Sunday, January 23, 2011

A great weekend

I see I am woefully behind on posting here but it's not for a lack of things to blog about. Instead of recounting our wonderful Christmas with Mum and Dad here in Berkeley or our impromptu trip to Hawaii last week I am going to tell you about the fabulous weekend we just had.

Yesterday's highlight was the purchase of a new teapot. Our first Berkeley teapot met its end over christmas but i think it did its due service to us after coming to us from a garage sale 2.5 years ago. Our other teapot found in freecycle was irritating us no end- too small, drippy, dangerous capsizing lid etc. We got a beautiful teapot from BeeHouse (of Japan) which we are LOVING!! It looks cool, it pours beautifully, it has a fixed lid that you can remove (if you so choose), and it makes wonderful tea!!

Then last night I did a runthrough of my Works for Unaccompanied Voice recital which I am preparing for two lower mainland performances in February. It was at All Souls Church in their church hall. About 15 or so people attended (I expected about 3!) and it was so great to engage them with this rather unusual music and for them to be so brave to attend something that they knew nothing about! They were so generous in their praise and interest and I was quite touched by that. I was very glad to get a chance to sing the repertoire with an audience to give me the experience and to teach me what I need to work on before the next performances.

Today we went to church and it was a very nice service with a good sermon and then we went to he AGM of All Souls Parish. It was only an hour long, included a light lunch and childcare outside, and it was standing room only! We came home, the kids played outside until it was time to head out for an adventure to the City (SF) to see SF Opera's film version of Elixir of Love created for kids. It was at the Herbst Theater which is next door to the opera house. It was free, we found great parkade parking for $4 very close to the theater and it was a great show. It was an english language version in a live performance recording edited down to 1 hour and with Nemorino as the narrator. The treatment of it for film was very good.

After the show we went out for dinner at Burma Superstar which had been recommended to me by a friend of Julia's at her wedding this past summer. It is also on a number of "where to eat in SF" lists and it was fantastic. We found a free parking spot and we got a table almost instantaneously! (not an easy feat as they don't take reservations and I think there is always a line!!) We had their tealeaf salad, rainbow salad, garlic noodles, samusa soup, platha (bread) with a coconut dipping sauce and the Classic Burmese Chicken Casserole with Cardamom Cinnamon Rice. The kids were their agreeable selves and tried everything. They preferred the noodles and the rice dish and we ate every last drop of everything!!! Our waitress was very impressed by us especially the kids and their adventuresome pallets!! 

Now we are home enjoying tea from our tea pot and reveling in the reality that we can go on adventures to San Francisco at the drop of a hat.

1 comment:

Julia said...

put up some hawaii pics! :)