Day 13 - 11/09/2022 - Santa Clara

What goes up must come down, I suppose. A little detail I forgot to detail in my last few posts was that, while I was in LA, we were going through an absolutely insane heatwave which saw temperatures go above 100 degrees, which I have always imagined as the sensation of spending the day with someone blowing a hairdryer turned up to its highest temperature right in your face, and I wasn't wrong. Blissful were the moments where we could get some respite from the air con (the Little Mermaid ride, already a firm favourite of mine, became even more so because the minute you entered the queue you were hit with an amazing cool breeze), but if I had to guess I would say that such differences in temperature were the reason why last night I covered myself with five layers of clothes and was still cold, and why this morning I woke up headachy, coughing and without a voice. Fortunately, at least, after taking a test, I found out it wasn't the dreaded C.

Regardless, I decided it was probably best to spend the day at home, so some of it was spent in bed reading and the rest meandering around the garden. This is the same house where I stayed when I first met the Rita family 15 years ago, in 2007. While the avid consumption of American culture by my high school cohort and I meant that we always expected the trip my school organised every two years to California to be fun, we had no idea how much fun it would be. Expecting it to be just a regular exchange programme, we couldn't fathom that over those two weeks we would be taken to meet the mayor of Santa Clara (who kindly let me sit on her chair for a photo), the police station, and the fire station, where the firemen were kind enough to not only give us the same t-shirts as theirs but to also welcome us with a table filled with cookies and sodas. Even more unexpected was the gala dinner where suddenly I was pulled to the side and told that, since I was the one out of the cohort who could speak English the best, I had been selected as the one to be interviewed by RTP International, a Portuguese radio station, who had stopped by. I was thinking of what I should say in English when the journalist started asking me questions in Portuguese, and we ended up doing the whole interview in Portuguese. I'm sure everything I said was at worst stupid and at best dull, but at the end we all got a golden medal at the end of the dinner, followed by a game of pool somewhere nearby out of it.

We also spent a day at Santa Clara High School, a place I loved so much that I seriously contemplated the possibility of doing a university degree in the US until I found out about the cost of tuition fees here. Once again, I'm afraid I didn't exactly shine: I was taken by a very nice student called Angelina to an art class, where I proceeded to pass a ball of clay from one hand to the other, as I was certainly not about to show everyone how years of getting some of the worst teachers in the word in every single Art class I had ever had hadn't exactly allowed me to develop any artistic talent. Then it was off to English class, where I was surprised at how the students were allowed to eat, chew gum and even leave to go to the bathroom whenever they wanted, and afterwards to Maths class, where I first developed my pet hatred for the "You're Portuguese and therefore different. Tell me about it" line of questioning by answering the question "What are Portuguese traditional foods?" with "Hm, I don't know, codfish?" And a few days later we got one more surprise: someone in one of the host families had a friend who worked for Dreamworks, so we were taken to their studios, where we got to look around, see the Shrek Oscar, watch a movie that hadn't come out in cinemas yet, and even left with merchandise from some of their movies.

This place has both changed in many ways and stayed the same in others, and I'm loving every minute of being here, even those in which I sound like I made a deal with a sea witch and lost.

Grapevines in the garden