# The Big Trip



## guythegreg (Jun 15, 2012)

Well I'm over my jet lag now and can write thoughtfully about the Big Trip. Those who have followed my posts know I cannot buy things online, so if I wanted tickets to see Natalie Dessay doing all four heroines in Tales of Hoffmann, next June at the SF Opera, I was going to have to wait until the box office started selling tickets and then go there and get them. So that's what last weekend was devoted to.

I stayed overnight in Manhattan (due to the fact that traveling from Secaucus, NJ to Manhattan that early in the morning by public transportation is not possible), had bacon and eggs at an all night diner at 3 am, and headed off to the airport. A rainstorm drenched me - I had checked the weather report and was told the chance of rain was 20%, so I don't know what went wrong, but all my money got wet, and all my pieces of paper that told me how to get around and where to go in SF got wet. I spent the first hour at the airport with all my papers spread out on a luggage carousel, turning them from time to time and getting them dry. I'm sure it was very entertaining to others there, you're all quite welcome. 

I have to say, JFK looks quite rundown. The AirTrain, that moves people from the airport to a nearby train and subway hub in Jamaica NY, is in good condition. But the JFK buildings just look old and decrepit.

So then we got on the plane and sat for an hour while they got their computer up lol. I kid you not. The computer was down so we couldn't take off. The plane had little TVs on the back of every seat, and you could listen to music or watch TV or a movie or play a game or shop. Probably there are people out there saying, this guy hasn't been on a plane in 20 years? He didn't know this? Well, in words of one syllable, equally divided between consonants and vowels: no. Actually that's not true, I flew to NYC from Spokane in 2009 and the plane wasn't fitted out with them then, so there.

So off we went, la di da, and arrived in SF 12 hours later. It was only 5 hours on the clock but when you're in the tiger cage known as the modern passenger seat on a jet, you know, time doesn't pass so quickly. And just as I had anticipated, where it had been summer in NYC, it was fall in SF. 

In to town on the BART and off to Berkeley, where I was planning to stay overnight, and Berkeley was just as wonderful as I remembered. I was at Berkeley for a semester and a half, lo these many years ago, and it was wonderful and strange. Summer in NYC; fall (specifically, October) in SF; but in Berkeley it is always Spring. Picked up the von Karajan Don Carlos from the Salzburg Festspiele with Jose Carreras, Piero Cappucilli, Ferruccio Furlanetto, Agnes Baltsa, Matti Salminen et al for $15. Hoping for good things there, we'll see. Had a couple of slices of pizza and a drink, and then discovered the restaurant had no bathroom. A restaurant with no bathroom? How odd. I then went from place to place and discovered that MANY of the restaurants in Berkeley have no bathrooms, or their bathrooms are out of order. I finally had to buy a drink at a place just to use the rest room. Yeesh.

Attitudes are different in Berkeley. I get the impression everyone there is scheming in some way. God knows I had schemes of my own when I lived there. In NYC people save their scheming for the workplace and for love affairs; in Berkeley people are at it around the clock. The striving is like a vibrating undercurrent that penetrates concrete, kind of like the residual microwave radiation from the Big Bang.

So: overnight in Berkeley, up with the dawn, and off to a coffeehouse, where the cinnamon raisin roll and the latte was nearly as good as I'd remembered. Next June I shall go every day to the coffeehouse and have lattes and cinnamon rolls without end. My poop shall smell of cinnamon and coffee. Aah! Wunderbar!

Off to San Fran and scope out the area around the opera house. I was planning to take a tour at 10, when it opened, buy my tickets at 11:30, after the tour ended, and then back to the airport. My God what a dirty city. The first time I saw San Francisco (twenty years ago now?) that was my first thought then, and that has not changed. I have many happy SUNNY memories of San Francisco - I know the sun shines there quite a bit - but that first impression is kind of off-putting. It's not just that there are bums everywhere - that's true of NYC as well - it's that the merchants don't have local business development organizations that police the sidewalks. Or that's my first guess, anyway. And the streets are too big! That's really why NYC is such a pedestrian-friendly town - half the streets are really small and quiet enough to just walk across at any point. The avenues are busy, 42nd and 14th are busy, 23rd is busy, but many of NYC's streets are small and quiet and you can just zip across. This is not true of San Francisco.

But the opera area is just gorgeous. The library, city hall, the opera buildings, just magnificent. Put me in mind of French architecture, can't really say why. Monumental but also accessible. No, I think I saw pictures of the Louvre recently and seeing the War Memorial reminded me of that. (Just by the way: the war it memorializes is the First World War.) So I sat at Burger King and had coffee, and sure enough their bathroom was out of service! lol I did eventually find a restaurant with a working bathroom. But right then I had to brush my teeth, and wound up buying a bottle of water at Walgreens and brushing my teeth in the park, yeesh. Well, whaddayagonnado.

So then the tour started and it was just me and the docent, Tim. We had a kind of an embarrassing moment because he asked me what opera I liked, and I told him I'd been kind of obsessed with Traviata since April, and he started asking me about Puccini, and I answered him twice before I realized he thought Traviata was by Puccini lol. So we had a little moment there and passed on. He actually wanted me to do the tour, didn't feel that what he had to say would be very interesting, and largely I have to say I would have been wise to take his direction on that! *L* But we did see inside all the three different theaters - the orchestra, the opera and Herbst Theater, which he said is the busiest stage in San Francisco. Davies Hall (the orchestra) and the Opera House kind of vibrated when we went in, as though the acoustics were going to be REALLY REALLY GOOD. He mentioned that when opera singers come in to the SF opera house they have to be educated not to sing so loud, because they always think it's going to be hard to hit the back wall and it's just not.

I was worried that I wasn't going to be able to see the stage very well from the balcony, and that's not going to be a problem. The balcony is much closer to the stage in SF than it is in NYC. I was worried the screens that come down (they show the opera that's on stage on movie screens in the balcony section, for some performances) were going to screw up the show for me, and they're not. The screens are for people in the UPPER balcony, and for older customers who just don't see so well any more. The opera house seemed a lot dingier than I was expecting - it's been a while since they re-uphosltered, and they need it - but those are going to be wonderful, wonderful shows.

So I got my tickets. I have six orchestra tickets for Tales of Hoffmann, and six balcony tickets for Cosi fan tutte. I probably should have got balcony tickets for all performances but ah what the hell, it'll be MEMORABLE!!!

Back to the airport and a medium original Pinkberry with no toppings - anybody out there hasn't tried Pinkberry, you've got to, it's great - and back to NYC. Caught the train in to Penn Station, walked north a few blocks to the Port Authority Building and hopped on a bus to Secaucus. Arrived home at 1 am local time, only 5 hours before I had to get up for work, but I got up and got to work and pretended I was doing a good job well enough that nobody called me on it! and last night plenty of rest finally, thank goodness. Whew. 

So how was your weekend?


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