myz_lilith

Hanging yellow trumpets
Cafe in Union Square. Strings of yellow trumpet shaped flowers. Hard to tell that at first, they were large, and mostly hanging upside down. They looked like folded cloth, or a colony of fruit bats in bright sunner clothing.

Lensbaby
First time I had a chance to play with the lens my brother got me for my birthday. It takes some getting used to but is fun, and some of the results were very funky. (Although I did keep thinking 'it'd take me 2 seconds to do that in Photoshop.') Still, want to play with it more and see what tricks I can make it perform.

Nepal
While taking photos, a random guy walked up to me, politely introduced himself, asked about my camera, told me he was from Nepal, talked briefly about the place, and then politely trotted off again. Very strange.

Buena Vista Irish
Dad remembered a place near Fisherman's Wharf that he said served the best Irish coffees in the world ever, and so led us all on a trek to try to find it. Ironically it turned out to be the not-very-Irish-sounding Buena Vista. He was right about the coffee.

Red lines
Driving across the Golden Gate Bridge. Not on my list, as sitting in a ton of tourist traffic to cross a bridge just to turn round and come back again never really appealed. But all those red lines converging and diverging overhead was pretty cool.

Traffic lamp
Trying to manhandle a lamp bigger than you are into the back of a rental car that you can't figure out how to lower the seats near Union Square in the middle of San Francisco rush hour traffic the day before a major public holiday. Not advised. Ended up giving in and sending passengers home by train.

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Ghost architects
In the deepest California, in the darkest San Jose, you will find the house that ghosts built, better as the Winchester Mystery House.

The story goes that Sarah Winchester, heir to the Winchester rifle fortune, consulted a psychic following the loss of both her husband and daughter. The psychic informed her that her loved ones had been slain by the vengeful ghosts of those killed by the infamous rifles, and that she would suffer the same fate unless she started building a house and kept on building, never letting it reach completion. So of course that's what she did.

She was guided in this enterprise by whatever restless spirits she could contact in nightly midnight seances. (I'm not sure why you would select the same bloodthirsty supernatural rabble that slaughtered your loved ones as your architects of choice, but maybe that was part of the deal. Or maybe the spirits advising her were the ~good~ ghosts. Who knows?)

The result was a rambling shambling monster of a house, a genuine oddity in its own right and now a massive tourist attraction. Even the shortest guided tour is an epic trek through the myriad halls and attics, as a guide fills you in on the macabre history and speculates how Sarah Winchester's odd motivations and state of mind may have shaped the strangest architectural oddities.

In fact, the 'weird' aspects of the house were the least intriguing. There are so many houses around that have been so warped by time and repurposing that something like a stairway leading straight into a wall, floors crossing each other at strange levels, and windows that never see daylight don't exactly demand a supernatural explanation. (I lived for six months in a house with a door to nowhere, and we never once had crowds of tourists flocking round to gawp at it.) The contradictions were striking though: lushly furnished apartments sat alongside bare lathe and plaster walls, where construction work was abandoned after being interrupted by the great 'quake of 1906 (which was itself, of course, caused by the vengeful spirits.)

And while most of the time it was hard to get a sense of scale of the place, the few times you did get a glimpse out across the whole sprawling construction (or even a segment of it) the scale was mind boggling. Plus there was plenty of fun spotting the repeated themes (spiderwebs and the number thirteen were particularly popular) as well as some gorgeous stained glass, and elegant furniture and fittings. (And that kind of stuff often bores me, so I'm sure the creepy context added to the experience.)

The really interesting aspect, though, was the human tale behind the haunted mansion. Sarah Winchester was by many accounts a paranoid(!) woman, and quick to anger. She had whole blocks of rooms constructed so that she could more easily spy on her household staff (to see if they gossiped behind her back) as well as a complex bell-call network that meant that they were at her beck and call every hour of the day and night. She was also obsessive about conserving water and set up elaborate recycling and reclaimation systems all over the house.

And the weirdest part of all was realising that those grand reception halls and ornate ballrooms never once saw the throngs of visitors they were designed for. Sarah Winchester remained a total recluse, hidden away from the world. She even had a special chamber constructed so she could get out of her carriage inside the house, away from spying eyes. She lived out her days as a lonely, fearful phantom, haunting her ever-expanding, never ending palace.

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So, in the gaps when the people in my head have been refusing to share their stories, I've finally got around to writing up my last trip to America.

Brief background: my brother moved out to San Francisco a couple of years ago, and my parents and I have been trying to get out to see him at least once a year. Usually I head over there separately, but this year was my Dad's 60th birthday so we decided to make it a big combined trip so we could celebrate as a family. It was the first family holiday I've been on for many year, and made for a very different sort of visit to my previous American adventures, which usually involve the whirlwind of alcohol, chaos and debauchery known as Dragon*Con.

We were staying in Mountain View (where Gavin actually lives) for most of the time, while making a few trips out to San Francisco proper and various other places, as well as a longer trip down along the Big Sur to Santa Barbara.

When I arrived back, I wrote a sort of random summary of the trip here. I'm now fleshing out each of those minute bursts of memory with slightly more detail* and releasing them into the wild whenever the mood takes me.

California
California is big. Very big. It's not quite as big as space, but things are definitely a lot further away there than that chemist's shop just down the road. (you know the one.) This is one of those facts that I do know, ad know that I know, but my brain actively overrules it every time. So I'll start saying things like 'Oooh, we could pop by here on the way' only to have people look at me pityingly and explain that 'popping by there' would involve a 100 mile round trip. (It also turns out that my brother's place wouldn't make the ideal place to stay if I went to Comic Con, what with being, ooh, several hundred miles away.) California is big.

Sunny
It's sunny in California. (See how easy this write-up lark is?) Although it does seem to get significantly less so whenever I turn up. Last year I was at an open air gig with my brother, it rained as much in 6 hours as it did in the previous 6 months. This time round, while the rest of the US was suffering endless heatwaves, Mountain View was a balmy twenty degrees. Mind you, after several weeks of sticky heat at home that was very welcome. But California tends to be more bearable even when it does turn up the temperature. Dry heat is less draining, and blue skies make me smile.

Whoops we forgot to put your luggage on the plane
Again, this one is pretty self explanatory. What is slightly less self-explanatory is HOW they managed it. I mean, an airline has two things it needs to remember to put on the plane: you, and your luggage. (Oh, and apparently a pilot or two.) One out of two really doesn't cut it. (Although I suppose I would have been more annoyed if they forgot the pilot. Or maybe not. Don't modern planes pretty much fly themselves?)

Anyway, for those that haven't managed to get separated from their luggage by the width of the Atlantic Ocean, I can tell you it's not a particularly fun experience. Standing by the carousel desperately hoping that there might be one more cart to unload leaves you feeling like the kid who is always last to be picked in PE at school, only with less snot and tears and more swearing. Usually at the point when you finally give up any hope of any more bags magically appearing, you go to talk to someone at the airline's desk who helpfully informs you that they have no idea where your luggage is right now, but that - like the truth - it's out there somewhere. Luckily in our case, they knew exactly where our bags were; unfortunately that place was still in the UK. They had every intention of reuniting us sometime soon, but were slightly less certain of when that might be. (Being Air France, the woman on the desk was very French about this, and seemed to imply that it was all our fault and that we should apologise for wasting her time.)

Mind you, I did realise it ~could~ actually be our fault. The minute we walked into Manchester Airport we were accosted by people trying to sell us some amazing new hyper-global luggage tracking system. So part of me thinks that because we turned it down, they deliberately 'lost' our luggage to prove a point. Which is a pretty normal level of paranoia to be feeling after a transatlantic flight.

(After all, I knew it was all going too smoothly this time when I didn't get bundled off to a small room halfway through Immigration for having the wrong sort of fingerprints...)

Macys spree
Of course, the one advantage to an airline losing your luggage (or even seriously delaying it) is that they're prepared to give you money to go away and stop bothering them (or as they put it to replace essential items until your bags are restored to you). Which translated (in my head at least) into free shopping spree. And so I discovered Macys. Which I knew existed in a general way, I just didn't know it would be a source for all sorts of gorgeous black flowing lacy see-through shiny things. (Which are my favourite sort of things.) And in proper sizes too. (In the US they call larger sizes 'Women's sizes - I very much approve of this. Curves are womanly and deserve to be dressed in gorgeous clothes.)

Tabasco for breakfast
California, being so close to Mexico, does spicy very very well indeed. I have no idea how authentic Californian Mexican food is, but I can say for certain that it's extremely yummy. And hot. And this spills over into breakfast (and beyond). In the same way that you'd expect to see salt, pepper and vinegar laid out in a cafe in the UK, every place we ate at had at minimum a bottle of tabasco, and in some cases a whole range of fiery sauces, ready and waiting on the table. Even with breakfast. As someone who believes tabasco is an ingredient to be added in sloshes rather than drips, this was my idea of burning hot heaven.

(For people who have shuddered after seeing me drink multiple flatliners at Whitby, this may explain a lot.)

Potential sister-in-law?
Met my brother's new girlfriend, Alice, in person for the first time. (Although she wasn't that new by this point, as they'd been together since just after my last visit the previous year, and have known each other since he first moved out there.) I liked her a lot, they're incredibly sweet together, and I can genuinely see them getting hitched (and with no ulterior motives either, as he's hopefully going through the work-related green card process at the minute.) However I have to leave the question mark in that heading as (1) I don't want to tempt fate and (2) I think that traditionally it's considered more polite to leave it to one of them to actually pop the question before announcing it as a done deal on LJ... just remember that I called it here first!

*Okay, some may end up being in a lot more detail. What, you expected me to write something short? Have we met?

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