Friday was given over to traveling out to California. I flew from Grand Rapids through Chicago to San Francisco, and then somehow managed to navigate the BART rail system at 10:30 at night to get into Berkeley. My earlier predictions that it was going to take some effort for me to adjust to Pacific Time proved entirely wrong; by about 11:30 PST I was dead tired, and after grabbing some vegetarian nachos at Saturn Cafe, I passed out without difficulty on my friend’s couch.
Saturday morning I woke up to fresh-baked sourdough. After a few slices my friend took me out to explore Berkeley.
Our first stop was a place called Cheeseboard, which is a dairy co-op that also does delicious baked goods and vegetarian pizzas. I picked up a few things for breakfast and we grabbed a pizza for lunch later on. With breakfast in hand, we headed up to the Berkeley Rose Gardens for a good view of the bay area.
After second breakfast, we headed into town to grab some groceries, at which point I really began to appreciate what you can grow when winter is just “that time when it’s 40-50 degrees outside.” Seriously, it might look a little gray, but this was about as lousy as the weather got while I was there:
Our first stop downtown was a farmers’ market/grocery store that had the largest selection of produce I think I’ve ever seen put under one roof. Where grocery stores in Michigan are maybe 20-25% produce department by floor space, this place was easily 50%. There were a dozen varieties of practically everything, and it was all so fresh! A lot of the stuff was either organic or from Mexico (which was only about a day’s drive away) and a lot of it was really inexpensive. They had fresh avocados for $.50 each!
And tulips. Turns out you can fly all the way out to California and you’ll still run into those.
After that, we headed over to Trader Joe’s, where I picked up some $3 beer and discovered Two Buck Chuck. $24 for a case of wine. I should have brought a bottle back.
With our groceries collected, we headed back to my friend’s place for lunch and baked up the pizza we had gotten earlier. Olive oil, tomatoes, and red onions: a combination I would never have dreamed of putting on a pizza.
After lunch we headed to campus and wandered around for a while. The campus was actually much smaller than I figured it would be, and for a Saturday, it was pretty quiet. This may have been because the residence halls are actually off-campus and it’s just the academic buildings. I was also surprised with how little green space there was.
There were some really weird trees as well. In other spots they had twigs growing out from the nubby things. It made no sense to me.
We were a bit far from the redwood forests, but Berkeley had its own miniaturized patch of Endor that I was able to walk through.
With our walking tour completed, we headed back home to put dinner together. Dinner was asparagus risotto with saffron, matched with a Chianti he had picked up earlier that day.
There would have been some comically oversized oatmeal chocolate-chip cookies as well, but the oven had decided to stop lighting that point, and rather than try to light it ourselves the cookie dough went into the freezer.
The rest of the evening was spent watching Big Bang Theory, playing Halo, and then moving onto StarCraft. A good day.
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