Weekend Mar 18-20, 2011

What a weekend was last weekend. A good enough weekend to make 5 blog posts. But i am lazy :)

So, after writing the last life-in series, i realized that nothing interesting had happened for over a month. On top of that it was raining badly in Bay area and it was going to continue like this. So i decided to act, take my life in my own hands and lets make it a great weekend.

Mar 18, Friday evening, 7pm-
Went to see Peninsula symphony orchestra's performance of Beethoven's Fifth concerto and a virtuoso debut. Link: http://www.yelp.com/events/san-mateo-peninsula-symphony-orchestra-presents-beethovens-fifth . The concert was preceded by a lecture for people like me who had no idea about the technical details of concert. Lecture highlighted on some of the Beethoven's techniques and how one piece ends and how another begins. A very insightful lecture which made the concert more interesting. Btw, Beethoven's fifth is jut awesome!

Mar 19, Saturday morning, 8:30 am.
I woke up early (6 am) and its been 2 hrs plus of mindless net surfing and i was getting hungry. So i decided to do something creative. It was raining outside, and what better thing to make in rain but pakodas. But it has to be something that i have not made it yet. And there it was stuffed bread pakoda. Yes, i have made bread pakoda couple of times in past but stuffed ones were a new height to climb. It took three trials before the besan's liquidity was in correct composition. Any how it was 10 am and the stuffed bread pakoda's were looking the best ever.

Mar 19, Saturday morning 11:30 am.
The mindless surfing between 6 - 8 am was to figure out what to do today. Having lived in SF for 2+ years now, it is quite sad that i had not visited most of the local museums. So it was museum day. After eating the hearty breakfast, i quickly left home to visit the Contemporary Jewish museum. Link: http://www.thecjm.org/ . I arrived at the museum at about 12:45, knowing the fact that there is a tour of museum at 1pm. I have no idea about jewish culture, little knowledge that i have are from films and we all know how truthful films are towards reality. I am the only one for the tour, very few people have turned out on that rainy day and my tour guide is a wonderful retired lady who is volunteering there. She starts be giving an overview of the architecture of the museum which is very interesting as the walls are slanting. The building itself has many hidden symbolisms in its design, had she not told me i would not have even noticed it. The tour was wonderful, it was supposed to be an interactive tour but since i was the only audience, i had little to offer.
The CJM is an awesome museum. Many things fascinated me. There are no permanent exhibits, every exhibit changes with time. Currently they had an exhibit of
(a) The Secret Musical History of Black-Jewish Relations http://www.thecjm.org/index.php?option=com_ccevents&scope=exbt&task=detail&oid=51 The music room was awesome. Some of my fav songs that i listened were - Hava nagila by harry belafonte and Eli eli by john mathis.
(b) Jewish religious text is called Torah and it is considered a very spiritual journey to write a torah. There are many rules on how to write a Torah and one of them is that women can't write it. Being a contemporary jewish museum, they have an exhibit going on where a scribe is writing the Torah and that scribe is a woman. It is called Project 304,805 because Torah has that many characters. It was great to know more about the Torah and the effort needed to write it. They were also showing a small documentary on how the woman scribe learn to write the Torah's language (because women are not allowed in such schools). Nice documentary. The scribe's name is
(c) Classification on Torah. Again going by its Contemporary theme, someone applied a classification on all of Torah's rules. Classification was based on labels such as Rules which apply to man, rules which apply to woman, rules for priests, positive rule, negative rule, rules inside Israel only etc. It was cool to see classification of religious text. Great idea for Indian religious texts.
(d) Participated in People's torah project - http://www.peoplestorah.org where you scan your hand the scanned image is converted to a character in Torah. For my hand it is י (Yud) which is located in Genesis 15:8.

Mar 19, Saturday 3 pm -
After coming out of theCJM, i was feeling hungry. There was a Papa Beard pastry shop right there and i decided to give it a try. Awesome cream puffs and desserts.

Mar 19, Saturday 3:30 pm -
The day was still not over and i had time. There was a teeny museum opposite to theCJM called Museum of craft and folk art. Link: http://www.mocfa.org/ . What a good decision to go that museum. They were having an exhibition by Corita Kent. Corita was a very talented artist and her art works displayed were awesome. She was initially a nun but later on she renounced that and became a full time artist. Her artwork is mostly colorful description of words. A good link to know about her life - http://weekendamerica.publicradio.org/programs/2007/03/03/sister_corita.html . She was also a teacher at Immaculate Heart college and this was her rules - http://hi-and-low.typepad.com/my_weblog/2008/01/a-new-year.html. There is going to be another blog post on this one. I ended up buying a book by her called Learning by heart. Haven't read it yet.

Mar 20, Sunday, 10 am
After the eventful Saturday, the weekend was only half over and i was in my full spirits. Sunday was the day of this month's camera cinema club screening. How awesome! The movie screened was The Women Chaser. It is a parody of noir genre. The movie was released in 1999 and it was a big flop but it was recently rediscovered by a film critic and since then it is re-released and gathering quite a bit of attention. I didn't like this movie particularly. Parody movies are usually a hard sell on me. But a very different movie overall.

Mar 20, Sunday 2pm.
The rain had stopped momentarily. So i decided to go for a run/walk on Steven's Creek trail behind my house. It was awesome weather, sunlight coming in between clouds, trees loaded with dew and a stream that is overflowing. The trail was closed because water had come over the trail.

Mar 20, Sun 4 pm -
Sufi cafe. Sitting at the back of Sufi cafe listening to Roja's songs, reading The Idiot by Dostoyevsky, enjoying rain and coffee. What could be better than this. A brief thass with Rathi, gurshi. The evening was spent in reading The Idiot. More on that book later.


That was one hell of a weekend to remember. I have clicked photos but while organizing them into an album, i accidentally deleted the album. I have to do the exercise again. So will upload them later.