Sunday in the Park with Jazz

Welcome, heavily syncopated reader, as we move from porchlife to parklife. Fascinated by the jazzy sounds that had filtered from the local park (which is actually about 25 yards from our house) as we enjoyed a bit of porchlife on recent Sundays, we packed up our beach chairs and wandered up the road to enjoy the music from the park itself.

And we weren't disappointed: the combo turned up and gave us an hour and a half of mellow tunes, even featuring a singer this week.

But there was plenty else going on too, revealing a critical difference between how the Americans see parks, and how we use them in the UK. I've previously remarked on what is called a park here would most likely in the UK be called a square. A park in the UK is a large green space, and you go there to actively do some kind of leisure activity. Here in downtown Palo Alto, a park is basically any spare piece of green, and folks tend to use them like we'd use our suburban gardens back home. There's a lot of just simply hanging out that goes on down in the park.

So for instance, today, as well as the jazz band, we were joined by a party of folks who appeared to be having a birthday gathering. In between occasional games of volleyball (yes, our local park has a volleyball pitch), someone got the barbecue out of the back of the car, and set it up to cook right in the middle of the park. Dotted around the place were lots of people reclining, chatting, sunbathing or just reading. As I said, something like a back garden or even a beach in the UK.

In the park I caught up with my reading on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, which I've been studying as part of an evening class provided by Stanford University. It's been fascinating to study something entirely different, in an area that I've never really looked at before. And of course, doing so in an American context has been doubly fascinating. There's a very different shared context here, and Ancient Greece seems a long way away both in time and in space. The class also didn't really get my joke about reading the works of the Yorkshire philosopher 'Arry Stottle and how I was looking forward to the bit about whippets. Reader, it was comedy gold, and it was lost on them.

This week we also cemented our baseball knowledge by watching some baseball on TV! It's starting to get something approaching comprehensible now, with what's a strike and what isn't becoming more obvious, even if it's still not intuitive (e.g. a shot that goes foul is a strike, unless you've got two strikes already, in which case it's not). What's difficult to take in about baseball is just the sheer frequency of it - the teams are playing almost every day, and in a 6 month season they play about 160 games! We're also preparing for the future by booking some tickets to go and see the football this winter too.

Jazz is hardly my favourite form of music - well, it's not strictly music, is it? - but it's nice to be entertained like this, for free, so close to home. And frankly it's the only live music I've seen in over a year so it seems quite the spectacle anyway. Perhaps as well as crossing off more of the sporting venues this winter, we can do some more cultural things too - let's hope so.