{"id":400,"date":"2003-10-02T03:00:00","date_gmt":"2003-10-02T03:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/life\/blog_california.html"},"modified":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"1970-01-01T05:00:00","slug":"blog_california","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/2003\/10\/02\/blog_california","title":{"rendered":"California Observations"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><!-- keywords:Life -->  <\/p>\n<h4> Weather <\/h4>\n<p> I&#8217;ve been in the Bay Area for 33 days so far, and i don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s rained once yet. Although I did play <a href=\"http:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/bicycles\/blog_bicycle_polo.html\">bicycle polo<\/a> in Golden Gate Park as the fog set in, which was almost like rain, except it wasn&#8217;t coming from the sky. September was about as sunny and pleasant as any place I&#8217;ve ever lived. Somehow, the climate seemed to know that the month was over, and now there&#8217;s a thick cloud blanket over the whole state. At least the part that I can see. <\/p>\n<h4> BART <\/h4>\n<p> It took me about two weeks to figure out a social norm around boarding <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bart.gov\">BART<\/a> (one of several non-integrated rail transit systems here). People were always lining up in certain places when there was no train. I hadn&#8217;t really paid attention and just walked up to the door and entered. I only recently realized that there are black spots painted on the platform every 15 feet or so to indicate where the doors will be when the train stops, and I was essentially cutting in line every day, probably pissing people off. People were too nice to say anything, though, and I finally figured it out. I&#8217;ve talked with some other folks who said they had similar experiences when first moving to the area. <\/p>\n<h4> Two Buck Chuck <\/h4>\n<p> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.traderjoe.com\">Trader Joe<\/a>&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.traderjoes.com\/new\/chuckshaw.asp\">Two Buck Chuck<\/a> is all the rage here. Being able to buy drinkable wine for $2 is a privilege I thought was reserved for the French. Although many myths abound about how Trader Joe&#8217;s can sell the wine so cheaply (including the apocryphal story that American Airlines could no longer carry corkscrews on flights so they had to dump their whole collection), apparently it&#8217;s just a matter of oversupply. It also appears that California is the one state where the &#8220;Two Buck Chuck&#8221; really is Two Bucks. It&#8217;s practically an institution here; I had never heard of it back east. <\/p>\n<p> So those are some of my naive East Coast first impressions. You are now prepared for your first trip to California. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Weather I&#8217;ve been in the Bay Area for 33 days so far, and i don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s rained once yet. Although I did play bicycle polo in Golden Gate Park as the fog set in, which was almost like rain, except it wasn&#8217;t coming from the sky. September was about as sunny and pleasant as [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=400"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=400"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=400"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=400"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}