Caitlin through the Looking Glass
I have many goals in 2010 but I have ticked one of them off already. It’s something that will help me with being a California-based travel writer. It’s something that most people do before they reach their early thirties. And it’s something that is harder to do in Australia than here. Can you guess what it is? (Follow the link if not).
I now know why Americans refer to this time of year as “the holidays”. I always thought that it was a politically correct term to avoid using the word “Christmas” and include other religious festivals such as Hanukkah. I was partly right.
It is also because Christmas is not the only holiday, even for Christians. There are major holiday events from the end of October to the end of December. Halloween is a big deal in this country, Thanksgiving comes a month later, then Christmas a month after that.
Of course I knew about Halloween and Thanksgiving before moving here, but I had not appreciated how quickly the festivals seem to follow each other, so that they combine to produce a holiday season. Here I am putting my Halloween photos up and Thanksgiving is only two days away!
We had our first American Halloween this year and it was a lot of fun. Our street was decked out with crazy house decorations – giant spiders on porches, white ghosts on trees, and our neighbours two doors up even had a coffin that you could feel inside to feel the “devil’s heart” (really two balloons covered in vegetable oil).
The shops were overflowing with pumpkins the week or two before Halloween so we decided to carve one. We created our first ever Jack O’Lantern following these instructions. It was quite hard work scraping out all the seeds and pulp but fun as well. (Gratuitous link: I love this ‘Jackie O Lantern’).
Here’s the result of my first pumpkin carving effort:
My husband had headed down to our shopping district earlier and seen dozens of people trick-or-treating along the main street. The shops actually employed people to stand at the front door giving out “candy” (the term for any sweet treats)!
Back at our place, the little kids started coming around with their parents from about 5pm and the older kids in groups from about 6.30pm. We stood out by our gate in our Star Wars cloaks from Tunisia giving out mini chocolate bars. We gave out 100 pieces of candy in two hours.
We didn’t see so many traditional Halloween outfits like witches and ghosts but we did see classic kids’ dress-up ensembles such as butterflies and princesses and super heroes. Many of the costumes were very creative. One of my favourites was a two-year-old girl in a homemade flapper outfit. Another was a little boy dressed as a firefighter, while his baby sister was in a dalmatian outfit (dalmatians being the traditional fire station dog).
Most of the street was out – people were either standing in front of their houses or trick-or-treating with their children – so there was a lot of neighbourly camaraderie. I really enjoyed it.
At 7pm, just as we ran out of candy, it was time for my husband and I to go and catch the streetcar downtown. We had tickets to see a screening of Nosferatu, the silent film vampire classic. (It’s basically a rip-off of Dracula and was buried for years because of a copyright dispute with Bram Stoker’s estate). We saw it at the Davies Symphony Hall, where we also saw the San Francisco Symphony perform Disney music recently. Except this time, instead of the symphony, the musical accompaniment was a huge pipe organ and a few other synchronised sound effects, such as a wind machine and a wand that created various noises when waved in the air.
Nosferatu was cool but it was also great to go downtown and check out San Francisco on Halloween. Dressing up for Halloween is not just something that children do in this city – all the adults were dressed up too. There were some classic outfits, including a press photographer with a ladder and fake ticket inspectors.
We ended the evening at a local bar to help celebrate a friend’s birthday. That was also fun and it also meant we met a few of his and his partner’s friends. I don’t think I’ve ever had that much fun on Halloween before, even as a kid. (Although I’ve been to a few good Halloween parties in the past).
The sequel to Halloween comes two days later with Dia de los Muertos or Day of the Dead. But that, my friends, is a subject for another post.
Last week we had the first proper rain we’ve had since I moved to San Francisco in July. The lack of rain was notable – the closest we had got was fog so heavy that it was verging on drizzle. Then last Tuesday the skies opened and we had several months all in one go – record-breaking rain, apparently.
Fortunately, the Indian summer has returned and the past few days have been filled with blue skies and glorious sunshine. Since most of July and August were cold and foggy, I’m quite keen that the sunshine sticks around for at least the rest of the month.
My in-laws are back from their trip to the East Coast and last night we went to the San Francisco Symphony at the Davies Symphony Hall. The theme was music from Disney, to celebrate the opening of the Walt Disney Family Museum, which I mentioned last post. It was a lot of fun to dress up and the music was wonderful. There were quite a few squirming children in the audience – I can see the temptation because it’s Disney but how many kids like symphonies, really? Fortunately only the well-behaved ones remained behind after the intermission.
The instrumental music included the William Tell overture, classical music from Fantasia and Sleeping Beauty and Grieg’s “March of the Dwarfs” from Snow White. We also had a soprano sing “A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes” from Cinderella, “Some Day my Prince will Come” from Snow White, “Feed the Birds” from Mary Poppins and “When You Wish Upon a Star” from Pinocchio. I enjoyed the orchestral music more than the singing, especially the “March of the Dwarfs” and the “Sorceror’s Apprentice” from Fantasia. I did really love “Feed the Birds” though – it made me feel like I was back in London. (Although if you tried feeding pigeons at St Paul’s these days, you would be moved on by the City of London police pretty quickly).
October is here already. We are having gloriously sunny days but there is a definite chill in the evenings. Pumpkins of all shapes and colours have appeared in the shops and sweet pumpkin flavours are on the menu at my local ice creamery. I’m sad to bid farewell to summer, though we should have nice weather in San Francisco for most of this month.
With just three months left in the year I’m also giving thought to goals and plans to finish 2009 strongly. It’s been a big year with the wedding and the move to San Francisco but I’d like to get back on track professionally now that I have my US work rights and I’d also like to make better progress with my novel. Plus, it’s time to think about travelling outside San Francisco and that involves finally getting a driving licence.
My in-laws are currently in New York and before returning to San Francisco, they are travelling south to visit old friends in Charleston. They’ll back with us on Tuesday week.
This weekend we paid a visit to the new Walt Disney Family Museum in the Presidio district. It’s about the life of Walt Disney and was set up by his daughter. It was a state-of-the-art museum with multimedia storytelling and covered both his animation and his theme parks and also some of the more controversial aspects of his life, such as his anti-Communist testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. I’m saving the details as I’m trying to write something more substantive for publication.
My in-laws are visiting from Australia for a few weeks. They’ve spent the past week in San Francisco with us and they are off to New York tomorrow. When they return, we may do some travelling with them on the West Coast but that is yet to be decided. My father-in-law is spending his 70th birthday here and we have booked to have dinner at a fancy restaurant in San Francisco, which should be fun.
Having guests from out of town was the perfect excuse to do some tourist stuff that we hadn’t got around to yet. Alcatraz was high on the agenda. For me, it was just a matter of ticking it off the list and I didn’t have great hopes for it being particularly interesting. Who cared which cell was Al Capone’s? I was pleasantly surprised!
We had a gloriously sunny day, with temperatures in the mid to high 20s (celcius). Hubby and I took the trails around the island, while his parents rode the courtesy train up the hill to the prison block.
I found the extent of the decay fascinating. The prison was abandoned in 1962 and, although the cell block itself is in good condition, virtually every other building on the island was a ruin. Everything seemed to have concrete cancer and many of the buildings were shells with no rooves or windows. Past the parade ground, which is now a nesting site for gulls, there were piles of demolished concrete and steel that was rapidly being buried with plant growth.
Hubby and I took a quick detour along the Agave Trail from the parade ground down to the waterfront. Agave is the plant that they make tequila from – it’s commonly described as a cactus but apparently it’s actually related to lily and amaryllis. We had stunning views of the Golden Gate Bridge and back to San Francisco.
After we had finished exploring the island, hubby and I returned to the cell block for the audio tour. We started downstairs with the shower block and then started the tour upstairs where the cells were. Audio tours are often mediocre but this was awesome – the thing that really marked it apart was that it used extracts from interviews with real prison guards and former prisoners. I actually cried when I heard a prisoner and his sister describing how she had been told as a child that her brother was dead, found out as an adult that this wasn’t true, and came to visit him.
The cells were tiny, consisting of a narrow bed, a toilet and sink. Some of them had personal effects in them, like musical instruments, paintings or library books. We also saw the isolation cells where the most recalcitrant prisoners were held in solitary confinement. And yes, we saw Al Capone’s cell – interesting not because the cell was distinctive but because he was held in the ‘hard core’ area, not the general cells. The tour told us all about the various escape attempts and the near riot in the dining hall when spaghetti was served again.
Alcatraz started life as a military fortification, then became a prison. It’s been empty since 1962 but was “reclaimed” by native American land rights campaigners several times. It’s currently a national park.
Many people who live in San Francisco have never been to Alcatraz, dismissing it as a tourist trap. I think they are missing out.
I’ll post photos up when I’ve got them.
Now that autumn is officially here, San Francisco is finally having its summer. The infamous San Francisco fog rolls in and keeps the city cool and overcast for most of June, July and August, even while the rest of the Bay Area is roasting. Apparently an Indian summer in September and October is quite typical and that is what we are enjoying now.
San Franciscans love to talk about the weather or, more accurately, the climate. I’ve found it only takes a passing pleasantry about the weather on my part to elicit a detailed description of the micro-climate of the San Francisco peninsula and the meteorological phenomenon that causes the fog. And I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard the Mark Twain quote about how the warmest winter he ever spent was the summer in San Francisco. Apparently he didn’t even say it!
I have found people in San Francisco extremely friendly. There is a real neighbourliness here that we never felt in London or even Sydney. I’ve been here just over two months and I know half a dozen of the neighbours already. We’ve had dinner with the couple next door and plan to have them around to our place soon. And we’re having a “block party” at the end of October where our section of street gets closed to traffic and everyone brings a potluck dish.
We have had a few visitors already. Our friend Jules (originally a Sydneysider but we know him from London) was in town for a couple of nights on his crazy world trip – he passed through San Francisco en route from Seattle to Las Vegas but is soon heading south to Mexico and Central and South America. Now we have Jack’s parents staying with us for a few weeks. They arrived on Saturday and they are staying in the spare room for now, though they are going to New York next week and plan to do a bit of travel in the US and maybe Canada. Jack’s father will be celebrating his 70th birthday here in San Francisco with us and we have booked to go to a nice restaurant.
In other news, I finally got my employment authorisation card so I can now look for jobs or freelance work. Woo hoo!
Lately I have been spending most of my blogging efforts on my food and travel blog Roaming Tales. This site, my original blog project, has been sadly neglected. But I have been giving some thought to the future of this blog and I have come up with some good reasons why I should keep it.
This is a personal blog and I don’t have any pressure to stick to a theme. It’s somewhere I can vent my thoughts on a wide range of topics or share useful or funny links. There is less need for that now since I use Twitter and Facebook and StumbleUpon, but it is still nice to have an outlet that is wholly mine.
I started this blog way back in 2005 to keep in touch with my friends and family in Australia while I was living in London. Now I’ve moved on to a new city and a new continent, this need is compounded since I need to keep in touch with folk in the UK as well as in Australia. So if anything there is even more need for it than there was. The odd Facebook status or personal tweet (many of my tweets are about food and travel to tie in with Roaming Tales) doesn’t really make up for the depth of a blog post or letter. Many people in my life don’t use those sites but do read my blog (hello, Dad!).
So I’m going to try to update once a week on what is going on in my life. The other posts will continue to happen at random. No one likes talking to a void so please leave me comments on the blog!
It’s a public forum so I can’t be too personal and of course, unless you also have a blog, it’s one-way. That’s okay – that’s why it’s so lovely to have one-to-one interaction as well. Email me – there’s a contact form here if you have mislaid my address. Better still, get set up on Skype, so we can make free video phone calls.
By the way, I have now switched off the Twitter posts entirely. Even at a weekly frequency, it seemed like too much. Maybe if I were blogging more frequently it would work but for now it’s overkill. I don’t like the way my site looks when every second post is a Twitter post – you can always follow me there if you want to.
In the month before I left the UK for San Francisco, I went up to Scotland for work followed by some pleasure travel through the Highlands. I spent a few days visiting my uncle Jeff and aunt Judith and my cousin Jenny came down from Glasgow.
Jeff and Judith are now living in a mobile home next to their cottage up the glen (valley) from Inveraray, while they get building works done on the cottage. The work was three-quarters complete when I was there and it’s going to be very nice, with a lovely big kitchen and more bedrooms, but still keeping the charm of the old cottage.
Jenny (left) and I went for a hill walk directly behind the cottage on the first full day I was there. We didn’t go to the mountain peak a bit to our left, but went to the highest point in a straight line behind the cottage. We saw a family of red deer (sadly, I didn’t have my zoom lens with me so the photograph fails to do it justice), which was very exciting. It was pretty steep going and a lot of it was really scrambling or climbing rather than hiking but it was lots of fun. We called Judith when we reached the top so she could see our silhouettes waving from the ridge line. At the top the ground was flat and boggy – the treacherous peat bog sucked Jenny down to her knees at one point! It was pretty though, scattered with fluffy white bog cotton flowers and patches of red moss and 100 metres or so in from the ridge line, there’s a beautiful little freshwater tarn (lake).
Red deer
The tarn
While I was at the cottage, I also found time to go chanterelle-hunting with Judith (slim pickings though as we were a few weeks early and it had been quite dry) and hang out with my uncle Jeff and talk about the meaning of life. We had my other uncle Steven and Jenny’s cousin (and my friend) Andrew come to dinner on the Saturday night and Jenny and I drove back to Glasgow with Andrew. I stayed at Andrew’s place that night, then it was back to London by train on Sunday, and into the US Embassy for my visa appointment the following day.
Sunset at the cottage
***
San Francisco is not especially warm in the summer and some days it is downright cold and foggy. While I am bemoaning the lack of opportunity to wear my favourite cotton sundresses, the local wildlife seems quite content.
We have a pair (maybe even a family?) of cute little red squirrels living out the back of our house. They have a couple of different hangouts but one of their favourites is this beautiful cedar tree* in the neighbour’s yard. I shot this picture above when I was eating my lunch on the back step a week or so ago (it was film so it took a while to get developed).
Our next door neighbours on the other side have a gorgeous flower garden, full of colourful chrysanthemums and dahlias and other blooms. We look out over this garden – and beyond to the city – from our kitchen and living room windows. This morning when I came back from a run, just as the automatic watering system turned off, a dozen tiny birds descended, feeding on the nectar of the flowers. I think they might have been hummingbirds. Gorgeous!
* Edited 1 October: I thought this was a Californian redwood but it’s actually a cedar tree of the same species found in Yosemite National Park, according to my neighbour.
It might be de rigeur to bitch about your internet provider but I want to take a moment to sing the praises of mine.
Getting internet connected was one of our first priorities when we moved into our new pad in San Francisco. Thanks to the wonders of Skype this also means we have a home phone. I asked around and it seemed that Comcast was the biggest provider but that many of its customers (or at least the vocal ones) were dissatisfied.
It was @aptinfrance on Twitter who tipped me off to the DSL Reports review site, which let me type in my zip code to see customer reviews for internet providers in my specific area.
I narrowed down the search and spoke to two different companies and eventually decided to go with the cable company Astound. They offer television and telephone as well but we just wanted broadband internet.
In Australia broadband internet costs the earth and comes with draconian download limits. In the UK, the price is not terrible but it’s normal to wait six to eight weeks for a connection, or to change providers, and ADSL is usually the only choice. By contrast, we have it pretty good in California, but I think Astound’s service has been above and beyond the usual.
The prices were competitive – it was a special offer and the price is guaranteed to remain the same for 12 months. We are paying $32 a month – $29 for the service and $3 for rental of the cable modem (we could buy our own if we wanted). This is the total cost as there’s no tax on internet here. It’s for the High Speed 10 plan, which is not their fastest but at 10Mbps download was faster than our previous ADSL connection in the UK.
Despite the price guarantee, we are not locked into a minimum contract so we can leave at any time. We expected to pay about $20 for the installation but we have not been charged for this on our first bill. I don’t know if we’ll end up being charged for it later, but as I’ve agreed to it, it’s fine either way.
I called on a Tuesday to get the prices and spoke to a woman called Megan. She sounded like she was local and was very helpful and pleasant. (this has been true of everyone I’ve dealt with at Astound). She talked me through the different plans. When I called back 10 minutes later to place my order, I spoke to the same person. She called me back 10 minutes later to set up an appointment for the installation. I opted for 2pm-5pm on Thursday – two days later.
I had a call the day before to confirm the appointment and then on the day, the engineer called half an hour early. When I said I was home, he asked if I would like him to come early since he was already in the area. I said yes.
It took him a little while to set things up as he needed to run a new connection from the street to the front of our house and then configure things with the modem in the house. He was probably there for 40 minutes all up, mostly outside. He remained entirely professional and courteous throughout and waited to check if the internet was working properly on my laptop before he left.
We had a customer service call a few days later just to check we were happy with everything so far. Of course we were.
After two weeks of smooth sailing, last night we got home to find our internet wasn’t working. We waited until this morning and it still wasn’t working. This evening we finally bit the bullet and called Astound. We placed the call at twenty minutes to six on a Saturday evening. They said they could have someone there by 8pm. The engineer showed up at 6.15pm!
It turned out that Comcast had been around the day before and disconnected us. (The engineer recognised the Astound cable with the Comcast terminator on the end). Presumably the previous tenants were with Comcast and they’d asked to be disconnected. The upstairs neighbours probably gave the technician access to the passageway while I was out. He didn’t think to check if it was actually a Comcast line or not and just disconnected it anyway.
The Astound guy got us back up and running within about 20 minutes. This meant it took under an hour for Astound to fix our internet, despite needing to send a technician to the property!
I don’t think I’ve ever written such a glowing review of ANY company before, let alone a utilities provider! Please note, I am just an anonymous customer and this review is unmotivated by anything other than complete satisfaction.
I am astounded!
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