My travels in early 2001: Andrew Hodges

Out We$t 

Gran Canaria: pages 1 | 2 | 3
America (east): pages 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5
America (west): pages 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 and page 10
More pages will follow.

As we fly low over the San Diego suburbs, I recover some memories of the time I visited San Diego in 1984. Faded pictures of a sleepy sunny city:

The gringo frontier (like Gran Canaria); the infrastructure of 'illegal' immigration without which California could not function. The furthest corner from Europe, the Pacific frontier that Europe doesn't appreciate as an American focus. The geopolitics of San Diego, the desert port where the Great White Fleet sailed out in 1908...

But what now strikes me afresh is none of this but the amazing Californian



L   I   G   H   T



As the bus from the airport passes the harbour front I can see the trams are still running, but the city looks very different from my recollection of 1984.

I find the bus and head towards Balboa Park.

I'm staying with Garrett Morris, whom I knew when he was a student in Oxford. He now also has a Weblog full of spiky scientific and political comment.

His house is full of animal life:
 friendsbiology  
travel fun
music art
 computerschat 
San Diego is now the fifth largest city in the USA and the social scene is now in:
...which is wonderfully sunny but dominated by traffic...

Are these guys Marines? It's hard to tell...

The lights give you about five seconds to cross the boulevard... YIPES...

In a Greek cafe a woman tells me I have beautiful eyes. Now I know I must be in California.
I find a place of pleasure:
Afterwards, late in the evening, I make for an amateur stripper competition in Flicks bar but it is endlessly postponed and I don't wait for it. Anyway apparently they don't really strip at all.

I take a long midnight walk back round Balboa Park in a peaceful city, amazed by the roaring succession of jets that seem to fly at rooftop level.




my Second Home Page

Continue to:

the Pacific rim
my images



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