Hippie with vet bills and cute dog. Please give generously.

The day started well. We got breakfast in the same place we had eaten for the two previous days.
I think it's just important for Sarah and I to have a breakfast place, I'm pretty sure we will probably get one in Melbourne pretty quickly.

Its true what they say, I'm totally capable of eating the exact same meal for breakfast until I die.
As long as that thing is crispy hash, bacon, two eggs, sausage and a motherload of great coffee.

We caught the BART to the airport to rent a car, figuring that the airport was the easiest and quickest place to actually rent one. Also, SFO is about 15 miles out from the city, and opens up straight onto the Santa Cruz freeway, 101, highway 280, and basically a driving route straight out to Santa Cruz
So basically we had done our revision when planning the route.
PARAGRAPH DELETED

I had about 6 cigarettes in an hour and a half, but in the end we arrived safely at Santa Cruz.

We were there to meet Cormac's sister, who was studying in UCSC for the year.
The campus is ridiculous. It might make sense if it was a cartoon show version of a University for kids and the students were all squirrels and chipmunks, but as any model of a functional college, its just totally ri-goddamn-diculuous.
The whole thing is across what must be like 40 or 50 acres of Forest. The SU is a bus ride from the Dorms. All the study depts are miles away in some backwater forest. There are frequent deadends leading to scenic nothingness for no apparent reason.
For some reason I really loved the campus.
The only problem is their unhealthy attitude to not drinking.
A college campus should really focus on the booze. Students living on campus are only allowed to drink on campus if they are in their room, on their own.
And they want to prevent problem drinking.
Hannah is 20 and has been drinking for at least 4 years in Ireland. But because she is in America, she cant have a drink for the year. I felt really bad for her, so I used my drivers licence to buy her two bottles of wine. She was really fun and had a great attitude to life, kept high-fiving us at the excitement of living in Santa Cruz for a year.
While we were ambling around the campus, we couldn't help but get immersed in Californian student speak. These dreadlocked disapproving deciduous kids with ideas about a life they had only just begun to taste made me laugh.
They reminded me of me when I started University, so certain of myself it was ridiculous considering that I knew absolutely nothing.
The conversations of the students there were ridiculous, even if you aren't a wannabe intellectual snob like me.
"I cant believe that the senior class didn't know the difference between "Should of" and "should have"" "I was like, my god."

"The thing u gotta, like, realise is that college is not like high school.
It's a whole different animal."

I'm serious. Students here are idiots.

We drove around Santa Cruz for ages, looking at beaches and promenades and piers. It was all pretty samey and dull, very disappointing, but I was still delighted to have the drive up and see the California countryside again.
Pretty much as soon as we left campus I was aching to get back to Frisco though. I only have 4 more days here after today, and I don't want to waste them in shitty seaside towns like Santa Cruz, replete with surf shops, students, surfer morons, vegans, rich hippies, organic supermarkets and goddamn soy milk.
Fuck soy milk.
It was nice to see the place, but even nicer to know that I wasn't staying.
Goddamn I am hard to please.

We finally left at about 7:30 after dropping Hannah off at her campus with her organic groceries.

I know she was glad to see us and hear Irish accents and see familiar faces, but she still walked off without glancing back at her brother, or by extension, I guess her old life.
I really sensed that everything in her was resiliently looking forward. She smiled and said a word to a guy with dirty dreadlocks who came out of her dorms, and strolled into her room.
I really liked her.
We drove home. A fast scenic race against the sunset to change hotels and get some food.
We got as far as one BART stop from the airport before we turned back and decided to drop the car back to the airport rather than driving into San Fran tonight and leaving the car back in the morning.
I was so glad because I couldn't face driving through the San Fran town centre, even if it was late on a Sunday night.
I just don't think I could have sat through that.
So we brought back the rental car (Corolla), got screwed on the cost of petrol (The guy went to wanting to charge us 60 bucks, to 40 bucks, to 23 bucks), and took the bart mack to mission.

We got off at Mission and 24th.
Its the first BART stop that vaguely resembles city, opens up onto a well lit intersection. Its preferable at the moment to getting off at Mission and 16th, even though both stops are equidistant from our motel, but Mission and 16th is much rougher area.
Or so I thought.
On our way back, passing Mission and 23rd on our way to the El Capitan on Mission and 20th, I saw a cop car crossing by on 20th st.
I turned to the guys and started telling them about how cool I thought it was that there were so many police patrolling the tougher part of the city, and how safe it made you feel, even in strange areas. But as soon as we reached the end of the block I realised that something was very wrong.
The cop car that passed by and went out of sight had stopped just a block away, and was now lost amongst 6 other cop cars and an ambulance.
We passed by, silent and worried. I turned to the right and looked, curious as always about what could warrant such a response.
There was a man lying prone on the street.
the police were shining a torch over him. The EMTs from the ambulance were ambling about 10 feet away, The guy was dead and they were shining a torch to examine the scene.
He was one of 7 shootings, stabbings and attacks in the Mission area in the last week.
he was the only victim to die.
We hurried back to the El Capitan, picked up our bags from Cormac and Meg's room, hailed a cab and got the hell back to Lombard and the La Luna as soon as we could. We were tired and hungry after the day and were aching for comfort like the lambs we are.
The Mission is fine really, but after the two dead bodies in two days, a little too much reality was on display and I was glad to turn my back on it, however callous that may sound.

It seems very easy to slip into habitual racism here. I'm not talking KKK or Neo-Nazi stuff either. I just mean racism of the mind, that never crosses your lips and is hard to admit even to yourself. Crossing the road to avoid a group of poorly dressed Latinos on a dark night. Feeling uncomfortable on the bus. Survival mode kicks in and you just don't want to take chances, no matter how silly it all seems the second the imagined danger has passed.
Something non-specific seems to make every demographic want to keep to itself and that even infects the tourists. I hope it doesn't stay with me after I leave.
Still, nobody can tell us we didn't see as much as we could have on my return to San Fran.
I still have 4 days left here, I'm wondering if I will get the hat trick of corpses before I go.
The cab driver was silent and sullen, but he went like the wind, carrying us away from the mission and towards the comfort of a motor inn.
Thank god for him and the bottle of fantastic 2004 Amarone in my bag. I got nicely drunk for the first time since I got here. And man did it feel good. I watched TV for most of the night while Sarah got her Internet fix. At one stage, I managed to flick channels for a full 16 minutes before I saw something that wasn't an advertisement.