Today found out that Japan had it hottest summer since 1946. Japanese summers are usually unbearably hot, mainly due to the humidity. As I write up this entry, it is past 10pm, the sun went down hours ago and yet the temperature remains just over 30 degrees and the humidity it just about up to 100%. Its foul and in a few hours it’ll be September. After several warnings about how stifling the summers were here, I decided to spend as much time as I could in California, as I might as well since I was going so far. And so I spent 3 weeks of my summer vacation in The Golden State.
It was my turn to cross an Ocean and visit an old friend of mine, called Cortney, who I met in London through the Libertines in 2005. I also arranged to meet Kevin my old friend from University and former flatmate, out there.
Originally there were grand plans about hiring big American cars and driving up and down the West Coast all the way from Canada to Mexico but the vast majority of my three weeks was spent in San Francisco, where Cortney has lived for the last 5 years. Nonetheless we did get up to enough around the Bay Area including a trip up to the wine region, a days canoeing around Bodega Bay and a trip out to the university town of Berkeley. We also got up to our fair share around San Francisco. I had visited once before in 2006 but I cycled over the Golden Gate Bridge, volunteered at a soup kitchen for the homeless and hiked around Presidio National Park for the first time on this trip.
The biggest adventure outside the city took place on my first weekend there, when we hired a car and headed to LA for the weekend. I had a great time but still have very mixed feelings about the city. On the one hand the climate was fabulous and most of the people I met were very friendly, on the other, the city seems to be one big sprawling traffic jam and reflects some of American consumer societies’ most vulgar sights. The highlights would have to be cycling along Venice beach and Santa Monica, strutting around like James Dean at the Griffith Observatory and visiting the Getty Museum, which was a stunning and vast and a side to LA that I wasn’t expecting.
I have to say that having to leave such good company, climate, and Mexican cuisine to return to humid, hot, expensive Japan, in the rainiest season of the year, where I would have to start work immediately, I was a little bit downhearted. There was also a feeling that I was halfway home somehow, by spending so much time in an English speaking country. It was as if it would be regressing to be going back, rather than on wards to Europe. However, I shouldn’t dwell on such things. I had a fantastic summer and will remember it fondly for years to come.
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