For the past ... hmm... I've lost count... days, I've been living in Berkeley California. I was picked to be part of a group of 18 teachers from Texas, who are studying astronomy at the Lawrence Berkeley Labs. They have a curriculum that provides activities using real astronomical images. The workshop has been excellent. The material within the lessons, and content we are learning is very practical to an astronomy class and the people from Texas are outstanding. A better group of people to work with would be very hard to find. However... "We are not in Kansas Anymore."
Walking down the main "tourista" street you will pass 3 or 4 head shops, which is the polite way to say a shop that sells stuff for you to smoke "wacky weed" in "high style".
The hotel we are staying in is the nicest hotel in the Bay. However, at times it becomes a guilded cage. The hotel sits about a half mile, across the freeway, from the rest of the town. This means in order to eat at night, we have to walk about a mile or more round trip. And finding a meal here for less than 10-dollars per person would be equivalent to the discovery of Noah's Ark. And I know I have been here too long when guys holding guys hands, and girls holding girls hands no longer make me do a double take while walking to supper. We have also got good at looking a block or two ahead to scan for homeless people, where we can change sides of the street, and glancing into stoops and doorways as you pass by them. Anyway, none of use are really worried about overeating and gaining weight, since you can't afford to eat good, and if you do, you walk it all off before you get back to the hotel.
The hotel's one and only washer and dryer has been out of order since we arrived. Two ladies in our group made a trip to a local laundromat. While there a homeless man came in, stripped down to nothing but his undershirt and proceeded to wash his clothes, which was probably good, since he had messed himself. Needless to say we now set up organized times where we go down to the laundry en masse. One of the young ladies who encountered the derelict asked us at the time if she could be "voted off the island."
Part of the training requires being on internet-based telescopes. These scopes are located in Hawaii and Arizona, and we take images from them in the early morning hours (11PM- 4AM). The only problem is that the internet is only available in the hotel rooms if you pay 10 dollars a day. So we have been having to meet in the business centers to do our projects and make our observations. Also, I think the hotel's internet access is just about the same as a home residence, and is down or clogged about 3-4 times a day, usually when you need it to work.
Driving, which myself and a teacher from Abilene are responsible for, is a test in Christianity. We both drive 15 passenger vans that everyone loads up to go to the labs. Parking spaces, if available, were designed for Honda Civics. The roads were also designed this way. Motorcycles are allowed to split the lane, so the dotted line is their lane as they zip by you. Add in parked cars, bicycles, and pedestrians all along 2-lane streets, all while driving in rush hours going and coming from the lab. Its probably one of the reasons there is a bar on every other corner in the town, and a liquor store on the corners without bars.
Homesickness aside, and in the immortal words of the writer Douglas Adams, I wish to return "where the men are men, the women are women, and the small fuzzy creatures from alpha centauri are small fuzzy creatures from alpha centauri."
shopping at bashas market
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Buying in the correct store can be a need to. When you're planning to
search for broad arrays of goods, you need to mind to your department shop
that deliv...
7 years ago
