America! Land of the apple pie! The home of brownies, muffins, pancakes with maple syrup! You would have thought there would be no problems with any sort of baking here. Think again…

While unpacking some of our things, I came across an old Christmas article with recipes for mincemeat and Christmas cake, and decided that now would be a good time to get ahead and make these things, so that we can enjoy a proper taste of Christmas here later on.

So some fairly basic ingredients were required – raisins, currants, sultanas, glace cherries, mixed peel, brandy, suet and cooking apples. So I hit the shops in a fairly serious way. We have a really good selection of food shops near us, so I was spoilt for choice as to where to go – Whole Foods, Draegers, Andronicos, Oakville Grocery, Sigona’s Farmers Market as well as plain old Safeway.

First stop was Draegers, a local chain of food stores that also sells equipment and offers cooking lessons. Raisins, sultanas and currants were no problem – after all, most of the world’s raisins come from California! Brandy was also not a problem – there were about 10 varieties, in all different sizes. No sign of cherries or peel though.

Next stop was the local Safeway. Again, they had raisins, currants, sultanas, as well as dried apples, apricots, figs, pineapple and plums. But no cherries.

So it was on to Andronico’s, another local chain of food stores that started in Berkeley. They were quite helpful – cherries only appeared at the end of November though, and they didn’t sell cooking apples – the closest thing they had was Granny Smiths. Next to the shopping centre and the Sigona’s Farmers Market, a sort of greengrocers with lots of dried fruit. They had 2 types of dried cherries, as well as dried blueberries, an crystallised ginger and papaya. But no glace cherries and no peel. So on to the Oakville Grocery, just across the way. And what should I find on the counter – candied peel!! 2 huge jars of orange and lemon peel – but at a fairly steep price. So I bought a little of each, and asked about cherries. They did not sell them but they suggested I try Williams-Sonoma, a San Francisco-based cookware shop that happens to have a branch in the same centre. So round the corner to them.

Williams-Sonoma is a San Francisco institution and something of a kitchen heaven. The San Francisco store that we visited the other weekend has 4 floors of equipment, including some ridiculous stoves and lots of shiny copper pans. So I had quite high hopes of success with them. I wandered around the store, but there was no sign of the items (although they did have glace apricots!). So I asked a cashier who said they didn’t carry them, but asked me to hold on a second. She then got on the phone to her friend, who evidently basked fruit cakes herself, and asked where she got her cherries from. The answer was… Safeway!

It seems that none of these items come into the stores until Thanksgiving is well and truly out of the way. One good thing about all these holidays is that Halloween and Thanksgiving delay the onset of Christmas in the shops, so you don’t have 3 months of build-up. However, this doesn’t help me. I finally ordered cherries – along with ground almonds, another hard-to-find item – from an online catalogue. I hope they are going to arrive in the next few days.

All I need now is the suet…

Firstly, for those who may have missed it, check out N’s first blog post further down – Blogged up.

Both N and I have been bemused since we arrived by the disparity between the sophistication of American society (videos that know what you want to watch, crossing lights that tell you how long you have left before the lights change, etc.) and the stone-age nature of certain other aspects, most notably their financial and electrical systems.

Consider the humble plug. Being Brits, we can be smug in the knowledge that the UK plug design is one of the most over-engineered designs in the world. However, let’s start from scratch and think about the qualities you would like from a plug that connects you to a highly dangerous 110 volt electricity supply. First you would want it to conduct electricity and actually connect you to the supply. Well, there are relatively few problems here, although if you wiggle a US plug a little, you can get the lights to flicker quite satisfactorily. Secondly, you’d probably look for some sort of safety feature that would prevent you from electrocuting yourself. Nope. Nada. The US is quite happy to leave two bare metal prongs dangling out of the wall, that can be easily grasped should you wish to end yourself. And thirdly, you might ask for a certain degree of robustness, such that a gentle tug on the cable wouldn’t disconnect you (or expose those live metal parts). Again, the US plug fails on this dimension. Even high power devices like the iron will happlily dangle from the socket given the slightest provocation. What is even more amazing is that the heavy power supply transformers that are required for many electrical devices, and which are usually connected to UK plugs by a separate cable, are part of the plug here. So you have a heavy power supply literally hanging from two spindly metal prongs on the wall. Not good.

So my mum asked me at the weekend what things I missed about the UK. That’s what I miss. Electrical safety.

Election day today! As we don’t have our cable connected yet, so I have been folowing the news and the early results on Radio 4 over the internet. It’s been very reassuring to have James Naughtie keeping me up-to-date while I unpack the all the boxes of our stuff from the UK that arrived yesterday. The dramatic news so far, surprise surprise, is that the uncontroversial states have been called as expected and the ‘swing’ or ‘battleground’ states are all too close to call. Its fun to be listening as states are called very soon after the polls close – quite a change from the long wait for ballot counts in the UK.

More on the election after we get back from the bar…

Turns out the closest ones are still too close to call, and if we don’t know now, we probably won’t know for a week (Ohio doesn’t count provisional votes until 11 days after polling day!) so I’m going to bed.

As there seems to be little going on in the news except the election at the moment, I thought I would bring you a Palo Alto election special.

Of course, there is a presidential race going on out there somewhere, but there is no real evidence of it around here. As California is not a ‘swing state’ it is of little interest to the presidential candidate – it will certainly go democrat. Judging by the posters in people’s yards, the locals are much more concerned about all the local issues which will also appear on the November 2nd ballot paper.

American elections are interesting in that there are so many things to vote for. In Palo Alto, voters will be asked to choose their choice for President, for the Senate, for State Assembly, for City Council and be asked to vote on a number of local and statewide propositions. For the representative for State Assembly, there are two main candidates, Ira Ruskin (democrat) and Steve Poizner (republican), although, as so often in California, it’s really a choice between the liberal and the more liberal guy. Interestingly, the republican candidate will not say who his choice for president will be.

Of chief concern amongst these options seems to be Proposition I, which is a proposal to maintain and increase a parcel tax that is used to pay for Palo Alto schools to $521 per year (with certain groups of people, such as the over 65s exempt). It is refreshing to see so many homes really interested in this issue – many people who haven’t bothered with Kerry/Edwards or Bush/Cheney posters are displaying a Yes on I poster. It is interesting that amongst the discussion of the presidential race and how it is all likely to come down to a few hundred voters in a couple of states, there is little room for the fact that Americans have a great deal of control over their politicians at a local level, where it might actually impact their lives.

Well, here we are after a Great Californian Sunday, which also happens to be halloween. We actually got up and went for a little jog in the sunshine this morning, and then rewarded ourselves with breakfast at the Peninsula Fountain and Grill, which is a diner near here that looks just like you expect a diner to look. We bought the Sunday New York Times, and we pursued those all-american activities of shopping for electronics and DIY – just what Sunday’s should be all about (although Nathan might disagree, having been the one building most of the furniture).

Anyhow, all this rambling is really only to introduce some pictures of the house, so here they are: link to Fotopic gallery

After some minor effort and consulting of help files we have managed to add me to the blog account, so I am able to create my own entries :

Despite the busy week – we managed to go to the office Halloween party on Friday in the city. For those who have never driven highway 101 to San Francisco on the Friday before Halloween – it is hard to describe. Think Wacky Races meets the Cannonball Run with a side order of Carmmeggedon. Ugly.In any case we made it to the party, held at the very funky Fluid Lounge, and met up with a few more people. Amazingly (if you are a Brit) everyone had made an effort and the costumes were very elaborate. Of course there were the obligatory ‘naughty schoolgirls’ and drag queens, but more original highlights included a box of tissues – and memorably a couple dressed as sushi. Inspired.

Overall a good time – and we felt good about getting to the city for the first time. So glad we followed L’s instincts and decided to live in Palo Alto though – that commute is not funny….

One thing that everyone visiting the US from the UK notices is their service culture. As illustrated by the cliches of “Have a nice day” and “I’m going to be your waiter for today”, it’s one of the most distinctive things about the States.

Americans are starting to become conscious of the false sincerity of these pat phrases, but the sentiment behind them is genuine and persists. And the difference between service in the US and service in the UK is how it is pitched. Good service needs to fall somewhere between ingratiatingly obsequious and sullenly reluctant. The english struggle with this balance, swinging wildly from one extreme to the other (see, most obviously, Basil Fawlty).

But the Americans have an uncanny ability to be helpful without intrusive. Take the guy in the bed shop that I went to last week. I stopped at ‘Sleep Train’ to look at the price of mattresses as we needed to get a bed fairly urgently. I wandered around the store for a couple of minutes before he asked if I’d like any help. He then asked if I would like him to explain the different brands they carried, and when I said yes, proceeded to explain the various benefits of each one. He gave an honest price range for the size of bed we needed, and never once gave a ‘sales pitch’ speech.

And then there’s the burger place we went to on Saturday night. Yes, we were living the true American dream – burgers and fries in a restarant where the baseball ‘World Series’ was playing on the big screen. It was a place where you order at the counter then take a number and sit down. The food was good arrived fast, cost $16 for the two of us, and at least 3 people checked that we were OK and had everything we needed during our brief meal. God bless America – or something.

We have now moved in – pretty impressive to arrive in a new country, find a place to live and then move in, all inside a week. Obviously the main priority before we could inhabit the place was a bed to sleep in. Which is how we ended up in Ikea on Wednesday night. Yes, they do have Ikea in the US (although only about 20 stores nationwide) and yes, they are just as much of a pain as the ones in the UK. Don’t think that Ikea are a pain? Have you ever tried to order a serious quantity of furniture from them? If you have, you will know that there is *always* some vital piece of the order that is not in stock at the moment. In our case, it was only the mattress pad, but it still nearly caused N to walk out of the place there and then. The added complication with Ikea in the US is that the staff have absolutely *no clue* how the names should be pronounced.

“I’d like to order a Liared, please”

“Li-wha?”

“Liared. L-I-A-R-E-D”

“L-Y-R…”

“No, L-I..

etc. etc.

I know they’re all nonsense Swedish names anyway, but I could swear that UK employees have much better stabs at pronunciation. Americans just aren’t used to having to deal with another language, unless it’s Spanish (or, for some reason, Tagalog – there are churches here that advertise special services in Tagalog).

So the conclusion to this story is that we are now safely installed in our new house – we have a bed, and a spare for all you budding guests out there, two rocking chairs, a dining table and chairs and bedding.

Next comes the sofa…

Americans really like cars. They generally like big cars. That’s not really a problem because there are plenty of big roads to drive them on. The main road running along the southern edge of Palo Alto (called El Camino Real) is a 6 lane highway, with a speed limit of 35 mph. Admittedly, we are not in a very representative part of America here. We are in California for starters, which is a pretty cosmopolitan state, and then we’re living in Palo Alto, a town where something like 65% of the adult population have 4 years of college education (i.e. an undergraduate degree). So we see quite a few VW Beetles, Minis and Volvos as well as the Dodge Durangos and Ford Pickups. But the weirdest thing I have seen so far, car-wise, was a hopped-up blue something, metallic paint, tinted windows, and chromed hubcaps that spin around when the wheels aren’t moving. Now I am told by the knowledgeable N that these are illegal in the UK, for the obvious reason that they make your wheels look like they are moving when they aren’t. My thoughts were, as a piece of car decoration, they make about as much sense as spokey-dokeys for bikes!

It’s Monday morning – we’ve been in California just over 2 days now, and here are some observations – may of which have been made before by other people, so apologies for repetition:

• Some people own some very silly cars.
• But that’s OK, because even the fairly minor roads are 6 lanes wide.
  
• There seems to be some sort of election going on here. We were asked if we wanted to register to vote yesterday – tempting to see if would work, but we resisted.
• People drive really slow – the speed limit in most areas is 35 mph, except on the freeway.
• The weather is *so* much better here!! OK, so it’s rained a couple of times already, but it’s warm rain, and it’s so unusual is occupies most of the local news.
• Nothing comes in small sizes – juice cartons, bags of rice, cups of coffee – everything is large, because there’s always plenty of space.