North Berkeley

When I leave my cottage in North Berkeley here is what I see when I walk south along Shattuck Avenue.

Before reaching the stores, there is a park called Live Oak Park.

Next to the park is Live Oak basketball court, where old women play basketball against young children (click on the photo for more detail):

This does not seem like a fair game.

The part of Shattuck Avenue in North Berkeley is called the Gourmet Ghetto because there are many good places to eat. The most famous restaurant is Chez Panisse

which is considered one of the top restaurants in the United States. A short walk away is a more affordable, but still very good, Thai restaurant called Cha-Am (reviews are here):

Almost across the street from Cha-Am is Crepevine,

which of course serves crepes.  A few non-restaurants on north Shattuck also suffer from the same "clever name" disease as Crepevine. There is the foot store Solemates

and Sew-Clean Cleaners:

Oh, that name is just seeeew funny. And not only do they clean clothes, but they sell jewelry too! Click on the photo and look at what's in the window.

One of the closest restaurants to the place where I am staying is Saul's Deli, which I found on my first day in Berkeley.

I was very surprised to see that the carbonated beverages sold at Saul's do not include Dr. Brown's!

I asked the cashier why they don't sell Dr. Brown's and he explained that the soda which they sell has better sugar than Dr. Brown's. Many people before me must have asked Saul's why they don't sell Dr. Brown's, because it is the second question on their FAQ page.

The most famous place to get food to go in North Berkeley is the Cheese Board, which is actually two stores: a bakery and a pizzeria.

Here is what it looks like at night, before they close: there is a line of people out the door waiting to get pizza (click on the photo for a better view).

There is a line out the door during the day too.  They serve one kind of pizza each day and it will never be a pepperoni pizza: the toppings are always vegetarian. Personally I like the Cheese Board not so much for the pizza but for the cheese rolls in their bakery:

These are really delicious!  If you show up too late in the day they are all gone (or they are a bit stale). Behind the cashier at the bakery is a Russian Civil War poster (from 1921) saying "Remember the Starving!''

This was on the wall when I visited the Cheese Board 13 years ago.

If you are sufficiently old then you get a discount on food at the bakery, with everything free once you reach 100 (click on the photo below):

I asked the cashier once if anyone over 100 had come in lately and she said not recently and perhaps I might be the next person to do so.

There are two supermarkets on north Shattuck: Safeway and Andronico's.

I was advised by several people that Andronico's is overpriced.  Safeway is closer to where I live, although these two supermarkets are just a few minutes from each other by foot.  Once when I was walking past Andronico's, a woman approached me and explained "I work for the environment so I am cash-poor.  Could you give me $2 to help me get something at Andronico's?" I said "You should go to Safeway.  Everything is cheaper there'' and continued walking.  My landlord said you can go broke giving money to people on the street in Berkeley.

Since California is the center of wine production in the US, the wine selection at supermarkets is  remarkably broad.  The display area for wine at Safeway's take up an entire aisle:

and I imagine some of the brands sold here are not widely available beyond California.  If you are not in California, have you seen any of the following wines?

(I mean there the middle bottle, Hey Mambo. Kendall-Jackson on the right is widely sold outside California.)

Click on the orange bottles above to read the diamond label, which calls these wines a Coppola production, as if it was one of his movies.

Now you know a new word where q isn't followed by u: promisqous. Click on the photo above to find out its definition.

The wine display at Andronico's is a lot more impressive than at Safeway:

Perhaps this illustrates what one of my landlords meant when she said that a friend described Andronico's not as a supermarket but as a food museum: they put so much effort into the way their goods are arranged that you almost don't want to touch them. (Someone else said that after you look at the wine prices you definitely don't want to touch them.) Elsewhere in Andronico's I found a long counter devoted entirely to olives:

I walked around the store a few times and when I passed this olive bar I never saw anyone taking olives from it.

Safeway has a sign at one of the entrances to the parking lot announcing a project to expand the store:

If you go to the website listed on this sign for the Planning Department and search for "Safeway" you find this page, which shows this project has been around for almost 4 years and there is still no visible progress.

Near the boundary between North Berkeley and downtown Berkeley is Oscar's, which hasn't changed since the 1960s or whenever it first opened.

At Oscar's I bought a hot dog and a strawberry shake (notice the Coca-Cola cup; this is no Pepsi place).

I was offered tomatoes as a topping on the hot dog, but that didn't make any sense, so I declined.

I have a car in Berkeley, but it is not my own.  A friend of mine moved from Berkeley to Connecticut in early January and asked to borrow my car in Connecticut while I was not there. I agreed to that if I could borrow her car while I am in Berkeley. She agreed to that if she could have her car back when she was visiting Berkeley (she comes back once a month). That was okay with me, since I basically only use the car in Berkeley to go food shopping. The first time the friend came back to Berkeley she asked to meet me with the car near the corner of Shattuck and Hearst Avenue "by the burger place''.  I drove down to that corner, turned onto Hearst, and drove along Hearst for several minutes looking for a burger place. Eventually I reached a dead end. It turns out that the burger place my friend had in mind was Oscar's, located all the way back at the corner of Shattuck and Hearst, but I was thinking of Oscar's as a hot dog place and not a burger place because of what I ate there, so I had driven right past it without thinking.

There are stores other than restaurants on North Shattuck.  Here is Elephant Pharmacy:

What a strange name for a pharmacy. According to the FAQ page for the store, it is called Elephant because those animals are large, intelligent, and caring. Caring? These elephant pharmacists don't know about the old  history of elephants and humans. This store, like many others in Berkeley, subscribes to a progressive/hippie ethos. Maybe they have some "special drugs" growing in the back? I'll never know, because the store actually closed two years ago.  If you click on the photo you'll see the white sign above the windows is advertising the 16,000 square feet of retail space. Signs indicate that this will soon become a branch of the Walgreen's pharmacy chain.

When your car needs to have its smog test, the testing station in the photo below will let you retest for free if you fail the first time (click on the photo to read the sign):

The people working there don't need a leaf blower when they can use a tire inflater hose to blow their  leaves over to someone else's property (click on the photo to see what is happening):

More information about the businesses along the northern part of Shattuck Avenue can be found here. The organization which promotes this area is called the North Shattuck Association, or NSA for short. I am surprised that organization would use such an abbreviation.

The apartments along Shattuck Ave. have parking garages on the ground floor.  An amazing piece of technology in one of these garages is a device that lets one car park directly above another one.  In the photo below things look normal.

If you pass this garage on another day, you find a roof above the gray car:

How did the roof get put there? On another day there is a roof across all three parking spaces:

The purposes of these roofs is to allow twice as many cars to park.  Here is one car above another:

Across the garage we also see one car parked above another car.

How does the top car get put above the bottom car? After passing the garage for about a month I figured  out how this system must work: the top platform can lie directly on the bottom platform so they are a common floor for one car. When two cars need to park, the top platform can be raised from the ground with a car already on it in order to to permit another car to park below it. The way I realized this is that each platform has a number in a small white square at the front (you can see the numbers if you click on the photos). When two platforms are visible, one above another, the number on the platform that used to be on the ground is now the number of the platform in the air. 

I would love to see this parking mechanism at work, but so far every time I walk past this garage there are no cars entering or exiting.  I am still puzzled by one matter: how do the car drivers negotiate who parks where?  It seems like a logistical nightmare unless one apartment owns both lower and upper levels. But that seems unlikely since we can see that the left side of the garage has a lower and upper level which each accommodate two cars. Does some family own four cars??

When you drive in Berkeley, make sure to let pedestrians have the right of way.  If you don't and you get caught, it will be an expensive fine:

Arrival in Berkeley

For the spring semester of 2011 I am visiting Berkeley.  I arrived in early January on a flight from Boston to San Francisco.  Here is the plane at the airport in Boston:

There was no scheduled food service (unless you were in first class), so I brought along some sandwiches and peanuts.

The flight left Boston late because of a problem with the brakes. The plane crew in Boston learned that the brakes on one of the wheels of the plane were not working correctly, so the plane would need a longer runway than usual to land.  Planes are designed to be able to land on a runway with a full tank of gas and a full passenger cabin in case of an emergency landing, but since the brakes were not all working it would be safer (in case of an emergency landing) if the plane weighed less than usual on takeoff. As the pilot explained to us, they could make the plane weigh less by removing three possible things: people, luggage, or fuel.  Almost every seat on the plane was being used and the plane had already been filled with fuel for a cross-country flight. The crew decided it was easiest to use less fuel than to remove anyone or their luggage from the plane.

Of course less fuel on takeoff means we wouldn't have enough fuel to go across the country, so the pilot told all of us that the plane would have enough fuel to reach Omaha (Nebraska) and in Omaha we would be refueled again to let the plane reach San Francisco.

After half the fuel was removed from the plane in Boston, it needed to use the longest runway at the airport in order to reach the necessary speed for take off.  Unfortunately, at that moment the longest runway at the airport was being repaired, so we had to wait for the repair crew to take their equipment off the runway before we could use it. That took about an hour. As the plane finally was speeding down the longest runway, I was thinking about the Concorde accident: maybe the repair crew had left a screwdriver on the runway?  It turned out there was no problem and we made it to Omaha. Here is what Omaha looks like:

That is the best view I have of Omaha since we were not allowed to get off the plane. Once we had enough fuel we left for San Francisco.

I am staying in a cottage in north Berkeley which is located behind a house, so it's quite private. Here is what the cottage looks like from the outside (note the nice January weather):

On the inside there is a large room with a couch, desk, and bed

and in the second photo you can see the entrance into the kitchen.  Here are wider views of the kitchen:

The small refrigerator magnet is from the Museum of Retro-Automobiles in Moscow, which I wrote about in a previous blog post.

In the kitchen I reached for a cup on the top shelf, and it was actually a container but I didn't see the top until it flew off as I took the container off the shelf quickly:

I tried to put the pieces back together, but not successfully:

My landlords had left on a trip for couple of weeks shortly before I arrived, so I wrote to tell them everything was okay except I already broke something.

During one of the first few days after I arrived, I wanted to make some eggs for breakfast but there was no whisk in the kitchen. There were a few others items I wanted to have in the kitchen but could not find in the cabinets, so I went shopping:

I bought: a whisk, a bowl, a large measuring cup, small measuring cups, smaller measuring cups, coasters, a cheese grater, bag clips, a can opener, an oven mitt, pot holders, scissors, a sponge with a handle and replacement sponges, a large garbage pail, and a small garbage pail. Can you find them all above? Soon after buying the scissors I found a pair of scissors in the cabinet, so the new ones were returned. Several of these items I found at Dollar Tree, which is a store in Berkeley where everything costs a dollar (tax included).  For example, the coasters were just a dollar. They're pretty good coasters too: a wood bottom and a cork top. No complaints from me.

After buying the cheese grater I made a mistake and tried to use it on muenster cheese. Trying to put soft cheese through this grater was a disaster.

On my first morning in Berkeley I walked over to the math department, which is in ugly Evans Hall:

The most famous mathematician in America used to work at Berkeley, but his office was not located in Evans Hall, which was built two years after he left. The place where he worked is now a pit in front of the car in the photo above.  Here is a closer view of the pit, looking from Evans:

The offices in Evans Hall have a bizarre numbering procedure.  They are not in numerical order.  Here is a sign on the 8th floor which illustrates the crazy way the offices are numbered:

The scene inside my office is sunny:

Directly outside the window, facing north, you can see Davis Hall, which is where the civil engineering department is located:

Since professors in the civil engineering department understand how earthquakes can affect man-made structures, presumably Davis Hall was carefully designed to survive a major earthquake. It would then be crushed by Evans Hall (there are two floors in Evans above my office), where the faculty study math, statistics, and economics.

Outside my office window to the east is the Hearst Memorial Mining Building (not named after newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, but rather his father George),

and to the west is McLaughlin Hall, where the College of Engineering has its offices:

Buildings around the Berkeley campus can be seen on an interactive map which tells you a little story about each building that you click on.

Looking straight down from my office window is a place you would not want to land if you jumped:

Evans Hall was repainted on the outside and the inside a few years ago.  Since 1971 there was a painting of Galois on the 7th floor of the math department (click on it for a better view):

I found that photo here. Now the 7th floor looks more professional:

I heard that some math professors (certainly not those who use Galois theory!) hated the painting of Galois and wanted to get rid of it.  Congratulations to them.

It takes me 30 minutes to walk to the math department from my cottage, and I am happy to do that instead of driving. Parking on the Berkeley campus is an expensive commodity, so much so that Berkeley rewards any professor who receives a Nobel prize with something more valuable than the Nobel prize: their own centrally located parking space.  Several of these parking spaces are located near Evans Hall (the economics faculty in Evans has several Nobel winners among them) and the signs are marked "NL" for "Nobel Laureate".  Click on the next photo for a better view of the sign.

Here you can see five NL parking spaces in a row:

Berkeley's math department has had several Fields medalists on the faculty: Steven Smale (retired), Bill Thurston (now at Cornell), Curt McMullen (now at Harvard), Vaughan Jones, and Richard Borcherds. In the late 1990s I saw a parking sign near the Nobel parking spaces above which said "Reserved for Fields Medalist". I don't see those signs now and I am not sure if they were put in a new place or removed.

Elsewhere on campus I saw what looks like reserved parking for Chicago Cubs fans: