Bay Area adventures - Berkeley

A normal day on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. That's not really a severed head though it may look like it on first glance.

Telegraph Avenue leads directly up to the UC-Berkeley campus. It's full of bookstores, record stores (Rasputin and Amoeba), restaurants and various-and-sundry boutiques. No Starbucks on Telegraph Avenue right there. Every Middle American's nightmare of what "Berkeley" is, in other words. (But, no, they don't sell LSD at the arts-and-crafts stands!)

Farther down Telegraph is Berkeley Whole Foods grocery. Photos are not allowed inside the store (I think the company CEO is a Republican or something), so this photo was made clandestinely by an anonymous source who left it at my door on a disk wiped clean of fingerprints.

But Whole Foods does have an impressive display of milk.

They're a little on the pricey side, though. Profit margins on "organic" products are pretty healthy. Some irreverent sorts call Whole Foods, "Whole Paycheck".

Berkeley also has a European-style Farmers' Market on Saturday mornings. It even features a German bakery with a big blond German guy.

The Farmers' Market features live folk music, just like you always imagined for Berkeley. No, it's not acid rock: you've been watching too many reruns of The Mod Squad.

Oh, yeah, the Farmers' Market also has food and stuff. Organic, of course!

The UC-Berkeley campus has all sorts of exotic things, as you would expect.

And also old-fashioned, campus-looking stuff like the Sather Gate. (Photo: Old Hickory's Photography Dept.)

For you 1960s nostalgics, right in front of this gate is Sproul Plaza, where a bunch of protesters surrounded a police car back in the day, while Mario Savio stood on top and talked about throwing his body into the machine. That, like, The Machine of dull-as-dirt capitalist society. They probably played Beatles music there, too, or something like that, who knows?

Speaking of all that, here's another Republican nightmare of the kind you see all over the place in Berkeley: a traveling flower-power Revolution Bus. It's part of the Vast Left Wing Conspiracy, people! (Photo: Old Hickory's Photography Dept.)

I think we'd better call the cops to check on all this weirdness! (Photo: Old Hickory's Photography Dept.)

No wonder they call this place Berzerkely.

Tags: berkeley