The Bureau

The trip has become a trip. Initial wonderment has been replaced by a strange mixture of emotions. There are long periods of driving, through sometimes extremely beautiful and sometimes quite monotonous terrain. There is so much of everything in California - millions of redwood trees, endless miles of sun-bleached grass, vineyard upon vineyard, closer to the coast just mile after mile of grey haar. The haar is almost constant at the coast, which is both a relief after the boiling interior and a nuisance when we want to see the ocean and sit on warm sand. We zigzag back and forth between the two, and it creates a strange natural mirror of my moods: open and optimistic for part of the day, sunken and muted the rest. There is so much time to think. When I'm driving there is almost nothing to worry about - an automatic car and wide empty roads make for an easy drive. When I'm the passenger car sickness means I can't read or move around too much. To be honest this is not much fun. I spend most of my time thinking anyway, and at the moment there is a lot to perturb me. I'd rather the distractions of company and events, but instead I am thrust into an uncomfortable confrontation with thoughts I'd prefer to escape from. In a way it doesn't help that I'm traveling with my brother. Unless something happens on our journey, there's not an awful lot to talk about - we already know pretty much everything about each other's lives. I feel a little guilty for being glum some of the time.

That said, the last few days have been extremely eventful, and there have been some moments where I've thought to myself: "this is one of the coolest things you will ever experience". Some examples:

Driving
I've always been dismissive of Americans and their attachment to their cars, but until you visit somewhere like California and start driving yourself, you can't really comprehend just how dependent this nation is on the automobile. Take somewhere like Mulholland Drive for example. It's IN Los Angeles, and yet it is so high up and isolated from amenities. There are houses all along it, but no gas stations, no stores, no hospitals. It's in the center of a massive conurbation, but if its residents didn't drive, they'd literally starve to death. Out in the sticks the distance between houses and amenities is just staggering. I don't think I could live here purely because I'd feel so vulnerable to the price of oil.
That said, I had the most amazing driving experience of my life the other day. I drove us from Monterey to San Francisco, a drive that takes in an incredible freeway that winds down through spectacular hillsides, and another that cruises up Silicon Valley and then hits the city. We finally got the iPod to work and I caught my first glimpse of San Fran to the sounds of Yello's 'Oh Yeah'. Fans of Ferris Bueller will appreciate the juxtaposition. Driving a big SUV along an American freeway to a classic song - that makes you feel all conquering and all powerful. No wonder these people cling on to that part of their way of life with such defiance.

Animals
On the way up I've had the chance to see elephant seals and sealions up close in their natural habitat. So close, in fact, that I can tell you elephant seals are STINKY, and sealions are total posers. No matter how low I'm feeling, animals always manage to bring me out of myself. They're just so much themselves, so idiosyncratic, and somehow so similar to us. Americans adore their pets. In fact I've even seen anti-PETA advertising exhorting Americans to stand up for their 'right to own a pet'. Our preferred motel has a welcome policy to pets, and so there are generally happy looking dogs bounding about and barking up a storm. It's nice.

Strangers
My poor brother took ill yesterday, after some dodgy Chinatown seafood in San Fran. He was forced to spend the day in bed, and so I was forced to go out and make my own company. We were staying on Geary Street, on the edge of the tenderloin district, which is one of the skankiest places I have ever witnessed anywhere (waaay worse than anything I've seen in Asia). There were people smoking crack on the street, women covered in track marks, homeless guys wandering around in the middle of the road like zombies, doing scary random shit. This gave me a somewhat unfavorable initial impression of 'America's most beautiful city' and I wandered as far from the hotel as I could get. This meant an overdose of shopping areas and tourist attractions, which tired me out. Somewhat disillusioned at the end of my day, I wandered back towards the hotel. Just a few meters up the street I chanced upon a nice looking coffee bar, with some normal looking people inside. I wandered in and began reading my book. It didn't take long before I got sucked into a conversation with the bar owner (a Turkish Cypriot) and a psychic called Elizabeth (a reformed psychic, to be precise). It soon became apparent that I'd wandered into the epicenter of neighborhood social life. Everyone who walked by popped in to say hello, ask a question, share some gossip, try and sell a stolen bicycle, find a partner to play poker with. I must have been introduced to between 15 and 20 people, each of whom had something interesting to say. At some point a local homeless guy came in and asked to play the piano. I sat there, listening to a bunch of amusing strangers discussing the nature of reality as this guy played one haunting melody after another on this utterly tuneless old piano. It was a truly beautiful moment. If it wasn't for the black poker chip nestling at the bottom of my handbag this morning, I'd think it was all a dream.