Now really, who WOULDN’T want to do his laundry at the Pineapple Laundrette?

I drove down to the city on Saturday, taking pictures and generally poking around. San Jose is nice, and it’s a handy reminder to Bay Area residents that we do in fact live in California. San Francisco has its own charms, but it’s really Californian only by virtue of geography…

San Jose, on the other hand, is more reminiscent of that cliché Southern California “dream” which draws so many people to the west coast. With its cute little single-family houses and neighborhood shopping centers from the 1950s, and with its freeways and low-rise orientation, and its palm trees and semi-trpocal vegetation, San Jose looks more like California is “supposed” to look: informal, sunny, modern, and open.

San Francisco looks stuffy, cold, damp, claustrophobic, and old. Residents are stacked on top of each other, many of them don’t own cars, and the freeways are more likely tobe demolished than repaired or expanded. There are dingy corner stores rather than big (or small) shopping centers, and any palm trees one finds look rather lost. It’s no wonder people are so surprised to find this very east coast city on the tip of a Penisula in California…