Mission District

After the walk in Muir Woods we went to the Mission District one of the oldest areas of San Francisco. Visited the Mission Dolores established by the Spanish who made their way up from Mexico and established a settlement in the city and of course the first thing they had to do was build a church to convert the natives.

Speaking about the natives, every time we come across an area of outstanding natural beauty, you are almost bound to come across a casino that the poor Native Americans have been given in exchange for their beautiful land. Saleem and Joel are pictured on the right outside a replica of a willow hut which the indigenous people lived in at the time of the arrival of the Spanish.

 Throughout the Mission District walls are covered with beautiful murals created by the Chicano Art Mural Movement of the 1970s inspired by Diego Rivera








The Mission District has undergone a gentrification process over the last few decades and is home to the young, hip and trendy. Pictured on the right is a Synagogue in the area with a gay pride flag hanging from its window. Imagine seeing anything remotely similar in a South African synagogue!

It was a beautiful sunny Sunday afternoon and the parks were filled with young and old, sunbathing, picnicking, smoking pot, etc. and we drove past a couple probably in the late fifties/early sixties taking an afternoon stroll completely STARK NAKED! At first I thought they were wearing body suits because they were strolling hand in hand, walking past young families pushing their kids in strollers, people out walking their dogs and not a single person seemed to think that there was anything unusual about this couple walking around without any clothes on ......

Redwood trees

 We spent a day with Joel Samoff whom some of you may know as a professor at Stanford University and his wife Rachel.
Started off in Muir Woods which is a forest of native redwood trees. These trees date back to 900AD and are the tallest trees I've ever seen. They grow in clusters of families (usually four) and share a root system, so even when one of them are damaged, the other trees in the family grow around it to protect the damaged tree.
We went on a lovely, but rather slow circular walk as Saleem and Joel were in professor mode  concentrating more on trying to solve the problems of the world than contemplating the spiritual beauty of the woods. Fortunately I had Rachel for company!

Best Ice Cream Ever

In the interest of research and being a good, loving and caring mother and godmother Cathy and I have been visiting an ice cream parlour in Berkeley on a daily basis. Cathy's daughter Che works at an ice cream business in Oxford when she is not working on her masters in social policy at LSE. So far we have tasted the following flavours:
basil & strawberry
lemon & ricotta
orange & cardamon
Vietnamese chocolate cinamon
dark chocolate chocolate
Mexican chocolate cinamon

We will of course compile a full report and submit it to Che at the end of our stay. Cathy has two half scoops daily while I have two full scoops (because I'm bigger than her!) and Saleem drives us to the parlour and has an ocassional lick of mine.

Outdoor Theatre

We had a wonderful evening at the California Shakespeare Theatre, an outdoor theatre which until recentlyonly performed Shakespeare but has now broadened its scope. We went with our friend Amina Mama who some of you may remember from her days at UCT where she established the African Gender Institute. She is now a professor in California and her daugher who will start studying medicine this year at UC Santa Clara and her colleague Maxine Craig a professor of scociology are pictured above at our picnic before the show. Maxine has written a book on the politics of black beauty.

We saw a show called Spunk - a muscial adaptation of three short stories by the anthropologist and author Zora Neale Hurston who was part of the Harlem Renaissance. We had not heard of her before and so I am currently reading one of her books.
The show was absolutely amazing and Amina introduced us to a real-life Black Panther who lives close to her. This woman really looked the part with a tall, almost regal bearing and long greying dreadlocks. I was completely overawed by her presence.
I realised that I need to improve my knowledge of African American literature, an area I have neglected in the past.

Movie sets

These beautiful homes are called Victorians and I think you can see a bit of the incline of the street. Saleem and I love riding the busses on these steep hills, especially when they're crowded and people have to stand in the aisled, as we go downhill an automated voices tells everyone to hold on, but then the bus driver also shouts to everyone to hold on. Very exciting, it feels a bit like we're in those movies with car chases or like Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry

Talking about movies here is a photo of Saleem and Cathy (who arrived from London on Monday) at Bodega Bay where Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds was filmed.

Pacific Coast

This is a photo of the beach at Monterey. Saleem and I spent a Sunday driving along the coast and stopped here for lunch. I at least put my toes in the water (which was freezing!) but Saleem was too chicken to even walk on the sand. We still can't believe that Faizy swam here in January!! The coast is absolutely spectacular with beautiful beaches on the one side and tall cliffs on the other, very reminiscent of the drive along Chapman's Peak. We saw two whales cavorting in the ocean and the weekend after we'd been there were a few shark sightings very close to the swimming beaches, but TV reports said they did not appear to be displaying aggressive behaviour - not sure what that means!

A very peculiar sight along the coast is that farming takes place right along the ocean. We saw all trypes of berry farms as well as vegetable farms - the Santa Clara area gros the most delicious fruit and veg. We didn't stop at any of these farms but will do so when we drive to Los Angeles and maybe we'll be able to find out how they're able to do this.

Weather in San Fran

The weather during the first ten days of our stay were absolutely fantastic - beautiful clear skies warm and sunny, and we just could not understand what people were talking about when they warned us about the tempremental weather and the fog that San Francisco is famous for. The sun is still perfectly bright and blue at 8pm and it only really starts to set at about 8.45 pm so we really enjoy the long days.

And then the city started showing its true colours. We woke up one morning to a fog so dense that we could not see the houses next door to us. So this happens apparently because the warm air over the Pacific from the coast of Mexico and the cold air from Alaska meet right slap bang in front of us and this causes the magnificent fog. So it takes a while for the fog to burn off in the morning and then it gets quite warm in the afternoon and in the evening the fog rolls back in at an amazing pace and the temperature drops again. I love watching this happen, but Saleem finds it most annoying that its supposed to be summer and the temperatures are so low - I think if there was someone he could complain to about the weather he would!

So while the rest of the country seems to be boiling away in unseasonable heat, we are dealing with average temperatures of 16 degrees during the day. I'm not quite sure why but it seems that I have a habit of finding myself in places that are not truly representative of the rest of the country that they're in ..... first Cape Town, then Grahamstown .... does anyone have any idea why this seems to happen to me????