Chico and back

First of all, Dan Grin came up from Caltech last week to visit. On Saturday we went hiking on Mt. Diablo at the peak of the tarantula (Aphonopelma sp.) mating season, so we saw three male tarantulas on the road. Back in Berkeley, Dan made excellent borscht (that made me reconsider my earlier dislike for beets) and then we ended up at Aaron's house watching The Dark Crystal. Over the course of the weekend, we managed to go out for Korean food twice.

(Photo by a friend of Dan's.)

This weekend, I went up to Chico to visit my brother. Chico is up at the northern end of the Sacramento Valley nestled up against the foothills of the Sierras, and is a quiet sprawling town known for California State University, Chico and the Sierra Nevada Brewing Company (which I didn't visit). It feels more like the Midwest than coastal California. We spent Saturday walking around the campus and downtown Chico, and stopped by the Chico Museum, which consists primarily of the collections of odd items (dolls, cameras, paint-by-numbers, pre-WWII Halloween decorations) belonging to local residents, as well as a display of local insects (more to my liking) and the accessories from a Daoist temple built in Chico in the 1890s (also cool too). In the evening we made a huge pot of spaghetti, and watched Clone Wars (weird).

Okay, I admit I found Chico rather boring. But as I realized on the Amtrak bus ride back, this rural city with lots of overgrown vacant lots, old wooden houses, and quiet streets, is probably a lot like what the South Bay looked like fifty years ago. I've always wished I could have seen what the Santa Clara Valley looked like before it became Silicon Valley, but would I have found it boring? I was overwhelmed and depressed by the suburban developments under construction on the outskirts of Sacramento, and that is probably what Chico too will look like in thirty years' time. I have to say I prefer today's Chico to that.

It was refreshing to get back to Berkeley and go for a run around the neighborhoods south of campus. If only all suburbs could be like this...