Unfortunately, our glorious fall break has come to an end. While some people enjoy their hiatus from school in the good ole ‘boro, I got the opportunity to travel over 2,300 miles across the county to The Golden State.
After a combined flight of 6 hours, Berkeley, California, home of the University of California, Berkeley (Cal), welcomed my family and I with open arms. My brother-in-law is a resident director at Cal so our stay was on the campus. With my sister and brother-in-law acting as personal tour guides, I got a feel for the Bay Area: San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley.
I could go on for days about my weeklong vacation but what struck me most, and what stuck, was the culture shock. I have been to states far from home, such as Wisconsin and New Mexico, where I felt out of place in my customs, but California was a different story.
As I roamed the streets of San Francisco (or SF as the San Franciscans say) I saw a sight all too familiar back home: an overweight person. Of course if I had seen this person in my old Kentucky home, nothing would have been out of place. However, it struck me that this was the only overweight person I saw in California during my entire stay. Health and fitness is a big deal on the west coast, something I found apparent the more Californians I saw.
Now I can describe in one word the most annoying, interesting and obvious difference I saw on the west coast: pedestrians. Although I will admit most of my stay was on a college campus of about 36,000 students, whenever I ventured to other parts of the Bay Area, I saw the same trend. People and bike riders were everywhere and cars had to yield to them. The pedestrians, I would say, are a cause and effect of the fitness ideology of California.
I would consider myself a pretty good driver so when I heard my brother-in-law did not want me driving his car once I was there, I was hesitant. After a couple of days of driving around the Bay Area, I was thankful for my cozy backseat spot. Stoplights were on the side of the road instead of overhead, most roads were one-ways, and pedestrians were crawling everywhere (not literally).
While everything in the San Francisco Bay Area is within only a few miles radius, the time it takes to navigate the area does not match up. After an hour in the car, you would reach your destination and then look across the skyline and see where you had just been an hour before. A cause of frustration at first, traffic and long commutes are just something you have to get used to.
In may cases Kentucky is considered apart of the South and the South prides itself on our southern hospitality. I had the misconception that nowhere but the South had this unique friendliness. I was both wrong and right. The Californians I encountered did not have the distinctive pleasantness of the South, but a different kind all their own. Everywhere you went people were just nice. Not overtly so with “honey” and a southern drawl, but with just a genuine friendliness.
Trashcans and disposal bins are often overlooked since they are such a trivial, everyday matter. The trash receptacles in California, however, demanded my attention. Recycling and properly disposing of trash is not taken lightly. There are usually three different holes for three different types of waste, something I had to take in to account before disposing of my trash.
The 7,000,000 people of the Bay Area sharply contrasted the mere 4,000,000 people of the entire state of Kentucky. The differences in the way of life were apparent. I loved my trip full of California redwoods, the Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz and great food. I’ll be back armed with the knowledge of how daily life in the Golden State operates. There are a million different song lyrics about California I could use to close this out but I’ll let you pick.
Digital Devil 