67th birthday party

Yesterday we had a belated joint birthday party where we celebrated being 67 with some of our friends that we have met out here. We wanted to share it with you.
http://picasaweb.google.com/gawley/10767thBirthdayParty?authkey=Gv1sRgCL3R8aL-2qa74QE#

I spent the morning preparing food - cupcakes, salads, marinades. Alex took Ruth to the Discovery Museum where they really enjoyed the water area.

The party started at 4pm, we had about 25 people and 10 kids enjoying themselves in the sunshine.

The kids liked the paddling pool.

The food went down well, especially the tri tip steak (from Costco! We are so American now...). Alex's friend Jerry needed to choose some wine for a family party, so he organised a blind wine tasting.

Most people with kids left by about 7.30pm, but luckily a few couples were able to stay around for a more relaxed after-party. We sat out in the garden finishing off the wine tasting until late.

The morning-after clear-up was livened up by Ruth who managed to make my hang-over more bearable with her new "Dingle Dangle Scarecrow" obsession:

6 month-a-versary

We recently celebrated our 6 month-aversary of when we moved out here, which prompted me to think about the things that we like about life in California compared to the UK. Please join the debate....

Things California has got right

The weather - although this has been the coldest and wettest winter practically on record, the weather is still so much better out here. It's rare to get a day without sunshine, and California does sunshine so well. Massive blue sky and bright bright sun. My tomatoes are shaping up to be some kind of record size, and for the first time in my life I have managed to keep a basil plant alive for more than a month.

Friendliness - everyone here is very positive and friendly. You go into a shop, they ask you how you are and they smile and they mean it. They seem to actually take pride in being nice. When I go out with Ruth, I am routinely stopped by people wanting to tell me how beautiful she is, and than chat for half an hour about babies. I actually haven't met anyone grumpy and negative at all (apart from Alex). Initially this can seem a bit fake, but you soon realise that people are genuinely cheerful a lot of the time. And that is nice.

Pride - people seem very proud of being American, and of themselves. It is normal and expected to celebrate success in a most un-British way. It is normal to see bumper stickers telling you that the occupant is an honor student at their school, or to have a building/facility/trail named after a local benefactor.

Community involvement - I have been struck by the levels to which normal people are involved in the community here. There seem to be so many volunteer opportunities and so many chances to get involved with the running of things, and everywhere we go we seem to be invited to contribute, much more so than the UK. This ranges from volunteering to lead tours at museums, to rangering at the kiddy farm, to parent-run schools. It is also much more common to go to church and to be involved with it. People also wear their allegiances on their sleeve more openly - we see lots of political banners outside houses supporting a particular candidate or suggesting that you vote a particular way on a referendum, and we have been invited to a coffee morning to support a candidate for assembly - I can't imagine anyone we know bothering to do this in the UK.

Playgrounds - there are 28 parks in Palo Alto, and they all have absolutely lovely playgrounds. Ruth asked me to put this one in.

Things the UK has got right

Pubs - we really miss pubs. There is no equivalent in the US. And weird commercial zoning laws mean that all shops & cafes are in particular groups, and you don't get corner shops or pubs sprinkled through residential areas like you do in the UK. Our walks seem oddly goalless now.

Roundabouts - I can handle the four-way stop signs, they even seem quite sensible after a while, but trying to get onto the motorway via a short slip road that has cars both accelerating to get on, and decelerating to get off, while all frantically trying to change lane to avoid being pushed off at the next junction - just crazy.

Electricity - 110V is wimpy. It takes a good 10 minutes to boil a kettle. By the time the toaster pops, Ruth has had a hunger melt-down. Safety shmafety - give me 240V anyday.

TV - thank goodness we can get the BBC over the internet. I always thought it was good, but American TV brings a whole new meaning to the appreciation I have for the Ten O'clock news. And there are so many adverts! You can flick through 50 channels and well over half will be showing ads at any given point.

Supermarkets - yes, Wholefoods is nice, but I would swap it anyday for a nice big Tesco down the road. Overall, groceries are more expensive than the UK, and there is no one place you can go to to get reasonable quality for reasonable price on the whole range of things you might want to buy. In any given week, I go to four different supermarkets to get different groups of things. And only Safeways does internet delivery.

#15 - California Avenue Farmer's Market

 
 
 
Not technically our first visit to the Farmer's market, but the first time I have remembered to take any photos.

This is the California Ave Farmer's market. So yes, it is on our road, but it is about a mile away. To get there we walk from the grotty end of California (where we live) through the posh bit to the commercial end, where there are lots of nice cafes and organic-y shops. Today we cycled, hence the photo of Ruth looking grumpy in her chariot.

The market is every Sunday from 9am to 1pm. There are lots of lovely happy vegetables and food stands, and good live music. Ruth had a felafel for lunch, then she cheered up a lot and danced to the music.

I saw a homeless man with a sign begging for - I kid you not - organic vegetables. Palo Alto - a more discerning class of homeless person.

#14 - Geocaching in the US

 

As I am spending so much time in parks and nature reserves with Ruth, I have started geocaching again and have just placed my firt US geocache in a nearby park. Here is a picture of Ruth enjoying the swings in the park.

Note: if you don't know what geocaching is, it's basically like a mini treasure hunt using GPS. Anyway, don't worry, just pass on to the next blog post.

#13 - eating oranges from our front garden in the sunshine

So sweet and lovely. Ruth ate four in a row. The weather has really turned a corner this week, and we have finally bought some patio furniture. This added up to our first outdoor brunch this morning where we had 2 other couples with kids round. We ate baked stuffed mushrooms and sat in the sunshine watching the kids running about in the garden. Just lovely.

You say zucchini...

Food in America is more different than I thought it would be. You expect the oven temperatures in F and measuring things in cups not by weight, but there is a whole world of strangeness beyond this.

First of all, the regular supermarkets are nowhere near as good as in the UK - at first glance they are enormous and bursting with choice, but upon a closer look, so many of the aisles are filled with pre-prepared food and snacks. For example, it is actually quite hard to buy raw ingredients like bread flour and herbs and if you do find them, there won't be much choice. The fruit and veg are not great quality, and although meat is cheap (suspiciously so), it is rare to see a meat counter so you can't look it in the eye. Given that we are striking distance to the Pacific, the choice of fish is very limited and poor quality, mostly pre-frozen. And the prices are higher than the UK for most basics. A few happy exceptions are asparagus (much cheaper than the UK and very good), and steaks (ditto), so these are our staples! One weird phenomenon is that you simply can't get everything you need from one shop, in the same way that you could in say Waitrose or Tesco, and everyone seems to accept this. So we do a big online shop from Safeway for commodities like cereal, wine and diet coke, then get fresh produce from a smaller market-style supermarket called Trader Joes, and then go to speciality butchers (which are bizarrely hard to find) for decent cuts of meat or fish.

Then there is the matter of different foods being available - often I have had a complete blank look when asking for something which I had always taken for granted in the UK, like fruit squash or tartare sauce . On the other hand, there are aisles full of ingredients where I have no idea what to do with them - perhaps time for an American cookbook.... Also, sneakily, sometimes they have something called the same thing but it turns out to be different, like stuffing (US version all horrible and bready so I have smuggled in a few kilos of Paxo), and sausages which - would you believe it - are sold pre-cooked! And don't get me started on "biscuit".

And then, there is the matter of translation. It seems to me that it is in the food arena where the language differences are most apparent. I have frequently felt like I was playing charades with the attendants in Safeway trying to communicate what vegetable stock is (turns out it is called bouillon, ad is usually sold in cans). There are the well-known ones like zuchini (courgette) and eggplant (aubergine), and cilantro (corriander). But it took me a while to work out that rocket is called arugula (what a pretty name), and broad beans are called fava beans, and many more. The cuts of meat are all called different names, as are flour and sugar.

And finally, the American habit of mixing savoury and sweet things with great abandon. Nowhere is this more apparent than when eating breakfast out. You might order scrambled eggs and bacon, and to go with it you are offered a hash brown (sensible), home fries (just about acceptable) or a fruit salad (fruit and eggs? On the same plate??). And on the side, toast (fine), English muffin (fine), sweet fruit muffin (weird).

#12 - Palo Alto duck pond

Ruth was a bit scared of the ducks and geese to start with, but she was soon waving and saying "birdie".  The duck pond is part of the Palo Alto Baylands nature reserve with an "interpretive center" (Alex refused to go to this).  It is close to our house, and very close to the airport where Pippa flies from, so we could see little planes coming in and out.  The weather was beautiful.  Pippa is planning to plant a geocache there.