Family

My current wayward wanders are all about family - on the other side of the world.

My eldest son currently lives in Berkeley, the famous university area on the eastern side of San Francisco Bay. I am here in my capacity as Grandma, to help the family while waiting for baby number two.

 

In one of the San Francisco guide books it states that San Francisco has more than its share of homeless people. This is true of Berkeley too, which is an upper middle class area with lots of university students. Even here, especially in the CBD, aka Downtown, there are 'interesting' characters wandering around. There is one man whose clothes are covered in patches and who has a tail. When I was in a café having lunch with my granddaughter, a woman my age, in her fifties, came in to buy an icecream. Later, I saw her standing outside with a cup, begging for money. It is not uncommon to see people pushing shopping trolleys loaded with all their possessions, and my granddaughter's school is part of a small church complex which runs a program on Wednesdays to feed the homeless. I will admit that I do find this quite confronting. We do have homeless people in Australia but they are not as obvious, even in cities like Melbourne, and certainly not in little old Devonport. Really not sure how to react to them, so I guess I default to ignoring them, which when I think about it is rather inhumane. For all our complaining in Australia, our social welfare system and health system walk all over America's.

In spite of this, Berkeley is quite a nice place to be, and quite good for a young family. There are parks for children and plenty of shops and activities. There is a resident squirrel that runs along the fence outside the kitchen window and he has lots of cousins living in the parks.

 

San Francisco has never been on my list of places to go, but while I am here, I will do some of the touristy things that you do in San Francisco - the foggy city. I have yet to see the famous bridge, apart from a brief glimpse of a blurry outline across the bay. Even though the weather is warm for winter (maximums of 17 to 23) and it has been mostly sunny and very dry, the city seems to be covered in a perpetual haze - fog or smog - maybe a bit of both.