I'm not sure if it's having done this whole law school summer thing before or if it was just plain luck, but I have truly embraced the past two months in California (much more so than I did in New York last year). From Napa visits and city nights, to day-long hikes and Giants games by boat it has been an amazing experience. The pictures below capture a few memories outstanding from our California adventures. Arnold, I'm sorry we never had the chance to meet while I was out here but for the record you have a wonderful state.
We adapted to living lean on the west coast. It's incredibly rewarding to realize that (even in the United States) you can be so happy with so little. Just to put this "lean" lifestyle in perspective, here is an inventory of what we had in our one-bedroom apartment:
- 4 pieces of furniture (two barstools, a futon frame, a futon mattress
- 6 additional pillows that could be used to turn the above futon frame into a couch
- 4 plastic plates, 4 plastic bowls, 4 plastic cups, 1 box of plastic (disposable) utensils. Because these items were so limited they were used for a variety of means including eating, cutting, serving, pouring, etc. Let your imagination get creative because we sure did!
- I tried using the blue cups for vino purposes, but being this close to Napa, just could not do it, so we splurged and bought 4 additional wine glasses.
- an iron and ironing board
The view as you step outside our front door. The Santa Clara University baseball field with the mountains in the distance...
We spent the 4th of July on a friend's boat, watching the Giants game from the bay. Mike served as Grill Master and while no home run balls ever managed to come flying over the stadium wall, we had a fabulous afternoon.
Worn out from a day of sun and liquid pleasures, we took the evening of July 4th easy. We rented a movie and watched the fireworks displays of 5 different cities. (Crazy, I know, but there truly is about 1 city per 1 mile traveled on The 101.)
If you have not heard about the Berkeley Tree Sitters, well; we saw them too. What a strange experience... I think they have been there for almost 570 days straight now. They are protesting to save a group of old oak trees that sit directly in front of Berkeley's football stadium. When the city sued the university on the grounds that their stadium needed to be renovated/relocated because it sits on a major fault line, the school proceeded to make plans to cut down the old trees. As you can tell from the pictures below, there is a group of students (and towns people) who are not about to sit back and let these tress go without a fight. Their peaceful protest has taken on many different forms. At present, the "tree palace" has been torn down by the university and a fence with armed police officers has been set up around the perimeter. But three remain! They used to be able to come and go, but now if a protester touched down, they are arrested and not allowed back up. The university has also introduced a mild-starvation technique. (Obviously, the University is not referring to the food delivery in this way. But, because all they are allowing to go in the protesters' food-box pulley are granola bars and water, I am choosing to call it a starvation technique.)
The first few pictures below show what is left of the tree sitters' protest. When we got there last week, a guy at the base asked where we were from. Mike told him North Carolina and he proceeded to scream up to a camouflaged pod-looking-thing in the tree, "North Cakalacky in the house." A single head popped out of the well-hidden fort and screamed back, "woooo Carolina, hell yeah!" The other three pictures are ones I pulled from CNN in order to show you what the scene looked like days and months ago.
Christie Cunningham also sent me a few more pictures from our weekend in San Fran... As you can tell, the first two are from our bike tour around the city - one at Alcatraz and one at the bottom of the Golden Gate Bridge. The picture with Mike was taken at our hotel just before dinner (wasn't he a lucky dude that evening). And the last one was taken during our visit to the Stanford campus.
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