View from my window. If you tell people this is San Jose, California, most would believe it.
A key point in my life was my successful escape from San Jose, California at 15-years-old. Here in Windhoek, Namibia, I look out my window each day to find myself right back in San Jose, CA.
Just like Jonah, I can't escape fate.
Joking aside, there's a lot of wasted space here. It's what they have plenty of.
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9 comments:
I never thought I would say this, but Namibia seems kinda cool.
California probably looks worse than this today. At least, I don't see a lot of homeless people pushing supermarket carts in that picture.
I'd love to go and visit the nature parks.
Waiting for more descriptions of the place and perhaps interviews with locals.
Hi Zeno,
Namibia is 22% larger than Texas, with less than a tenth of the population. Namibia has 2.5 million, with Texas around 30 million.
Cape Town is a magnet for not just South Africans from the rest of the country, but Africans from all over. With its gravely damaged economy thanks to Covid, its homeless population has exploded.
Athough Windhoek has its bad section, downtown is practically free of homeless.
More than 90% of Namibians are Christians, with half of those Lutherans. My landlady is a Lutheran. Right after this comment, I'm going to post two examples of Namibian gospel music. Very rousing and moving.
Linh
I spent an afternoon watching video's made by Ocean Conservation Namibia,
you get loads of seal colonies on the coast and they can get entangled in nets, these guys and girls spot entangled seals, catch them and cut them free on the spot,
I've always been fascinated by Namibia, there are abandoned mining town which have featured in some of Ron Fricke's time lapse cinematography,
there's also some notable ship wrecks along the skeleton coast,
the Eduard Bohlen for instance,
I'm feeling desperately jealous of your current adventure Linh, I'm stuck here waiting for Britain to implode and wishing I wasn't here!
Hi Linh,
Native San Jose resident here. Yeah it's quite horrid nowaday, but back 20-30 years ago? Why did you leave so early on?
Hi Nolan,
I had to flee from my psycho stepmother. My brother is still in Cupertino, though I'm not close to him. I had a friend in Fremont whom I'd see every few years. Santa Cruz I loved the last couple times I was there. The Mission in San Francisco suited me, but I'm sure it has worsened, like the rest of San Francisco. Oakland I much prefered over Berkeley. I was in Redwood City in 1978. It was very grubby then. Seeing it again a few years ago, I couldn't recognize any of it.
It was good that I got out CA because I hate driving. I've only had two cars in my life, for a total of maybe two years. No way I could have gotten away with that in CA.
Linh
Hey Linh,
I was a long-time (23 years) Bay Area resident. I left California for Colorado in 2003, but I go back at least once a year to visit my parents in the East Bay. Yeah, that picture from Namibia definitely conjures up my own memories of San Jose circa 1980.
Cupertino, eh? I'm a De Anza College alum. It was really nice town in the 90's, when I attended school there. A few months ago, I drove through Cupertino along Stevens Creek Blvd. following a trip to the Winchester Mystery House with one of my daughters. It's actually still pretty decent there, and the drive was a nostalgic one.
I would have liked to stay in the Bay Area, but the horrific traffic and very high cost of living forced me to look elsewhere to live. Apparently, given the high number of California license plates I regularly see here in the Denver area, many more Californians have made the exodus, too. That's why Colorado is now sickeningly and irreparably blue, sadly.
Paul
Hi Matt,
More picturesque towns like Swakopmund and Luderitz are pretty expensive, and not cheap to get to, so I'll probably just linger in Windhoek. I'm not really a sightseer anyway. I might run down to relatively nearby Rehoboth for a look. The people there are Afrikaans speaking coloreds called Basters, a word derived from the Dutch bastaard. I got a glimpse of Rehoboth on the bus up here and it seemed like a neat little town.
Linh
I only visited San Jose one time, back in 2015, and the thing I remember most is the Vietnamese signage on the buses, trams, roads etc. I had never seen any language other than English and Spanish on public transit here in the US before.
Siddharth.
Here's my San Jose Postcard. It's a chapter in my book, Postcards from the End of America. The cover is a photo I took in NYC.
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