kalifornia

Still jetlagged on my third day here, I’m still getting up at 4 every morning (local time). By the time I get zeitgebered into local time, it’ll be time to head to Belgium (a nine hour difference from here).

Couldn’t shake the weird feeling that California felt familiar, but couldn’t quite grasp how, and then I realized it feels like Indonesia for some reason. I think it’s the smells, because it sure ain’t the weather - it only gets up to about a “chilly” 15 here. But it’s sunny and blooming all over the place, and the vegetation is garishly lush.

A funny thing about the flight over: the pilot tells us we’ll be going right smack over the Grand Canyon. I’m thinking, “we’ll that sucks, we can’t see directly down. Only left and right”… Well, when we got there I realized that the Grand Canyon… is big. Holy crap it’s big! Kind of had trouble with perspective, looking at it from so high up, but the fact that it went on and on, on both sides of the aircraft, well…

I couldn’t decide whether the endless, reddish desert terrain over Arizona and New Mexico looked more like a scene from Roadrunner (complete with those natural monoliths you see in cartoons) or Mars. Gotta get down there for a closer view someday.