11 am PST with a lovely morning to look back on. Ironically, my phone refuses to switch from CST to PST and therefore, when I set my alarm for 8 am this morning, I ended up waking at 6 am here. I got up, caught up on email, and went for a delightful little run in the chilly California morning air as I headed towards a fantastic mountain vista in the distance, after which I freshened up a bit and Edwina and I headed out towards the Davis Farmer's Market... on bikes, of course. My sweet Missouri piano-teacher tush is slowly getting used to the fact that it has to sit on a hard bike seat at least once or twice a day. Probably more than you want to know, but it is what it is. As Edwina says, "You're in Davis now, Katie. Your ass is just going to hurt for a week or so..." I also figured out how to snuggle my Starbucks cold cup between my shoulder-bag strap and my body so that I can still enjoy my iced coffee at stop signs and traffic lights during my new morning commute without spilling it in my bag or holding it the entire way :) Edwina is a pro though. She conducts half of her daily business on her cell phone while riding her bike, which is quite unfathomable to me.
The Farmer's Market: Whoa. I have never tasted peaches so sweet, as if the farmer injected them with sweetener before bringing them to market. Then we got distracted by the Greek stand where I ate half my morning breakfast in falafel and hummus samples at the urging of the stand owner. Whoa. They know how to do food here and they aren't shy about it. It is amazing and marvelous and ridiculous, which is one thing about Missouri that I have to concede: by comparison, our food is just kind of ok for the most part. In most cases, we have to work hard to make it truly extraordinary, although we do make wonderfully nice dessert wines out of seemingly random fruits (like blackberries and strawberries)... we're kind of forced to be resourceful in that way since we can't all have grapes growing outside our front doors. Here, everything is just naturally incredible on its own, especially when it's in season. And I asked Bobby and Edwina about why that is (which, they would know, since they're both studying specialized agricultural sciences here) and from what they tell me, it seems it all has to do with rainfall. Before he came to UC Davis, Bobby spent significant amounts of time farming and gardening in Missouri and he says that the soil in both places is essentially the same (clay), but that in California, the farmers know it won't rain. For instance, in Missouri, we store our hay in barns since the weather there changes like the tides of the female mind but here they just stack their hay bales (or alfalfa) out in the field because the likelihood of it randomly opening up and pouring down is extremely slight. Incredible.
Oh yeah... and here, rosemary grows in hedges... like everywhere. The people here who buy rosemary in markets must be completely out to lunch since they could walk out their front door and trim it off the hedge down the street, where it would go completely unnoticed. I also tried my first boysenberries here the other day. Holy cow, someone needs to make wine out of that...
One thing that does strike me as strange about this place is the people. California really is the land of fruits, nuts, and flakes... truly, there's a reason that joke exists. The people in Davis are very nice and extremely down-to-earth, very much like the people in Columbia. But whoa, San Francisco: holy cow, that city is full of strange people. Being there even for a day made me feel totally vanilla in comparison. I used to think that people in St. Louis were really authentic and down-to-earth, which they are... to a point. But I realize now that people in my town can be somewhat guarded in certain ways, which I think is actually good and healthy sometimes. It took me a while to adapt to that mentality when I first moved back after undergrad, but I now have a lot of respect for it and feel it's a lot easier to live and exist as a self-employed professional while operating in that mode. Business is business, personal is personal... and not everybody needs to know about the personal either. There's dignity in keeping the vault closed to most people. In San Francisco, if outer appearances are any indication of what's going on inside, it seems that everyone is on a perpetual quest to find themselves and in all sorts of unconventional ways, which is extraordinarily interesting (and I daresay hard?, considering what I come from...) to observe as an outsider, to say the least. I think I would rather live in a town full of people who think I'm crazy, rather than live in a town where everyone else seems to be crazy. But I speak in a horrible digression of terms which are completely relative... these are purely my own observations and speculations as a casual traveler, for what they're worth, if anything at all.
Not entirely sure, but "Moonrise Kingdom" looks like it might be on the docket today, since Bobby and Edwina haven't seen it yet. Edwina has also switched me over from Tevas to Chacos: she gave me a pair for my birthday. They are wonderful and I think more durable than my Tevas (which I can easily wear through in two summers) and I feel crunchier than ever when I wear them :)
More whoa to come from this mind-blowing part of the country: See you soon.
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