Here is something to take your mind off the Australian election, which still doesn’t have a result!
Spotting hummingbirds is one the great joys of living in California. They are just so darn cute! We have hung a hummingbird feeder on our balcony and the little birds have been coming to visit. They usually announce themselves with the loud whir of wings and sometimes they tweet.
In the wild, they usually hover while they drink from flowers. However, our feeder has a ring that they can perch on so we often see them quite still. Sometimes they stop feeding and have a little sing.
They’re territorial and I have seen one bird chase away another before. We had a cardboard hummingbird hanging off the feeder for a while but I removed it as I was worried it might be scaring some of the less assertive birds away.
They’re really hoeing into the syrup water – we’ll have to refill after just a few days!
This is a pretty good selection – you can see that we are getting a few different species of hummingbird. Some have iridescent blue-green colouring, other ones are red like a robin redbreast. Lovely! For more photos see the Flickr set.
June was completely hectic! We ended up moving house two days before I was flying out to New York City for the TBEX travel bloggers conference. Our new home is a two-bedroom unit in a block of four in one of the towns near Stanford University. It’s not quite as big or charming as our old house but it’s quite spacious and it has a little balcony. There’s a ton of cupboard space, an outdoor clothes line and a car port. We live on a quiet street, but close enough to the shops, and there’s a library and swimming pool nearby as well. We are not fully unpacked yet and we don’t have a phone or the internet at home yet, but we are starting to settle in.
The biggest advantage with the move is that my husband can walk or cycle to work rather than having a mammoth commute from the city. We are also saving a huge amount of money on rent. But there are a few other nice side-benefits as well. Firstly, the weather is so much better than in the city. San Francisco is infamous for being cold and foggy in summer but it’s very much a micro-climate and everywhere else in the Bay Area is warm and sunny at this time of year. Secondly, we are now only 10-20 minutes’ drive from great hikes in the state parks. If you look at the map of the Bay Area below, you can see that the peninsula is rimmed by green. Thirdly I didn’t have a pool near me in the city and since moving here I’ve been swimming a few times a week, which is something I really enjoy. There are tennis courts too but you need a key and I haven’t got myself organised yet, nor do I have a partner to play with.
We have bought a car – a 2007 Prius and we got a great price for it. My husband bought it the day I was coming back from New York and came to pick me up from the airport. It’s amazing to me that we both went 33 years without a car or even a driving licence but within six months of moving to California we had our licences and within a year we had a car. The Prius is not the most exciting car in the world but the fuel efficiency is terrific (we’ve rented a few cars so we have a good basis for comparison) and because they are so common in the Bay Area, there are some good options on the second-hand market. It’s a lot newer than I expected that we would be able to afford, though there are also quite a few miles on the clock already. This area is great for walking or cycling (flat, unlike the city) and there’s a train up to San Francisco that takes 40 minutes to an hour, but it’s really great to have the freedom of a car and be able to get out to do hikes on the weekend.
I had a great time in New York, though it was unpleasantly hot and humid. I stayed with our friends Mike and Jessica in Brooklyn and met their gorgeous one-year-old daughter. I also stayed with a travel writing friend Wendy at her mother’s apartment in Midtown, in order to spread myself around a bit. I caught up with my friends Rema and Sheelagh and Alex and Kachina and their two-year-old son. TBEX itself was hectic with lots of late-night partying going on and it was really great to meet so many people that I’ve known online for so long. I have promised a lot of New York-related blog posts and so far I have this post on gorillas at Bronx Zoo and this video of a cool interactive art project involving street pianos.
Please subscribe to Roaming Tales or join the page on Facebook to keep up with the new posts. Among the upcoming posts, I have Cajun food in Staten Island, a behind-the-scenes tour of restoration efforts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and a review of an Afghan restaurant in Manhattan.
San Francisco really turned on the summer sunshine this weekend – I think the city is trying to convince me not to leave! I won’t be fooled – I know the summer fog is hiding somewhere.
It’s been a fantastic weekend, crammed with fun things. Yesterday was especially full. At lunch time we headed to Golden Gate Park for BattleUS, a slalom skating competition. Our friend Natalie was competing in the international women’s tournament and we arrived just in time for her heat. We were well impressed by her mastery of tricks and speed – and so were the judges, as she got through her heat to the semi-finals held today.
I didn’t make it down to the park again today but I was excited to hear that she made it through to the finals and came fourth overall in the women’s comp. Her world ranking was 53 before this weekend and she’s probably shot forward a few places now. Well done, Nat! (It’s not been updated yet but I’m sure they’ll show the results on this page soon!).
Slalom involves skating around cones in all sorts of configurations including on toes or heels and even jumping. It’s pretty cool to watch! As well as the women’s heats, we saw the men’s heats. It was a warm day and I enjoyed sitting on the hillside, chasing the shade as it retreated the hill and tanning my legs. As well as the slalom, I also watched a gopher digging up the hillside and poking his head out from time to time, which was terribly cute!
In the evening we met up with a friend FeLicia, who I met in writing class. We had a simple Asian dinner at a restaurant called LimeTree in the Inner Sunset. Then we went to see the end-of-year show for the San Francisco Circus Center. It was a really high-quality show for only $20 – my favourite act was the aerial hoop spinning. In the first act, they had a man doing it; they topped this with twin girls in the second act! I also loved the rope climbing, the Chippendale-inspired shirtless hoop diving, the unicycles and several (though not all) of the clown acts.
We’ve found a place to live! As I mentioned previously, we are leaving San Francisco to move closer to work opportunities in Silicon Valley. For me the most stressful part of moving house is the overlapping time between giving notice on the old home and finding a new place to live. Unfortunately that’s pretty much the way it has to happen unless you want to pay double rent.
We spent two consecutive Saturdays hiring a car, driving down to Palo Alto, and spending the day looking at places. We nearly took a place in – I kid you not on the name – Professorville in Palo Alto. This was a quirky craftsman cottage with red windows – but we were gazumped by an eager tenant offering more money and a quicker rental. We thought very seriously about a place in the hills in Portola Valley, backing on to wilderness with miles of hiking trails – but we decided that it would be too isolated and would mean buying not one, but two, cars. Finally, we took a two-bedroom unit in a central location, close to shops and parks and even a pool nearby. We don’t have a long credit history in this country but our current landlord gave us a fantastic reference and that clinched the place for us – yay!
I haven’t actually seen the place myself yet. My husband went to see it in his lunch hour or after work and got the low-down from the current tenants. You might think I’m mad but actually this bodes well – out of the seven homes we have shared, he has chosen three of them sight unseen by me and they have been the best three of the lot! I’m told the place is nice, with a balcony, a parking space and only four units in the complex. Having said that, it sounds a lot more functional than our current home, which is a gorgeous two-bedroom cottage surrounded by flower gardens in a great neighbourhood. That’s okay – we’re going to be saving a lot of money on rent, nearly a grand per month, so we’ll be able to afford other compensations.
We’ll be moving sometime in the second half of June. I know our new address already, so feel free to write to me and ask. We’ll get mail forwarding anyway though so it doesn’t really matter for the time being.
I’m really glad to have this squared away. Once we have a firm move-in date I can start booking removalists and cleaners and so on and try to make it all fit in around my trip to New York.
We are busy playing host in our final days in this house. We had Matt Judd stay with us last weekend, after he finished attending a conference in San Francisco. We had a great time, showing him the Ferry Building, our favourite hang-outs in the Mission, and the California Academy of Sciences. Matt even inspired me to join him for a jog on Sunday morning after a little too much indulgence on Saturday! We’ll have Natalie stay with us on Thursday night before her slalom skating competition this weekend. That’s it for house guests, but hopefully we might have some friends over for dinner soon too.
We have loved living in San Francisco but all good things eventually come to an end. We have decided to leave the city and move down to the peninsula to be closer to my husband’s new job. We are looking at Palo Alto or Menlo Park, which are about 40 minutes drive from here when the traffic is good. Really in Sydney, you would still consider that part of the city, but here it is very much its own place.
I will miss our little home in Noe Valley. We have a super-cute cottage with a garden and view of the city, friendly neighbours, a rec centre with a tennis court nearby, lots of cafés and shops, and a tram line into town. San Francisco is not a big city but it’s interesting – there is always something going on. I’ve also got friends here – in the city and also in the East Bay. It’s started to feel like home.
Still there are advantages to the move. San Francisco is foggy and cold in summer but elsewhere in the Bay Area it is sunny and warm. I’m looking forward to that! We should get more for our money in terms of housing stock without being too suburban – the places we are looking are really more like little, upmarket towns than suburbs. Although I work from home, the location should be better for me in my coverage of the media and tech scene in Silicon Valley. We are planning to buy a car and this will also be good for my travel writing as it will make short trips out of town far more convenient and cost-effective. (We both got our driving licences earlier this year – I got mine about five weeks before my husband so I joke that I am the senior driver!)
We have let our landlord know and we need to get the house ready for tenancy viewings so that we can get it rented out and avoid any double rent. We have also started looking down south – we rented a car on Saturday and saw a few places and we plan to do this again this weekend. Hopefully we will find somewhere soon as I am going to New York in June and I would like to have everything in place before then. I dislike moving but I’ve done it enough times by now that I should be quite good at it! Wish us luck!
Welcome to another post where I apologise for a lack of blogging and promise to turn over a new leaf. Actually, my dad asked me to update the blog. He’s probably my only remaining reader after all this time, so how can I refuse?
I’ve been in Australia for three weeks and I just got back to San Francisco. I spent a week up in Queensland – Brisbane and the Sunshine Coast and hinterland – to visit family. My mum came up to meet me and we went to see my grandma and did the rounds of aunts and cousins. Then I had week or so in Sydney, interspersed with a long weekend down at my dad’s farm in the Southern Highlands.
The main piece of business was a visit to the US Consulate. My husband is starting a new job tomorrow (exciting!) and since our visa was attached to the job, we had to get new visas. That went through very quickly and smoothly – we had our appointment Wednesday morning and the passports with visas arrived in the post on Thursday morning. Efficient!
The rest of the time was spent catching up with friends and family. The final week was especially hectic with lunch and dinner dates every day. We were also trying to go through the storage boxes in my in-laws’ attic and we managed to reduce it considerably. We had extra suitcases to cart wedding presents etc home and we also gave a lot of old clothes and kitchenware to Vinnies and books to my mother’s online book store. I didn’t quite finish the job though – next time! We are selling our beautiful four-poster bed on eBay and it’s currently going for a steal so if you’re in Sydney, please feel free to make a bid! The bed is dismantled and pick-up is from Balmain.
Life is moving on – friends and family are buying houses and having babies. It seems crazy to me that my sister is turning eight in a few days and my brother is four – she was two when I left Australia and he wasn’t born! I’ve been back and forth quite a bit and the family came to visit me in 2006 but it’s still hard to be away. When I arrived, my brother and sister ran up to me and hugged me, crying “Caitlin!!!”. Then they said “we didn’t think you could come because of the volcano in Iceland.” Where did that come from?!!! I guess it shows they pay attention to the world around them. Emma also asked me why I had to live so far away. “Why can’t you live in Queensland? That would be better,” she said. Pause. “Except Queensland has floods,” she added. (Noosa is probably her favourite place in the world and there have indeed been floods in Queensland recently).
My husband and I flew home together on Friday, on a direct Qantas flight from Sydney to San Francisco. It was fine, though we didn’t get much sleep and as we left in the day and arrived in the day it threw our sleeping patterns out of whack. I watched a few movies – a documentary called Christian the Lion, and three features The Invention of Lying, The Lovely Bones and Precious. Going over, I left at night and arrived in the morning and had three seats to myself so I got quite a lot of sleep and didn’t really get jetlag. Right now I’m still quite jetlagged. I managed to stay awake on Friday until 9pm but then I slept solidly until after midday on Saturday and didn’t go to bed until 2am. My husband seems to be doing better than I am, which is good since he starts work on Monday. I guess I can ease into it a little more.
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.
