San Jose

We are staying in downtown San Jose at a rather new Fairmont. Hard to tell if it was built to be some other hotel or if they built it. Structurally it is nondescript. Early 90's architecture? Late 80's?

It has several redeeming qualities though. It is a very central location - right beside the art gallery and a french patisserie that makes wonderful croissants, a very lovely pool, and the best is that the night we arrived they had a band in the lobby and people were dancing. You could tell it is a regular feature that draws all of the passionate dancers from San Jose. They would arrive and mostly drink water and swirl around the dance floor showcasing their dancing prowess. It seemed like a pretty big night out for all of the couples involved. It made me think I should try once again to take ballroom dancing lessons.

San Jose seems like a fairly quiet city. Not that well off economically - but not horrific numbers of homeless visible. All the downtown workers that congregate to get their morning coffees at Starbucks are not too intense, the cell phone use doesn't have that frenetic deal making quality to it, and they are quite casually dressed for downtown workers. The city doesn't make you feel too nervous. You can blend in quite easily and not feel that you are missing out on some other intense mandate felt by everyone else. Food at restaurants seems surprisingly inexpensive.

Quite a relaxing city really, not that we've spent that much time here.

We drove yesterday to Santa Cruz and Monterey. Santa Cruz is touristy but not irritatingly so. The downtown core consists of used clothing stores - too numerous to count, and third world import shops. Kind of an eclectic commercial group for a tourist town. I can be seen happily clutching a bag containing a beautiful wool winter coat - hand made in Viet Nam.

The trip down the coast along the number 1 was fascinating because it passed through a large tract of agricultural land - miles and miles of strawberries and large groups of pickers shrouded in hats and scarves under hats, bent over picking. It wasn't hard to translate the miles and miles of strawberries to the ubiquitous plastic containers available in the grocery stores all year. It definitely has lost any romance that you think of as associated with farming. It is just miles and miles of things artichokes, some kind of cabbage??? (that one brought miles and miles of consternation - was there a cabbage in those leaves? was it chard? kale? Is is that important to the grocery economy that there is nothing but miles and miles of these leaves?). Kind of mesmerizing and frightening . I witnessed areas that have those fences dug in to keep out the rodents to prevent ecoli contamination. Kind of ineffectual looking with the black fabric. A determined contaminated rodent would have no problem getting through. But mostly I thought of the waste. You could see that there would be no way of harvesting that wouldn't leave so much just wasted. And the lives of the pickers. I can't imagine their backs. There were long tracts of okay looking cars parked along side groups of pickers - they looked like fairly new models. Maybe it is lucrative enough to make a living. But stooping all day in field with a tractor pulling two portable toilets doesn't seem that fun to me.

The aquarium at Monterey was wonderful. Kyr took many amazing photos. I've included some of my most feared jellies. I wasn't that satisfied on the info front though. I expected a lot more stunning ocean facts delivered in nice succinct sign posts. The posts concerning the jellies were too equivocal for me - might be climate change, might be pollution, might just be the natural order causing the plethora of jellies. Not too satisfying.

The gorgeous giant octopus was only revealed to be one of the most intelligent creatures known - no qualifying ie) outside of land mammals, within the ocean etc... so in fact that says it all - most intelligent creatures known - isn' that spectacular? I was fascinated that their suction cups can taste and that they can tell people apart with their suction cups by just touching their skin. Isn't that amazing? Is it each individuals taste? temp? quality of their skin?

Today we head off to the Redwood forests and to check out the Wincestor mansion.