ticket holders advising early arrival, you needed more like an hour in hand than the 30-45 minutes most people allowed.

Despite the logistics, however, it was a great programme, very enjoyable to hear such a good orchestra and a great soloist, though I thought they played the last couple of movements of the Seventh a bit too fast, and the acoustics seemed to swallow up a bit of the lower registers of the piano and the brass during the piano concerto. The New York Philharmonic was very impressive.

We picked Eleanor’s husband Mike up at the local airport a bit before the Saturday concert, which featured Jazz great Chick Corea playing solo on the same Steinway. We left time for traffic jams this time but got there very early as there was no problem at all. We had a picnic supper first – it was a bit damp as it had been quite a rainy day, and there was no lighting in the picnic area at night so it was a bit hard to figure out what we were eating, but the pre-ordered picnic boxes provided were very tasty and varied. The first half of the concert was jazz classics and improvisations that I don’t really appreciate, but the second half opened with pieces by Scarlatti and Scriabin, followed by some pieces by a few other jazz composers and a lot of Corea’s own work, whose structures and musicality I was much better able to enjoy. It was quite a contrast from the experience of a full symphony orchestra the night before.

On Sunday morning Emily took us for a walk by the beautiful Hudson (see the photos above m- lanscape, autumn foliage and some fall crocuses) , in a part of the Rockefeller estate I hadn’t seen before, and then we proceeded to White Plains, where Emily and Eleanor grew up. I saw their childhood house and then Emily took me to the new home of my first cousin Jeremy, who with his wife Tara and twins Jonathan and Jacob (pictured here) have relocated from London. We swung by the train station to collect Ben and Lissy, as we were all invited to lunch in their sukkah. And as a bonus, Jeremy’s sister Angela (her picture is just below) was visiting from London, so it was another family reunion. Angela and Ben hadn’t seen each other for about 20 years, we guessed, and she had of course not met Lissy. We 3 last saw Jeremy and Tara at Ben and Lissy’s wedding, and last time we visited they were in Scarsdale and had not yet moved to White Plains, so there was a lot of catching up to do. Ben and Lissy love interacting with the 5 year-old twins, with a lot of pretend and chasey and shrieking and throwing balls and scary soft toys. This was the day before Ben was due to start his new job, so after taking the express train back to Grand Central in the evening, they went home and I returned to Jay and Ellen’s, with a plan to meet for dinner the next night, my last night in NYC.

I took the Supershuttle to JFK airport from Jay and Ellen’s, on the Upper West Side. Though it picked me up 3 hours before my flight was due to depart, and I was second on the minibus, we took an hour and a half tracing a circuitous route through Upper Manhattan , back down to the Upper East Side and then down Lexington Ave to the 59^th Street Bridge. This was pretty interesting between 7.40 and 9 on a workday morning, seeing such a variety of streetscapes and street life. Not a white face to be seen north of 145^th Street, and still many boarded-up buildings and store fronts up there in Harlem, giving way to largely Hispanic faces and stores in Spanish Harlem (is it still called that? I remember looking for an apartment to rent in early 1968. Innocent abroad that I was, I put down a deposit on a place around 98^th St on the East Side, only to be told that I wouldn’t be safe in that neighbourhood, Spanish Harlem , in those years (long before I learned to speak Spanish). I took the advice, lost the deposit, and ended up on the Upper West Side, where I still encountered several muggers in my 4 years in NYC). Of course the greatest risk one faces in this neighbourhood now is to be mowed down by people queuing for ice cream, and the blocks of misery to be avoided then have been gentrified and are now very desirable and totally unaffordable.

As we got closer to mid-town all the pedestrian traffic was heading towards office blocks, bearing briefcases and very smartly turned out, except for the sneakers rather than smart women’s shoes, which are kept in the office. Manhattan is so densely populated! And the traffic! I thought nostalgically of the Clearways in Melbourne as the Shuttle Van wove in amongst the double- and triple-parked cars, taxis, delivery vans, buses and streams of pedestrians jay-walking. Then it took nearly half an hour just to get across the bridge and onto the bits of freeway heading for JFK, but there were no further hold ups and I got to the airport just short of 2 hours after leaving 75^th St, with a bit over an hour in hand to check in and deal with the queues through security.

I remember when flying used to be fun, but the performance at airports especially in the US is very far from that now... I always forget about taking off my shoes when I get dressed – today I was in sandals so had to walk about barefoot for a while, at other times I have worn boots with a tricky zip or awkward-to-lace and -unlace sneakers. I don’t actually have any easily-slipped on and off shoes, certainly none I could comfortably travel in – I should have saved some of those paper slippers they give you in Japan. I wonder what the next crazy bomber will do to alter the search protocols once again – the shoe bomber and the liquid plotters have a lot to answer for in adding to the misery of millions of airline passengers!

My Berkeley Choir at the Solano Stroll, and some observations

They put on a street festival called the Solano Stroll each year along Solano Avenue, a street about a mile long that runs downhill from Berkeley into Albany and is full of interesting shops and restaurants. I blogged about last year's Stroll here, so if you are interested you can refresh your memories by scrolling back through this blog to that posting, or look at the Stroll's web site http://www.solanostroll.org/ for more information on the kind of festival it is. The East Bay Jewish Folk Chorus had a gig at this year's Stroll with a band called Adama, singing and playing some well-known Israeli folk dances to draw in lots of the passers-by. I rehearsed with the choir last year and found it great fun to be singing in Hebrew and Yiddish - well, at least I am very familiar with Hebrew, more so than with the Spanish and much more so than the Greek that my Melbourne Community Choir, Canto Coro, sing in, and I am also familiar with a lot of the songs from my childhood and general cultural exposure. But last year because of other commitments (notably Ben's wedding!) I wasn't around to actually perform live with the choir.

I don't read music so I need to practise lots, and finally bought myself a little MP3 player as Barry's iPod is loaded from his Mac and with his being away at a conference in Bilbao, it was impossible to get late versions of my songs onto it. I must seem fairly peculiar to the casual observer as I walk around Berkeley singing along with the alto parts I am listening to on the player. Come to think of it, in the general Berkeley scheme of things, I am probably no more eccentric than is normal here! But as I do walk a fair bit, it is a golden opportunity to get the music into my head, though I need to practise with the words as well. I also tend to practise (very quietly, I thought) on public transport, which I thought would be noisy enough so no-one would notice, but recently while travelling on BART into San Francisco I have got some funny looks from adjacent seats so maybe the earphones are distorting my perception of loud!

I only found out about the gig a couple of weeks before it was due to happen, so the singing was my highest priority since then. I went to 2 full choir rehearsals, and as I drafted this post, was feeling terrific after a great alto rehearsal at my house. Three of the four altos (including me) were able to come after we decided at a rehearsal the night before that we needed more work.

As the other two women, Laurie and Dana, were coming from work, and it had been a very hot day, I decided to prepare a great big salad so we could eat together quickly and recharge our batteries. It really hit the spot, as did the wine Laurie brought. We had a lovely chat over the salad, and then got down to work. Dana had brought her keyboard and we went through all our songs many times, working through the tricky bits. I had seen one of the songs for the first time the night before, and Dana hadn't been at any rehearsal before then, so most of them were new to her. But as she is very well-educated musically and sight-reads, we rely on her a lot. We took a break for a cup of tea and some honey cake and went back to work again. I guess we put in at least a couple of hours' singing altogether, and it was totally enjoyable.

I usually characterise myself as a singer whose enthusiasm exceeds my talent by a considerable margin, but with enough work I can learn the tunes and I just love to sing. It is one of those activities I only took up when I retired, but I so enjoy it. I find however tired or disinclined I feel before a rehearsal or performance, I always feel uplifted, energetic and full of joy afterwards. And that is how I was feeling when I started on this post. We had a dress rehearsal the next afternoon, then our performances were at 2 and 4 on Sunday. This year I remembered to charge my camera battery (last year the battery ran out quite early, so there were many sights I couldn't capture. Very frustrating!) But this year I was so busy rehearsing, singing, and meeting friends that I was too preoccupied to take many photos. The ones I have posted were mostly taken by the wife of one of the band members. If you click on the photos they enlarge so you might even recognise me in some of them , and any other choir or audience members who are reading the blog, check yourselves out too!

There are more photos, in a large format, at this link

http://www.jeremycohenbass.com/Solano.html

but you probably need to copy and paste the link into your browser's address line rather than just click on it to see the photos

In the shot above, you can see me talking with my friend Sonya and her sisters (who were visiting from the East Coast) after the chorus had finished singing, listening to the band and watching the dancers.

It is quite hard to grasp the diversity of this country. Here in the Bay area we have the largest concentration of Nobel prize winners in the world, and an event like the Solano Stroll really embraces and celebrates diversity and difference. Yet in the US right now one also hears a level of debate about health care reform which is utterly ill-informed and totally ignores the fact that despite the existence of extremely advanced (if costly) medical care, life expectancy is lower and infant mortality higher here than in almost all developed (and some developing) countries, and medical costs are spiralling up at many times the overall rate of inflation. It is a kind of blindness, and many people are in the thrall of a counter-factual vision of reality where the US is always seen as the best of all possible worlds. Another example - people refusing to send their kids to school because President Obama is addressing school kids about the importance of getting an education, working hard and staying away from drugs, as if that were some kind of socialist propaganda and the elected president has no right to speak to the next generation about the world they will inherit. It often leaves me speechless, with no common ground for advancing discussion.

Two other illustrations of the kind of thing that throws me:

First, I bought a copy of Street Spirit, the newspaper that homeless people sell on the streets here. It is not formatted as a magazine like The Big Issue in Melbourne, but is tabloid-sized and printed on newsprint. It is published by the American Friends Service Committee. I am going to quote something that left me speechless, from an article about violence directed against homeless people on the streets in the US, by Brian Levin and Michael Stoops, in Vol 15, No 9, September 2009.

"Bumfights"is a popular violent video series that sold hundreds of thousands of tapes and DVDs before going viral on the Internet. The film series sets a new low in American popular culture, featuring fights between homeless men plied by the producers with alcohol, as well as sadistic parodies of the late Australian conservationist "crocodile hunter" Steve Irwin. These skits feature terrified sleeping homeless people who are startled awake and forcibly restrained with duct tape by "hunters" narrating their attacks with feigned Australian accents"

And, to quote the caption of a rather horrible accompanying photo, "Violent and fatal attacks against homeless Americans have risen to shocking levels. Assaults and murders of homeless people now exceed those of all other hate crimes committed against all other minorities".

73% of the attacks were committed by individuals who were aged 25 and younger. When we were at Lake Tahoe I saw an episode of Law and Order: SVU which dealt with this phenomenon. I have often seen episodes featuring a newsworthy or morally challenging issue, e.g. recently euthanasia or opposition to vaccination, but in this case I had not heard of the issue until I saw the episode, and then to see it raised in this publication a week or two later was quite a shock, (even without the truly bizarre Steve Irwin link).

Second, while I was taking a break from practicing for the Solano Stroll concert, it happened to be the first anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers in New York. As usual when I am around the kitchen, I was listening to KQED, the Bay Area Public Radio station. They were broadcasting a BBC mockumentary dramatization of the events around that weekend, with the Bank of America takeover of Merrill Lynch, the behind-the-scenes machinations involving the Federal Reserve, the British government, the various individual players at Lehman and the other institutions – it was absolutely riveting radio but I haven’t been able to locate a link to a podcast to refer you to (I know quite often when the (Australian) ABC has broadcast a science programme based on BBC material, the podcast doesn’t use that material, so maybe they have a more restrictive approach to podcasts than Australian or American public broadcasters do. ) I will try again before I finally publish this post , but perhaps you have better skills than me in finding such things for yourselves if you are interested. I highly recommend it both as an interesting piece of radio drama but also as an example of the excellent coverage of public affairs by NPR, as opposed to the shock jocks of talk radio who deal in slogans and fear-mongering and eschew any kind of rational consideration of the real issues. Again, as so often here in the US, you find the best and worst examples cheek by jowl – media, food, environment, health care, religion, social attitudes. It is definitely a very interesting and endlessly fascinating place to live

Lake Tahoe, August 29-30, 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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



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

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

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


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

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

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