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Moon's Family Sports Pub. When I asked them for permission to take photo, they said sure, but then I cracked a bad joke, "None of you guys are on probation, right?"

Starting in Santa Clara, I had walked 7.5 miles past countless strip malls to Sunnyvale, where I boarded a bus for Palo Alto. There, I saw all of these expensive homes with elaborately landscaped front and back yards, with a typical house featuring half a dozen kinds of trees and assorted flowers.

After walking three miles across Palo Alto, I met up with Ali Razeen and his girlfriend, Branka, and together we went to East Palo Alto, the poorest city on the Penisula. Not unreasonably, we were hoping to find a spot to down a couple beers or micheladas, but incredibly, there's not a single bar in this burg of nearly 30,000, and we got this information from a black man of about 45.

"So where do people drink around here?"

Smiling, he pointed to a guy with a paper bag sitting in a bus shelter across the street. He also informed us that East Palo Alto has no downtown or center. What he thought most hilarious was the fact that I had come all the way from Philly, and Ali and Branka from North Carolina, to hang out in East Palo Alto.

With our East Palo Alto plan coming to nothing, we headed to San Mateo, so that's how we ended up at Moon's. Though it's downscale by local standards, it's expensive enough, but that's just the economy here.



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