Half-time

More than half of my time here has already passed.
So many new impressions, I've seen so many new places, and time passes too quickly.

I'm now sitting in Billy's house in Elk Grove near Sacramento. I haven't seen much of the town because we arrived here at 11.15 pm after a two-hour drive.

Today was a strange day. When we woke up the wonderful view from the villa was hidden by fog and it was cold. Until about noun it stayed like that, but in the afternoon the sun was shining bright again. Practically we haven't done many things. We passed two much time in the car looking for a parking space. But it was Saturday, Obama was in San Francisco (we didn't meet him) and it was the last day of the Fleet Week. Again there was an airshow, but from where we were we hadn't a good view. People were watching from rooftops, wherever there was a good spot to watch it was packed with people. But my sister said: "I don't understand why you're so excited. I'm a pacifist. Think of all the good things they could do with that money." I know that the same planes throw bombs on people. And when they hear the same noise it's a very different kind of excitement.

Today we had to meet another friend of Billy. He has a shop stuffed with all sorts of things. You can hardly walk in there and I don't know how anybody finds what they are looking for. Cheap souvenirs, clothes, suitcases, kitchen items, dolls,.....
Nearby, we went to a Nicaraguan Fast Food. Billy and Uschi ate with appetite but the rest of us couldn't eat it.

I wanted to buy a metallic case for self-made cigarettes. The tobacco shop had to offer a lot of things but they had never heard of such a thing. Instead they wanted to sell me plastic cases for joints.
Meike finally found the Harley Davidson T-shirts for her father, we tried to go to Chinatown, but it
was impossible to park anywhere, drove through the famous Lombard Street, visited the Palace of Fine Arts and found the street along the Pacific coast to the beaches where Billy insists that it is too dangerous to swim and nobody is swimming there.

We had to leave the city quite early. Billy's Chinese friends expected us for dinner in a Malaysian restaurant. So we tried some strange new foods, some quite good, some not really, and some just strange, like the dessert: crushed ice with coconut, beans, peanuts, corn and different kinds of jelly.
I clearly prefer American Food, as far as I've tried it.