Normalisation

It's the end of week 2, and my overwhelming feeling is that it's funny how quickly things stop seeming weird. Whilst we haven't really got into a routine, many things are starting to seem familiar.

Today we spent some time up in Palo Alto, including going to the amazing Post Office, which is like something out of a different era. We also visited the Museum of American Heritage, which is actually just somebody's house, with a lot of early 20th century artefacts in it.

Palo Alto post office

This afternoon we went down to Shoreline Park, and wandered along the Bay a bit. We happened across a nesting site for American White Pelicans - there must have been 250-300 of them there, which you might be able to see as the white dots in this panorama:

There's some great wildlife here which is very different to back home, whether it be the dragonflies (today we saw something called a Flame Skimmer), the seabirds, or the Californian ground squirrels.

Perhaps even more interesting are the things that California doesn't have. The latest thing to add to that list is quiche. We went around a supermarket several times looking for such an item, and even asked someone, but the closest we got was a frozen pizza. We may have to go back to my favourite (and slightly posh) supermarket, Draeger's, which has what appears to be a special expat shelf, if we want to hunt down that elusive quiche.