Balboa Park means something different to every resident of a City who has a Balboa Park, which appears to start with a list of all of the major California cities. If you are missing one, don’t visit one locally; they aren’t a chain, for heaven’s sake.
But if you are missing say, Central Park, or Golden Gate Park, and you find yourself in San Diego, then your pain might be eased a little at Balboa Park.
Keep in mind that I am not replacing or debating sizes of parks here. We’ll save that for posts that tote city pride. Instead, think of your traveling soul coated with dust and looking for an oasis, even if it’s only a single palm and a birdbath. When it comes to size, think of Hamlet and his nutshell of infinite space, for only an afternoon.
Saturday last, Yorrick, that nutshell is where I found myself, in the company of family and strangers. We had traveled there for Scottish Tartan Day, an even to celebrate Scottish heritage at the International Cottages in Balboa Park in San Diego. The cottages are just that, cottages, with flags and placards of various countries hanging outside respective doors. Normally the cottages hold trinkets from their countries, but on this day the Scottish cottage was sporting a bake sale, with some items Scottish, some items English, and some items that you would find in a Midwest American church basement after services on Sunday. Each cottage is small--holding about three people comfortably--so we glimpsed the food and circled back out into the sunshine.
The Scotland cottage sits at the pinnacle of a teardrop-shaped lawn, framed by other cottages. In the lawn were a series of booths celebrating the heritage of certain Tartans, with patterns, costumes, and instruments--musical and otherwise. At one booth you could look for your tartan, or choose from a selection of universal tartans in a book of them. My companions and I all had distinctly non-Scottish/British surnames (Japanese/German), my brother and I tried my mother’s maiden name; she had what she called a Heinz 57 ancestry and could have claimed to English or French. We had no luck finding her tartan either, however, and we looked at the universal models, feeling like bowling alley patrons at shoe rental. My favorite of the universals was a purple and green pattern, but my companions didn’t select one.
I’m one of those band nerds who grew up to love nearly all kinds of instruments (save for that horn apparatus blown at the 2010 World Cup), so when the bagpipes and drums began their hum and crack I was smiling. The music was the main reason for our journey there, and we had hoped to try haggis as well, but the culinary selection didn’t include it. (We could purchase burgers, meat pies, or one of the aforementioned baked goods. Shortbread cookies were free at every booth.) The music was enough. Some took to dancing in their kilts on the stage and in the lawn, and between numbers members of the group who had organized the event spoke a few words. Being a huge Sean Connery fan, I love hearing someone speak in the same manner. As by homage; one man quoted a few lines of a Robert Burns poem and then instructed us to “look the rest up on Google” before retiring from the the mic. I could have done just that had I been able to remove the lyrical speaker from his respectable verse.
Given the minuteness of the event, we had the place memorized in ninety minutes and decided to move on to other places outside of the festival but still within the park. We worked our way around Spreckles Organ Pavillion, where the organ was humming and calling out tunes of its own, to the Japanese Friendship Garden, where two women presented us with a soothing and mindful tea ceremony and we inspected bonzai. I have never experienced a sunnier Japanese garden, personally, and could have stopped my exploration of the Park that day right there, sitting zazen, but group travel didn’t afford that, so on we went. The History Center, down a series of Spanish-style corridors, gave us a rest, and then on to the Botanical Building for shade and cool green subjects.
The Botanical Building strikes me as the best combination of the deYoung Museum and the Golden Gate Park Conservatory buildings in terms of architecture; the shape and size are comparable to the Conservatory, but where the Conservatory is white with glass, the Botanical Building is rustic copper with oxidation, like the exterior of the deYoung. The building boasts mostly lilies, orchids, and tropical greens, with a few carnivorous plants at the entrance to wow children visiting. At one point we found a hummingbird nest in the rafters; a matte-gray ball about the size of a golf ball suspended by what looked like abandoned chain that you might hang a lamp from. Without the bird’s comings and goings we might have missed the nest entirely. Hummingbirds should avoid buzzing the tower if they want to go unnoticed; I’m tempted to name all of them Maverick or Goose.
After the Botanical Building the decision was made to have lunch on the waterfront, so we saved more of the Park for another day. I’m eager for that day, hopefully as sunny as this one, where I see the museums, sit in meditation, or take a performance at the Globe. My cup runneth over, Horatio.
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