Category Archives: Home & Family

My husband John and I took a few days off last week to take one of the
Top Ten Train Rides
in the world: across Canada on VIA Rail‘s “Canadian”.
This train goes back and forth between Vancouver and Toronto through some of the most
beautiful mountains and countryside in the world.

We started off on Friday, 29 July with a complete disaster: a frustrating and pointless round trip flight to Phoenix, AZ. It turned out that our connecting carrier, Air Canada (flying for United Airlines), decided to hold an end-of-month strike. That is, they left their flights on the computers but did not send any airplanes to move passengers. It is not clear why the San Francisco United staff did not tell us this instead of confirming the connecting flight at the Premier desk. Grump!

The United Premier desk in Phoenix helped us to reschedule everything since we could not get to Toronto. Instead of flying to Toronto to take the train to Vancouver, we reversed direction to take the train from Vancouver to Toronto. We ended up staying over night at the Vancouver airport Fairmont (actually inside the airport building) and spending a few hours in Vancouver before boarding the train. We checked our bags at Vancouver’s Union Station then walked a short way to board the
Downtown Historic Railway to Granville Island. From Granville Island, we took the False Creek ferry to see the ship St. Roch at the Vancouver Maritime Museum. The St. Roch crossed the icy Northwest Passage twice during World War II and now lives in its own building on the waterfront. It is one of my favorite spots in Vancouver.

John and I had our own sleeping compartment for three nights and four days aboard the Canadian’s Thompson Manor car. It came with 3 meals a day (everything was wonderful and was made from scratch on the train except the baked goods), plus access to the four dome cars and the lounge car. The staff were helpful and supportive; each car has its porter plus the dining car and lounge car staff. We sat with a number of different charming couples at meals. Most of them were retired (from South Africa, Australia, and America) but there were a few families with young children.

We were able to get out and walk a bit at some stops. The longest stop was for over an hour at Jasper high up in the mountains but we got a good walk in at Winnipeg too. Jasper looks like any ski and tourist town but the surrounding peaks are barren and spectacular. We were blown out of town by a rain and dust storm. Winnipeg was hot but had a lovely garden walkway from the station to a cantilever bridge over their muddy river.

John and I read lots of books and magazines, took many pictures and naps, and had a delightful time all around. After we got in (only 3 hours late), we stayed at Toronto’s Royal York Fairmont across the street from the station. Next morning, we flew home to San Francisco much relaxed.

On Tuesday, we rented a trailer and picked up our terra cotta warriors in the warehouse
in Oakland. There was the usual frustrating back and forth and discussions with middlemen.
We ended up paying $270 cash in addition to the trailer rental in addition to the purchase
and shipping price. $160 for the customs middlemen and $110 for the warehouse middlemen. The total cost was still much less than buying them here in the US. The warehouse had a funny sign
on the cashier window, something like: “If you are grouchy, irritable, or just plain mean,
there will be an additional $25 charge.” I told the lady I wanted one of those signs.

We picked up our son Paul at summer school in Palo Alto, drove an hour north and picked up my mother’s helper Sean in San Francisco, drove for another hour and picked up two terra cotta archers in three hundred thirty pound
wooden crates in Oakland. We left one archer in San Francisco with my mother (after John and
Sean and I pushed and pulled the crate up two flights of front steps and through the house and down the deck steps to the back garden). My mother and Sean unpacked her archer and she
seems very happy. The black finished archer is now kneeling in the dirt under a
rhododendron bush. It took about 6 hours round trip.

Our own archer is in our back yard in San Jose. He is currently kneeling on 50 pounds of
white sand surrounded by red bark chips in a corner between our river wall and the side
back fence. He will eventually have a wooden shed built over him. Like the ancient terra
cotta warriors, his head is separate from his body
and there is space for water to get in. He was packed in the crate with his head
wrapped in shredded paper under his butt. I don’t want him to fill up with water and leaves,
so we will build a shed over him before the rain starts in autumn. I am looking at Chinese garden building designs now. We are discussing what our archer should be named. I am
reading the Records of the Grand Historian by Sima Qian and will probably find
the name in there.

Jessica is at Westminster Choir College for
two weeks. She seems very happy from her emails and phone calls. She wrote “we had a
brief rainstorm today, and i swear that i could chew on the air! the
humidity is still fun, and the bugs here are waaaaaaay more
interesting than at home. fireflies rock!”

Her brother Paul is very lonely without her so we are taking him on a trip to the
Monterey Bay Aquarium on
Sunday. He will take a SCUBA lesson on Monday in the tide pool. John and I are both
enthusiastic divers and we are looking forward to a family dive vacation.

It is very hot in the Bay Area this week and all the new plants need lots of water.
Paul and I planted the dirt strip along the front of the garage with 5

nandina (heavenly bamboo) and a large garishly colorful

Amazon Queen hibuscus which is already blooming and seems very happy.

My husband John and I took a joint
three week business trip to China in April and May
this year. We went to the Sun China Engineering and Research Institute on
the campus of Tsinghua University in Beijing. I was there to recruit participants
for the SEED Engineering mentoring program and John was there to talk with the
Engineering staff about Sun’s ARCs (Architectural Review Committees).

On one of the weekends, we flew to Xian to see the terra cotta warriors.
We made the mistake of going during the Chinese Labor holiday so it was
very very crowded. The archaeological site is an hour’s drive from the city of
Xian. Xian has some lovely old buildings and a big city wall. The night before
we went to see the site, we walked through the hot streets of Xian.
The city park was full of teens and little kids roller skating. The
Science and Technology museum was closed but we could see painted figures on the
windows: a local version of
NASA’s Pioneer space plaque. The differences were that the figures on the
window in Xian wore underwear and were Chinese in facial feature.

Outside of the city, the countryside has scattered brick houses and walls with
many neat piles of sticks, tiles, and bricks around. Some of the walls and
shacks are dry-laid brick, others use mortar. There are tiny towns with small fruit
tree orchards and grain fields between. Brick outhouses stand between the road and
the homes. All the space is thoroughly used with old and new jumbled together.
You can see the stacks of what looks like a nuclear power plant past the farms
and muledrawn cart and bicycles on the road. As we drove closer to the Qin Army Vaults,
there were factories, some with rows of terra cotta warriors for sale in front.

We spent about three hours visiting the 2000-year-old
tomb itself. We mostly had to squeeze around the tours because the tour guides
would take up a position in front of their group at the rail over the pit and talk
for a very very long time. This meant that no one else could see what was below.
There are four buildings: 3 covered pits and one museum. Visitors get from one to
another using a credit-card-like ticket (from Xian Typical Brother Industries Co., Ltd.).
The pit earth is yellow brown and seeing the clay faces and bodies standing or lying on
top in their orderly rows is awesome. The bodies are strangely perportioned: the
trunks seem too long and the legs too short on the men. The horses have full size heads
and 3/4 size bodies and no tails. On the warriors, there are slight facial differences
from man to man, particularly when comparing the rarer figures and officers.

The museum room displaying the two small bronze chariots was absolutely packed with
people around the central glass cases but as usual in China everyone
seemed calm and good tempered. There was little elbowing and grouching. Kids were
protected from the crowd and everyone looked to be enjoying themselves even in the hot airless crush. Most of the tourists at the site seemed to be Chinese nationals rather
than foreign tourists. It was like visiting Washington DC where Americans go to be
proud of their heritage rather than just gawk at the sights.

John and I knew before the trip that we wanted to buy a full-size terra cotta warrior
copy while we were in China. I have wanted one for my garden ever since my Mother
visited China for the first time ten years ago. We had gone shopping at http://www.terracottawarriors.com/
so we knew what was available in the USA. Bargaining in China seems as much
interactive theater as
commerce. It took four hours at two different factories to make a deal everyone
liked. We tore up two sets of contracts along the way as part of the discussions
of what, where, how much, and how to pay. We had some advantage because the
http://www.terracottawarriors.com/
web site is blocked from viewing in China so the Xian salesmen did not know their
competition’s prices. After very hard bargaining, we bought two figures in dark
grey clay – like this original:

kneeling archer. One archer is for us and the other for my parents.

Last week, I got email from the Xian shipping company that two boxes are coming
in. Our warriors are in Los Angeles now, headed for Oakland, California. We will
borrow a truck and some hefty friends to pick them up when they arrive.

My mother has been distributing some of her larger family
furniture to my brothers and me. Last weekend, I brought home
a parlor screen painted in the mid-1800s. It would have originally
been used to shield someone from drafts. It has 3 sections hinged
together; each being about 54″x20″. The frame is made of
some dark fruit wood mounted with paintings on canvas panels.

The six paintings are by my ancestress Mary Esperandieu who came to
Knoxville, Tennessee USA in 1840 from Vevey, Switzerland. The panels tell
the story of her move to what was a lovely but relatively
primitive new country. She came to America as a young woman with her family.
Her father, Reverend Frederick Esperandieu, was a Huguenot (French protestant)
minister and teacher.

One screen panel shows a woman in white waving a hankerchief
goodbye to Lake Leman (Lake Geneva) and the Swiss mountains. Another shows
a tiny church in a field of wildflowers with hills behind. There are panels
showing lilac and sunflowers and another showing the dogwood native to the
Knoxville area. A very different panel is of a lively snow play scene with
children on sleds, a horse drawn sleigh, and a mansion in the background. This
is probably out of Mary Esperandieu’s childhood memories.

The paintings are in a Grandma Moses primitive style. My mother says this is
one of several family screens she inherited and is restoring. When she got this one,
the paintings were all crumpled up and in very bad shape. She remounted them
on new canvas with rabbit skin glue and tacked them back on the old screen frame.

Rev Frederick Esperandieu ran a French-English bilingual school in Knoxville. Both
he and his sons fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War.
Mary Esperandieu eventually married Edward Bolli. My brother Mark has her diary from
the crossing to America, including the sad story of the death of her Mother’s new baby
at sea. My cousin Rip has Mary Esperandieu Bolli’s diary from the time of the Civil War.
In it is her story of telling the soldiers who came to take her chickens that they were
no gentlemen. They slunk away ashamed.

My daughter took her last final yesterday. Tomorrow I take a vacation day
so that her girls’ choir at Harker can come over for an end-of-year swim party.
Today, she and I took a few hours to practice taking CalTrain and BART trains
to San Francisco from San Jose. Jessica has a part-time unpaid summer internship
at the EFF – Electronic Frontier Foundation –
which starts Monday. She is very excited to be working in an area she cares a
great deal about. EFF is in San Francisco’s Mission district so we needed to try out
the public transit route to be sure she knew where to go, what it cost, and how long
it took.

We had been advised that the 16th & Mission BART station was a little “colorful” so
we got off at 24th & Mission. We walked to EFF then wandered around the neighborhood.
Jessica and I ate some pastry at a paneteria, did some shopping (3 formal dresses
for $20 at Thrift Town), then I participated in a work conference call on my cell phone
while sitting on the BART station plaza bricks in the sun among the pigeons.
After the call, we ate lunch at a taqueria featuring a delightful mural of the Virgen
de Guadalupe on the wall, and took the train home. It was a good trip and I think
Jessica feels more sure of her way.

My own summer intern started on Monday. Shilpam will be supporting the SEED program
between her Harker high school graduation and starting as a Freshman at Cal Berkeley.
She was our intern last summer too and did a fine job.