'I studied at Berkeley"

The University defines Berkeley as a city. It has always been, and continues to be, progressive and outspoken, ie radical. If you are old enough you will remember seeing it on the television news in the 1960s as students protested against the Vietnam War. Regular protests still occur here.

This is Sproul Plaza where those 1960s protests took place.

 

Sather Gate at the end of Sproul Plaza was the gathering place and main entrance before Sproul Hall was constructed just outside and the university began to sprawl in to the surrounding areas of Berkeley.

 

As I entered the university I could hear melodious music wafting over the campus. It was coming from the 61 bells in the campanile tower which is 93metres high and stands next to the library buildings.

 

Beautiful eucalyptus tree at the eastern entrance. There are a lot of gum trees around Berkeley, especially in the hills. They are introduced from Australia and they like it here!

 

There are a lot of newer 20th century buildings on campus but this is one of the original buildings from 1873.

 

More older buildings. Perhaps trying to capture the ivy league atmosphere of Harvard and Stanford.

 

 The University boasts 22 Nobel prize winners among its faculty over the years. It can claim credit for the atom bomb, nuclear medicine, atom smashing, discovering vitamins E & K, flu vaccines, the wet suit, free speech, no fault divorce, UNIX and open source software, genes for breast cancer etc....

 

It is one of America's prestigious universities. If a graduate is asked where they studied, they simply reply "At Berkeley," My son has been impressed by the quality of the young Berkeley IT graduates he has worked with in his job here.

 

If you remember the saying "Never trust anyone over 30" it came from Berkeley during the Free Speech Movement protests of the 1960s.

For my librarian friends

For my librarian friends - I am still a librarian at heart. Today I was a library tourist.

And he did - the library is indeed located right in the middle of the Berkeley campus of the University of California.
Today I went for walk through the campus. I especially wanted to see the university's library buildings which I had read about in "It came from Berkeley: How Berkeley changed the world" - a history of Berkeley which I am reading at the moment.

 Above  - the Doe Library, construction began in 1907. The upper story of the front wing houses a beautiful reading room.

 

Below - the inside of the main reading room which includes the reference collection shelved around the walls and at the far end.

 



The Reference desk librarians are at a counter half way along this room just off the main reading room.

 

This reading room includes the serials collection.

 

Lunch time poetry reading in the Morrison room.

 

Main entrance hall

 

This is pretty cool! Inter-library loan and book delivery around campus using an electric golf-buggy style vehicle.

 



Homeless in America

First world country - third world problems.

At Fisherman's Wharf - (touristy area near the city centre of San Francisco)

Main street of Downtown Berkeley - (one of the nicer middle to upper class areas) A little 'art installation' called "The Bastards took it all" with a tin bowl for donations.

 Begging outside a Berkeley supermarket

 

 Outside another Berkeley supermarket

We Australians should not complain about our social security system.

The foggy city

A day of touristyness for me:

I rode the duck board ie. stood on the step on the outside of the cable car.

 

The driver works two levers constantly, and at the rear another works the brakes.

 

Thank God the brakes work! The streets are really steep - Alcatraz Island is just off the shore in the fog at the bottom of the hill.

 



They have interesting 1950s looking trams too.

 

 

I hired a bike and rode to the famous bridge. It was like a trip to my childhood - being allowed to ride a bike without a helmet!

 

The Golden Gate Bridge slowly revealed itself through the fog. It really is quite beautiful. It is currently being retrofitted to make it more earthquake resistant. There are two fog horns with different pitches that blow constantly to help ships navigate under it. 40 million vehicles drive across the 2.7km bridge annually.



Palace of Fine Arts - a curious Greco-Roman style building - the only surviving fantasy monument from the 1915 World Expo.

 

Lunch - clam chowder in a sour dough loaf - a San Franciscan speciality - with a view over the bay toward the bridge. Very delicious!

Pier 39 sea lions. These are wild sea lions sleeping on platforms provided for them at Pier 39. What a life!

Meeting Harriet's family

I met some of Harriet's family at the Oakland Zoo:

This one is a statue but there were several real ones.

Photo credit: My not quite 4 year old granddaughter

 

 

What ya lookin' at? 

 

 

Another photo taken by my granddaughter. "I took a photo of the rainforest!" Might have a photographer in the making here.

 

Where is the Wayward Wanderer?

Where is the Wayward Wanderer?      Read the previous "Family" post to find out.

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.