Silicon Valley By Bus, and other ill-advised endeavors

[tim]

Yesterday I did the first theme in the June challenge: buses. I picked the first option, where you get on the bus closest to your home or work, and stay on until you see something interesting.

I started from work, on Castro St. in downtown Mountain View, California, and the closest bus stops were the 51 and 52 bus stops. Both of these lines stop running before 7:00 PM, and I was starting out later than that. So I picked the bus stop on El Camino Real just east of Castro, catching the eastbound VTA 22 bus.

This turned out to be a harder challenge than I thought it would be. The 22 bus follows El Camino Real, which is the major non-controlled-access thoroughfare through the South Bay Area. With few exceptions, it's a bleak suburban landscape of car dealerships and chain restaurants. So what's the threshold for "interesting"? An ethnic market? A restaurant of some cuisine I hadn't tried recently? Yet either of these would seem disappointing destinations for this particular trip, since I check out new grocery stores and restaurants often enough.

So there was a lot of staring out the bus window, wondering: is this interesting enough? Is that interesting enough?

There's nothing new under the Sunnyvale, but I thought about getting off at the cluster of Indian restaurants and markets there anyway. I thought better of it since that was something I might go to without an excuse like this one was well. So I stayed on the bus.

I wondered the same thing passing the cluster in Santa Clara where all the signs are in Korean -- particularly when the bus passed a karaoke place. I decided I would feel stupid being the only whitey in a Korean karaoke place, and alone and before dark, to boot. (When I checked the googles later, it turned out the karaoke place was one of those private places with booths, rather than a bar. Which is interesting to know about, but still not where I would have wanted to go without a bunch of friends.)

After other "almost interesting" things (a scuba lesson place; the Center for Spiritual Enlightenment, which was probably a cult; a sign for the Egyptian Museum, which sounds like it's actually pretty interesting but was closed), the bus pulled into downtown San Jose and I saw a bookstore I'd actually seen before but not gone into, so I rang the bell and got off at Cleaves and the Alameda.

It was 8:10, almost an hour after I left downtown Mountain View. By the way, the same 12-mile (19-km) trip would have taken 15 minutes on an express train. As I retraced the bus route to get back to the bookstore, I passed by the DeFrank Center (the South Bay queer community center), but I'd been there before, so it wouldn't count as my interesting thing.

The bookstore was open, till 9:00 PM, thankfully! And the front door had some interesting signs.

Inside, it looked just like a real bookstore should look!

I did not buy this book, but I was amused that it existed.

And also like any good bookstore, it had a kitty.

There was a Tom Tomorrow cartoon about going to a Borders or Barnes and Noble and asking about where to find Noam Chomsky's latest book -- the clerk directed him to something by Rush Limbaugh "if you like politics". Not a problem at this particular store.

And some other useful categories as well.
And a much-appreciated feature that one can't rely on finding in a random independent bookstore, but that is very useful during an extended journey.
After I left with less cash and a book of 366 leafy greens recipes, I took the obligatory California-at-twilight shots.

The westbound 22 bus arrived just a few minutes later.

I decided I had to check out that Indian restaurant cluster after all... and enjoyed a delicious methi paratha, paneer pakoras, and chai...

followed by green guava and halwasan ice cream at the shop with a cheesy name (but delicious desserts) next door.

The Recycle Bookstore, 1066 The Alameda, San Jose, CA
Kwality Sweets 'n Food, 1036 E. El Camino Real, Sunnyvale, CA
Nirvanaaah!, 1038 E. El Camino Real, Sunnyvale, CA

Comments

[tim]

Yeah, it's Vietnamese. San Jose has the largest Vietnamese population of any city in the world outside Vietnam, or so an SF Chronicle article claims :-)

As for the bus options, I think (c) would probably be tricky in some places, but I can't see any of the others posing a real challenge except in areas that literally don't have public transit or that only have one bus route :-)