When I opened my fortune cookie this morning, the message inside it said: "Travel with an open heart and positive expectations." This seemed like a good omen for a day when I had decided to do something very, very silly. Like I wrote in a previous post, when we first came to California fifteen years ago we were taken to one of the fire stations, where the firemen gave us a hero's welcome. Then, we were all given t-shirts but sadly mine didn't survive the great Rootes residences moth infestation of 2019 (don't ask). Inês kindly asked around and found out which fire station we had gone to and drove me there. Sure, Inês had told me that the programme had definitely not been running over the last two years because of COVID, and I had no way of knowing whether the fire station was still -- or had been over the last fifteen years -- a stop on the tour of Santa Clara, but I was confident that they would immediately know what I meant when I told them that I had been part of the Sister Cities programme.
Reader: they didn't. The very nice lady at reception didn't really seem to know what I was talking about when I mentioned the programme and said I had come to buy a t-shirt like the ones they had offered us at the time. Still, she made sure she called someone over who could help me out. Wonderful fireman Brian then opened the gates of the fire station for me. The fire trucks reminded me of the last time I had been there. The firemen had wanted to show us the procedure for making sure a victim was okay at a scene, so they picked one of the students for a little demonstration. They measured her heartbeat as she visibly reddened in front of all of us. But that was nothing compared to the colour of her cheeks when he said: "Well, your heartbeat is a little faster than normal right now, but that's okay," as we all laughed uncontrollably.
Brian also had no idea of what the programme was, which tells me that the students have probably stopped coming to the fire station over the last few years. Still, he surprised me by coming back not just with the exact same t-shirt that I had got all those years ago, but also with a light blue one and a medal, which he explained to me was from a 5k Christmas race they organise every year to benefit the schools in Santa Clara. It sounds like a great idea to me, and not just because 5k is the absolute maximum I could ever run. Having not run the actual race, I told myself I kind of deserved it from having completed Couch to 5k over lockdown.
I had some time in the afternoon, so went back to my favourite spot in San José: the Rose Garden, where I sat between the roses "Jump for Joy" and "Sweet Madame Blue" and finished my novel. Afterwards, I took another walk around the residential streets of San José, and this time somehow and totally accidentally ended up in the quirky part of town, and came across some of the most wonderfully funny-looking houses I have ever seen.
In the end, Brian didn't let me pay for the t-shirts and just said "We'll see you back here in fifteen years!" As far as I'm concerned, even fifteen months would be too long.
San José houses: The Quirky Edition
Back - fifteen years later!