Welcome history and culture enthusiasts! Let's go explore the Bay Area's cultural treasures around us! We visit archaeological sites, museum exhibits, participate in discussions, go to historical reenactments, attend plays and operas, explore old parts of cities, visit fairs and festivals, learn skills at workshops, go on tours, enjoy movies, and more!
Everyone is welcome: families with kids, students, scholars, seniors, singles, LGBTQ, all ethnicities, people with all ranges of physical capabilities, all religious backgrounds, and those ranging from the aspiring Indiana Jones to people just rekindling their interest in history and culture.
In addition to exploring new places, we also have our own bookclub: (we currently need a new host for this, so please let me know if you'd be interested!)
We choose our own book from any genre that is related to that meeting's topic. For example, one topic we had was the US Civil War, where people chose books covering culturally-based war tactics, Lincoln's funeral train, articles from that time, and fiction. By having a topic that we base a variety of books choices on, we are able to have a more holistic discussion from interdisciplinary perspectives.
We start out by everyone introducing themselves and their book with a brief description of what it was about, an interesting fact, and how they felt about it (30 seconds to two minutes each). Then we open up to a naturally flowing discussion. It is okay to also just sit and listen the whole time!
"Book" is used loosely to describe a possibility of many medias: songs, films, scripts, anthologies, short stories, newspaper and journal articles, magazines, and art.
Cuisine and Convo events:
We choose a cultural place in the world (i.e. not strictly geographical) and then find a group-friendly, highly-rated restaurant featuring traditional foods from that country. Similar to the book club, we chat about that culture in an interdisciplinary manner drawing from our own experiences of travel, books or movies, college classes, crafts, scanning trivia online, to...well, anything at all as long as it relates.
You can bring books, pictures, artifacts, or just yourself. If you don't get a chance to look up something about that culture, you can always bring up a "top 10" trivia on your phone about the culture/location. After we finish our brief show-and-tell/sharing, we open up to casual conversation about the culture or whatever topic morphs from that.
Occasionally we will host this with a concurrent cultural festival like combining the topic of Germany with an Oktoberfest celebration or Greece with a trip to the Greek Festival.
Please bring cash in case we can't split the check. You only pay for what you ordered, but tax and tip will be divided evenly by the number of people present regardless of what you ordered.
We hope to join us for our next adventure!
