San Diego and Money and Water

San Diego, Money and Water

Places and cultures are different; certainly cities.

San Diego is a "nice city". Different than most, I would wager.

I have been there a number of times, over a 27 year span. I have been to a bit of its downtown, to its coasts and harbors, to its expansive suburbs. I have stayed with people in around them, especially in La Jolla, "The Jewel" in Spanish.

Yes it is. A jewel.

If you visit and stay in cities the world round, San Diego is shiny and nice, clean, rich, and prosperous. Sure, there are poorer parts, like everywhere. But overall it is very nice. Better than most. The weather is amazingly pleasant, to boot.

Growing up prior, until the age of twenty-two, to first being able to visit California, I had already seen in so many television shows, movies, and presentations, the vistas and lands of the Golden State. It is everywhere in the entertainment world. Little House on the Prairie and M.A.S.H., not filmed in Minnesota and the Korean Peninsula, respectively. It is all California.

Many hours, days, weeks, of our lives, watching the lands and seas of California, via television, film, video, DVD and Youtube. We even watch and consume from the pens and computers of Californians, from Disney and all the other animators based there. We live in the California entertainment world. Even when we are not there physically.

I ended up visiting there a number of times from the Inter-Mountain West, with roommates and friends. Later I moved there, I worked there, I married there, I studied there.

San Diego was a choice place in the state, for sure. It is. And so close to the murder, mayhem, and general malaise of Mexico. But Mexico, Tijuana and border towns like it, are still doing better than many other places around the world.

When I was there in San Diego briefly last summer (2018), I recall driving around modern neighborhoods of La Jolla, near our religious temple, and seeing the neatly manicured lawns and bushes and gardens and paths, the bike ways and the parking, all the nice, modern apartments, and no trash, and much water, and everything perfectly coifed and groomed.

Shangri La, the modern day wonder town.

Crime is not as bad as other California cities in San Diego, the population is not as crowded.

Rents are higher? Assuredly.

---One experience I recall when I was being interviewed as an American with my northern San Diego roommate (Del Mar), in the far off city of Chillan, thousands of miles south of the United States on the opposite side of the equator. A teacher brought us to her class, maybe middle school age, to

But first, some information about me: I am from a college town in southern Indiana where my parents saw homes not too many blocks from my house without running water or electricity, or even hard floors. I guess they had dirt. Parts of Bloomington were not exactly third world, but we knew people who lived in humble circumstances.

My roomie from California, the one I was randomly assigned to stay with a Chilean family with--I will call him Paul--had different ideas than me about comparing the United States to Chile. He had served a church mission in New York City, and had grown up with some people who would be considered known celebrities, especially in the basketball world. He was used to a higher caliber of place, I suppose.

Me, I knew Indiana and Massachusetts a lot, Cape Cod and Kentucky and Wisconsin, some of tghe western U.S., some beaches of the Gulf of Mexico, even parts of the Caribbean and Spain. I had lived in various towns of Chile for my church mission, however, and I saw Chileans and Americans as being more the same than different, and so I answered when asked by the youth.

Paul, however, gave a different impression emphasizing the differences between the U.S. and Chile. He said it was more modern, more economically strong, and a few other things that contradicted my answer but were probably correct. He was correct.

California, and San Diego, are hard to compare with. Indiana doesn't compare, most of Chile doesn't, most of the world doesn't.

And above them all, at the bottom of the state, is this well-kept San Diego.

It means the same as Santiago, which is Spanish for James, which is also related to the ancient name Jacobo or Jacob. 

The chosen one of old, the new elect of the present.

It is quite a town.

What else did I wish to say?

This is a blessed place in many ways, and yet we must find our own jewels to inhabit, our own realms of beauty to discover. We cannot all live in San Diego, nor should we want to.

But it is a nice place to visit, and know people, and simply know that such a place exists.

Here's to San Diego! Go Padres.