Seniors Experience Culture and Diversity

Set on sparkling San Francisco Bay, Berkeley is a city of diverse districts and great discoveries. It’s a city where senior visitors come for the culture, stay for the food, and depart with their imaginations, taste buds and memories fully engaged. Berkeley is a food-mecca. The city motto seems to be “Come for the Culture.  Stay for the Food.”

It is quite evident that the counter-culture, flower power center of the 60s, bohemian Berkeley has evolved into a culinary and cultural travel scene. The very name of Berkeley conjures up images of dissent and it remains a solidly left-wing oasis.

Senior visitors will find that Telegraph Avenue holds most of the student hangouts, and several excellent book stores. Culture overflows into the streets of Berkeley and the Downtown Berkeley Arts District and Berkeley Art Museum. The Aurora Theatre Company, Berkeley Repertory Theatre and Cal Performances present world-class productions year round that draw visitors from every nation.

UC Berkeley is home to the Golden Bears and is one of the world’s leading educational and intellectual centers. Furthermore it is renowned for the distinction of its faculty and students, scope of its research and publications, and quality of its libraries.

The Cal campus also serves as Berkeley’s unofficial “Central Park,” with beautifully landscaped grounds, historic architecture, and wide walking paths through stands of redwood and eucalyptus trees that connect downtown Berkeley with the Telegraph Avenue business district.

UC is home to more than 30,000 Golden Bears and 24 Nobel Prize winners. UC is clearly what makes this city something more than a picturesque bedroom community. Cal’s landmark is the 1914 Sather Tower, also called the Campanile, with elevator rides to the top. It’s a cool site senior travlers will not want to miss.

Senior Visitors Enjoy Berkeley’s Parks

Tilden Park is one of Berkeley’s oldest and most popular parks. The #1 tourist attraction in Berkeley, Tilden Park is also one of the three oldest parks and has been called the Jewel of the System. The #2 draw in town is the 34-acre Botanical Garden, which holds about 13,000 species of plants. The species are organized according to regions of the world, and the garden has a great collection of native Californian plants. This senior citizen would have to head over there being a Master Gardener and my older brother, a PhD botanist, would probably beat me there.

For a city of 112,000, Berkeley has a super-sized presence. Berkeley has a strong reputation for its liberal politics, rooted in the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s. Although Oakland, its southern neighbor, is considered the new center of liberal political activism, the progressive spirit is alive and well in Berkeley,  just as it is in nearby San Francisco.

Berkeley is a unique experience, enjoy!  jeb