smelling the roses.

and now i am annoyed. why am i so awake at 5am? i went to bed close to midnight... i didn't have a nap, nothing went thump, and i should still be asleep! gah. anyhow... since i'm awake, i might as well post about my day trip that i took last saturday. it's gonna be long, even by my standards. but (and?) there are pictures. you have been warned.

inspired by the globetrotters i mentioned in my previous post and deciding that i should take advantage of the fact that i'm in california and won't be for long, i hopped on a train and went (not that much further) south, to san jose. according to wikipedia it's known as the "capital of the silicon valley" and is the third largest city in california, and tenth largest in the states. there, now you have two bits of random information you'll probably never need. =P

i left my cottage slightly after 8am, and walked to the nearest caltrain station, which wasn't totally unlike ktm stations back home. the caltrain itself is pretty different tho. for one, it has an upstairs! which i shifted to immediately once i located the nearest stairway up. i had planned to read "the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy", which was small enough to fit into my bag and not to heavy content-wise, but i decided simply to stare out the window instead. it looked like it was going to be yet another gorgeous, sunny day, and it was.

on the caltrain.

the relapsed camwhore.

my first destination was the san jose municipal rose garden, which took me about a half-hour walk to get to. i didn't get lost! =D if you know me, you'd know that that is quite a substantial achievement. haha. the rose garden was pretty... i think it would have been even prettier if it was earlier in the summer, because a lot of the roses were late in bloom and kinda wilty, but it was nice. i wandered around for a bit, then settled on a park bench in the shade to rest my feet and read for a bit.







blue was feeling left out.

i have a thing for benches under trees. =)

(yes sean, i know i have to adjust my camera's international student orientation settings, but since my camera skills are pretty much limited to "point and click" i'll ask for a tutorial when i get back to eugene, okay?)

next up was the san jose flea market, and it was really like a pasar malam back home! except not pada waktu malam. they sold almost everything you could think of... from fruits to underwear to boots to cars! it was interesting to be in such a spanish-speaking environment. stall owners were calling out left and right, mothers were talking to their children, husbands were consulting with their wives... it was fascinating to be able to guess what their topics of conversation were simply from being in that context, even though i didn't understand the stream of sounds from their mouths.







after that i hopped on a bus with no idea of where it was headed and where i wanted to go, and got off at the last stop, which i inferred was the last when the bus driver turned off the engine, got out of his seat, looked at me quizzically and went "er...". i appeared to be in a suburban neighborhood, and walked around for a bit getting a feel of the place and checking the houses out. they weren't too fancy, and had a nice familial feel about them. i like the suburbs. =)

i found another bus stop, and waited for the bus, this time with a vague idea of getting off at a light rail transit station and taking the train to another bus stop where i could get on a bus that would get me to a memorial park that i wanted to go to. when i got to the bus stop, i realized that i wasn't too sure of which direction the bus i wanted should be going, so i asked the driver of the first bus that came by and he said it was the right bus. after close half and hour, the bus was empty and he asked me where i wanted to go again. i told him, and he went "oh, you should have gotten off at winchester!" okay, so i asked him about this other place that i knew was further along the bus route, and he said "ah, it should be somewhere over there", and pointed vaguely to his left. "but," he said, "if you can't find it, you can wait for a bus on the other side of the road to get back to where you came from."

i got off the bus, and walked over to other bus stop because i saw it had a map, and realized that the bus driver was going in the opposite direction from where i wanted to go and so now i was twice as far as when i started! so. i sat down to wait for the bus, and when it came round it was the same bus driven by the same driver. he looks at me and asks if i had any luck, and when i explain to him that he was going in the wrong direction he goes, "oh, so you got on on the wrong side!", like he didn't tell me that he was going in the right direction in the first place!

after another half an hour or so, the bus driver lowered the platform thingy so that a man in a wheelchair could get off the bus, and he must have screwed up somehow cos i heard the platform grating against the pavement. two minutes later, the bus driver tells all the passengers to get off and wait for the next bus because this bus couldn't move! by this time it was past 4, and i wasn't sure if the places i wanted to go were open past 5, so i decided to have dinner at this mexican place in downtown san jose and then call it a day. i fell asleep on the train ride home, but for some lucky reason woke up when the train was at (not arriving at) my stop! it took a couple of seconds to register where i was, and then i hurriedly gathered my stuff and rushed off the train, just in time.

downtown san jose.

all in all a well-spent saturday. =)