Food, Rocks and risk aversion...

There are some really interesting/fun parks and playgrounds around us. Berkeley is built on a substantial rocky outcrop that rises about 2-300m from the surrounding Bay area. We explored 2 places quite close to us. The first, called Indian rock, is about 0.5 km away up the hill from us and is a prominent outcrop of hard  underlying volcanic rock called rhyolite. It makes for great climbing and scrambling for the kids and a teeny weeny bit of nervousness on the parental supervisors....

Where is Stella????

The second, Codornices Creek Park, has an amazing CONCRETE bum-slide. It was a bit of an revelation for us in this age of risk aversion that a city maintains (and promotes) the slide with its associated hard concrete edges and no sign saying "enter at own risk"...... It was refreshing to see this "give it a go" attitude. The girls, as usual, went hard at it and wore out several bits of cardboard and pants!

Another fun thing that we've been doing is exploring the great fruits and vegetables that are grown in California. Stella was the first to find Jicama.... a really fantastic root veg that comes from Mexico. It tastes like a cross between apple and potato with the texture of water chestnut. Sounds weird, but is fantastic when eaten raw.

mmmmmmm... jicama!

Lucia has been exploring new and interesting varieties of pears, avocados and mango.....

which one will we eat first?

This week we have our spring break, so we are off to Monterey Bay to see the best aquarium in the world and on the way back we want to visit some of the old spanish missions that are being restored in the San Joachim valley. We'll post as many pictures as we can. here are some more to satisfy Fletcher...