Day 22 - 20/09/2022 - Santa Clara University

There is a little rose garden at Santa Clara University that I didn't realise existed until the end of my last visit there three years ago, so today I decided to head over there. Tomorrow I'll be venturing out into San Francisco, so I figured it was a good idea to have another chilled local day before. Having secured enough passion fruit tea from the Portuguese grocery store (it's actually Brazilian and I never seem to be able to find it in Portugal, but it's one of my favourite teas ever) to last me for the next year in the morning, I made my way there in the afternoon. I had never seen the mission at the university before, so went there first. It's a small though very pretty church in the neo-colonial style. The mission was first established in 1777 on the banks of the Guadalupe river, and it was the first to bear the name of a woman, St. Claire of Assisi. The mission didn't settle into its current location until 1822, falling into disrepair in subsequent decades and being remodelled with an Italian façade in the 1850s. A fire in 1926 completely destroyed this newly remodelled building and when it was rebuilt it was done in the neo-colonial style that was fashionable at the time.

You could tell that, unlike the last time I visited the university in Easter of 2019, this time term had already started, as the campus was filled with students walking to their lectures and studying at the library. Plenty of them passed me by as I sat at the rose garden (which smelled amazing!) reading my Daphne du Maurier novel and enjoying the company of the first black squirrel I had ever seen. I couldn't help but wonder if I was managing to blend in with the students (my Powerline backpack probably helped if I did). And if so, I probably made a few students feel bad as I later sat in a quiet corner of the library and furiously typed away my last few blogposts and perhaps gave the impression that I was a model student already working away at my essays.

The mission at Santa Clara University

The rose garden at Santa Clara University

Black squirrel!