Furnished Room in Peaceful Nor Berkeley Home-10 minute walk to CAL or train

Description

For over 40 years I have been sharing my home and verdant garden with visiting scholars, graduate students and occasionally a serious undergraduate. I am sensitive to how confusing and puzzling one experiences in a new culture. I was a stranger comming from England to America when I was 5. , I always ask foreigners if they have questions I might be able to interpret. Our 2 story wooden house was built before the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. It has been retrofitted to meet State of California earthquake safety building codes. The entire foundation was replaced, the basement was sheer-walled and an automatic earthquake shut-off valve was installed on the natural gas line. The neighbourhood is residential, older houses with families, some groups of students living in a half-dozen apartment buildings on our block of Milvia between Vine and Cedar. The sunny furnished middle of 3 bedrooms on the second floor is available, a newcomer will share the full bathroom and separate commode room with 2 mature engineers who have lived in this household for over 2 years. One completed a Masters, currently employed at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, the other pursuing an engineering doctorate focusing on Artificial Intelligence for construction engineering use. My bedroom, study and library on the 1st floor are adjacent to a large kitchen and deck which I share. I am slowly revising my Ph.D. thesis (a field study (with an international literature review on women in prisons) based on years of visits at the Centro Femenil, a prison for women and their young children in Mexico City. Our house is respectfully quiet after 10 pm for sleep or study. No smoking, vaping or recreational drug use. Kitchen privileges are limited to conventional hours: Breakfast 7-9 am; Dinner 5-9 PM and all day weekends and holidays. I share all my kitchen implements, designate refrigerator and cupboard spaces for housemates. Another furnished room with a private entrance and small half bath below the kitchen will be available in December. The symmetry of limiting kitchen hours overhead provides predictable hours of quiet that the occupant can count on. A covered deck off the kitchen has stairs to the deep 40 foot wide back garden where a mature Box Elder tree shades the Mexican tile patio. Despite apartments shading both sides, vegetable and herb beds thrive, tall shrubs, rose bushes, plum and apple trees with Cape Weed ground cover keeping the open space green for visiting song birds, neighborhood cats, occasional visiting opossum families and for us seating at a picnic table. The North Shattuck Avenue shops are 2 short blocks eastward at the foot of the hills. Promoted as the Gourmet Ghetto we patronize: the Cheese Board; The Walk Shop; Peet’s Coffee (original); BMO Bank; US Post Office; French Hotel Cafe; many take-away food courts; restaurants; cake shops; clothing-gift boutiques; copy stores; Bing Wong staffed laundromat; CVS Drugs; 2 supermarkets—on Thursdays a large Farmers’ Market with festive music. Local buses travel on Shattuck with rapid service to San Francisco during commuter hours. Walking south towards the University is the LBNL bus stop to carry scientists and staff uphill to the Lab research buildings. Downtown has offices, shops,the wonderful public library, a community college, the Bay Area Rapid Transit (Bart) train that links to SFO (airport). Again, in the 1980's. I was a stranger in a foreign nation as I went to live in Mexico City on a UCB grant to learn the local culture. I attended seminars at the UNAM to prepare for a qualitative field study of a prison for women and their young children. I was invited to be a visiting scholar at the Penal Science Institute (INACIPE), later hired to teach Comparative Prison Systems.I joined a seminar on women's studies at El Colegio de Mexico. In closing, should the Corona Virus varients resurge, our household can comfortably work on line at home as we did for 3 years.

Private Space Offered