Spring Break, chapter 1

By -

 My niece Katya was able to visit for her spring break, which coincided with our spring break -- ours is always planned to cover St. Patrick's Day, so it comes pretty early compared with everyone else's, and that was a nice coincidence that let us plan a few days in the Bay Area, "us" being my mom, Katya, my younger kid Sammy, and me.  One of my brothers lives in the Bay Area, but his kids were not on break and we wound up getting an Airbnb in West Oakland for a few days, closer to the things we wanted to do.  I thought I'd just write it up for posterity....

We picked up Katya and headed right for my brother's house, where we stayed the first night, visiting and being fed some fabulous curry that was almost all right out of the garden (including the chicken).  The next day was Sunday, and after church we stopped by the world's oldest working lightbulb, which lives in a fire station.   It's been on for a good 120 years.


Four cousins

See those hills in the background?  I don't think I've ever seen them green before.

Soggy spring -- this creek is usually dry or a bare trickle.

The lightbulb dates from 1901

We all drove up to Berkeley, to Tilden Park, which is a large wilderness/park area in the hills between Berkeley, Oakland, and Orinda.  It was cold and soggy, but so was everything else!  (California has been having a wildly wet, cold, and stormy spring, with more snow in the mountains than anybody has seen in 50 years.)  Berkeley and that area has this interesting smell that is a mix of pine and eucalyptus, because 100 years ago or so people planted a lot of eucalyptus everywhere, apparently in hopes of it being a fast-growing building material.  Instead it's mostly a massive fire hazard, but the result is that the parks all smell of pine and eucalyptus combined.  Anyway, we wanted to visit the carousel, which is extremely fancy, about a century old, and only open on weekends.  We all had a ride -- I got a zebra! -- and then went out to explore a little bit before sunset.  We just wandered around a nearby picnic spot and mostly looked for mushrooms, as my youngest niece is very into identifying (not eating) mushrooms.  It was excellent mushroom weather and we found several varieties.  






Extreme closeup of a raven

Then we headed down to the Laurence Hall of Science, which was closed, but always has a great view of the Bay, and we took lots of pictures of the kids posing and looking generally poetic/playful/scientific etc.  Once we got cold enough, it was time to split up -- my brother and his family went home, and we drove to our Airbnb house in Oakland.


A panorama!  That's a good 200+ degrees of scenery.

It was the top half of a refurbished duplex in a gentrifying area that must once have been mud flats, right by the port.  The neighborhood is called the Lower Bottoms and you can't get any further southwest in Oakland without landing in a shipping container.  A BART rail ran behind the houses across the street, but wasn't unpleasantly loud, and somehow we couldn't hear the freeway at all even though it was right there.  Those soundproofing walls must be well built.  Anyway, it was quite convenient, because we did have to do a lot of driving, and everything was pretty comfortable.  No complaints.

Tomorrow: Berkeley!  My favorite!

Comments

  1. LoryMarch 22, 2023 at 12:29 AM

    How fun, thanks for sharing with us. You must have gotten the snow we are missing this winter, because we hardly had any here in NW Switzerland. I look forward to visiting Berkeley with you (I've never been there, consciously anyway - I lived briefly as a child in SF but I don't remember it at all.)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. JeanMarch 23, 2023 at 12:43 PM

      You've had hardly any snow? Well we did in fact get it all. The drought is officially not happening this year. (CA has more drought years than not and it's been very bad.) I'm still writing up the Berkeley day, but I'm getting there!

      Delete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of...
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the s...
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he ...
Read more