Day 21 - 19/09/2022 - Santa Clara and San José

Maybe I should have done my homework before venturing out into San José's Japantown, only to realise that all shops and restaurants are closed on Mondays. This little area of San José has recently turned an impressive 125 years, and despite having had pretty much all of its places closed today, I still enjoyed walking around it. After talking to my parents in the morning, I realised that, since arriving in California, I haven't spent a single minute worrying: not about my life, my financial position, the state of academia or my academic career. Nothing, absolutely nothing. As Cameron Diaz says in The Holiday, the perfect movie, and one of my favourites, that is what a holiday is meant to be for, for vacating your life, and I feel like I haven't so much left it as left all that is negative about it behind. Three weeks in California and I'm blissfully happy in the newly-found awareness of the fact that my life doesn't actually revolve around my job, and that, much as I love it, there are many, many other facets of me and many, many other things I'm passionate about and interested in.

And so I made my way through some random streets of San José, listening to music and wondering whether I could be confused by a local by the people who passed me by. The fact that every so often I was taking pictures of the nice Victorian houses probably gave me away as a tourist, but I couldn't help myself, as I ended up with a beautiful medley of old San José houses.

When I arrived home, I had a lovely present waiting for me: Maria José, Joseph's mother and Inês's sister, having found out that I loved cavacas, a traditional Portuguese pastry, had made some for me, and they were AMAZING!

Cavacas!