Days 3 and 4: Fruit, Walmart and Mongolian Food

Greetings from San Jose! We arrived yesterday around 1:00 after driving through about 2oo miles of the San Joaquin Valley where about 25% of the nation's fruit, vegetables and other random plants are grown. We literally saw just about every type of produce I can think of, especially cherry trees full of little red cherries. The most memorable though were the artichokes and the town that smelled overwhemingly so of garlic. I got a huge craving for cherries from seeing all the cherry trees and pulled over to a fruit stand to buy some cherries. They were good.

After some trials and tribulations, I finally got a place to live in a big house near downtown San Jose, across the street from a hispanic grocery store. I'm really excited about that. I will have 3 roommates who are all students and San Jose State University and they all seem really nice. The bed I will be sleeping in is a full size bed and so I needed to go and find some sheets for it. We found a Wal-mart, and it was purple. Leave it to California to have a purple Wal-mart.

After shopping, my dad and I needed to go back to the hotel to get our jackets because the temperature had dropped down the the high 50's. That's right, its June and its cold here. Its awesome. =)

My dad and I walked around the market square near where our hotel was in search of a place for dinner. We stopped in front of a Mongolian grill, to watch the guy cook the food on the large round cooking surface with what looked like a wooden stick. I asked my dad if he liked Mongolian grill and if he'd had it before, and he said "Yeah". So we proceeded to go in. The hostess told us to go ahead and stand in line to get our food while she got our table ready. Strangely the meat was frozen, and I had noticed that my dad only got a few pieces of meat but didn't pay much attention, I was still baffled by the meat and I was planning out what vegetables I was going to put on my plate. When we got the vegetables, he said "I guess this is the salad". I was still confused by this, but I assumed he knew what he was doing because he said that he'd been to a mongolian grill before. Anyways, the time came to give the guy my food to cook, and I turned around to see what my dad had put on his plate. He had disappeared! So I got my food back, and set off to find my dad sitting at the table eating raw vegetables on top of a few pieces of raw frozen meat! I asked him what he was doing and then took up his bowl and took it to the guy to cook. I came back and laughed and he said "I guess I hadn't had Mongolian before". Fortunately we could go through the lines as many times as we wanted, so he went through again, this time having the guy cook the food before attempting to eat it. He really liked it, but I don't think I'll ever forget that experience.