Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Restoration in San Jose and East Bay Blues


While the timing of this trip was to view the exhibition from the national museum of Afghanistan that is currently at the Asian American Art Museum in San Francisco, Alice had an outstanding obligation to San Jose State: do some simple restoration at the student health center's women healers mural. So we got up on Monday, joined by Kathy Glassley who lives in San Leandro and was the documentor of the mural as it was painted to spend the day in beautiful San Jose. It is still a beautiful city. Touch up was pretty minimal for something that has been in an institutional setting for almost 30 years. Kathy has agreed to go back in a month to seal it. I'm hoping that the newer paint will not cause problems on top of the old. Kathy assisted in cleaning some of the surface as there was dust and the occasional coffee spill.
We had a perfect lunch at La Victoria Taqueria, near the campus (I warned Jim not to eat on campus!) and headed back to San Leandro where Alice viewed Kathy's studio/craft/music room and talked about Kathy's antique jewelry collection. We had met up with Kathy's husband Ray, also known by Alice since community college and sds days, spending the evening most agreeably laughing about kids, families, work and the political situation, dining later at Vo's vietnamese restaurant on Parrott Ave. While not Tamarind Tree or Green Leaf, it does serve fresh food, including green papaya salad. There is a predominance of prawn dishes (Alice avoids arthropods), so there were things we didn't try on the menu. We expect to see Kathy on Wednesday, going to Golden Gate Park to see the new Academy of Sciences, the old one a place of fond childhood memories for both of us.

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