We spent five months in San Jose, California. They say it is an interesting city. It is the Center for many technological industries. Places such as Google, Apple, Netflix, Intel and many more are headquartered in San Jose.
San Jose as a place to live, is different. I would have to say it is not my favorite town to live in. One of the things we found was that there isn’t really a good side of town and a bad side of town. It’s all intertwined. We would drive two blocks and feel like we were in a wonderful neighborhood and then two blocks later feel like you need to stay in the car with the doors locked. Now some of the suburbs are of course nice. We particularly liked the southwest side of town. That is where my husband worked. And then places like Los Gatos are quite nice. But when I referred to “in San Jose, I speak primarily of the city itself.
Also you are paying San Francisco Bay area prices without all of the perks. That is, things like the ocean and the charm of San Francisco. There are no beaches and it is pretty hot and dry in the summer. Furthermore, we could not seem to escape the bad stench that floated about the north east side of the city.
One of the things that we truly did love though was that fruit trees grow everywhere. Where we stayed they had lemon trees, grapefruit trees, orange trees and avocado trees.
We spent many days picking fruit and making had squeezed lemonade, orange juice, and grapefruit juice. We made lemon zest and orange zest, lemon scones, lemon blueberry pancakes, lemon bread with orange jam… Mmmmmmm! It was wonderful! We even made lemon marmalade which was not my favorite actually. But fun to make! The kids and I could not get enough of it. Many of the locals seemed to take these treasures for granted but our zeal for this endeavor seemed to attract new attention buy some. And it was a great way for us to make new friends. One local in particular (Marilyn) taught us that the only way to get a grapefruit out of the massive grapefruit tree was with a picker! She would take us picking regularly and by the end of the summer we had purchased our own picker.
I remember when we had first arrived one of our neighbors mentioning that there was an avocado tree in the park. My children and I spent quite a bit of time (weeks really) looking into trees and poking about the park trying to discover which tree carried this delicious fruit! I am sure we looked quite suspicious nosing about everybody’s campsites. But alas it paid off! And this tree was so much larger than I had anticipated! It was the largest tree in the whole park and the man living under the avocado tree came outside when he saw me gazing up into this tree. He asked me if I would like some avocados. I said that I would. So he went into his shed and pulled out a picker and a ladder and picked four avocado for me. The tree was so large that he had to have a 12 foot picker while standing on a ladder to reach the avocados. I would have never dreamed such a small fruit could come from such an enormous tree.
While in California we have also discovered that there are many different kinds of avocados. They have different flavors and different textures. I found one in Southern California that is very round and very creamy and it has great flavor. The one in San Jose was a little leaner and the flavor was a little more bitter. All this opened my eyes to a world beyond the same old same old store bought avocados.
Trails of Ever After 