À la recherche des Maoris, a wandering trip (2): London-San Francisco, a Chinese immersion

This stop was friendship and family related! I promised myself to devote this weekend to dear friends who used to live in Geneva and who became very special to me…

So, following a very active cultural week in London I was expecting this stop to be purely family oriented with my lovely friends Mignon and Oliver with their family!

Except that my friends are like me so it still got pretty cultural (how could it be otherwise in one of the leading cultural capitals of the world?) and I discovered quite different aspects of one of my favorite world cities!

The first cultural shock was to get into a Tesla car and discover a totally new dimension of driving an almost completely automated car!

Staying with a Chinese Americano-Canadian family who is sending their little girl to a Jewish kindergarten also thrilled me with a cosmopolitan excitement and delight!

Talking to Mignon’s Mum, a well connected Taiwanese diplomat widow and sharing quality time with my long time best friend WeiQi convinced me once more of the close cultural connections between Jewish and Chinese world views and values!

California is always a sheer paradise and the views of the Bay AreaLands End, Half Moon Bay or of course the downtown area made every moment a breathtaking experience of beauty and simplicity…

The unexpected cultural highlight of this trip was to be able to enjoy the World Premiere of John Adams’s Girls of the Golden West at the very golden San Francisco Opera House!

Based on “Dame Shirley’s letters which

Have come to be regarded as a cornerstone of the 19th century California literature (SF Opera programme)

This somehow impressionist account (libretto by Peter Sellars) with the Gold Rush as the main character was served by the delightful voices of J’nai Bridges, Julia Bullocks, Davone Tines and Hye Jung Lee was a great moment, though at times a bit dragging as I would have minimized the cabaret sections a bit….

And of course, a Chinese-Franco-Jewish encounter in San Francisco wouldn’t be complete without the culinary delights this city offers, the list of which you will find below but the summit of which was the fabulous Dungeness crabs dinner prepared by my dear friends Oliver and Mignon