Skinship

How is life in Silicon Valley?

I have (mostly) recovered from the first cultural shock and I am actually starting to enjoy my life in the Valley. We are almost done with the furnishing and I have to say I am really enjoying the nice customer service around here. People are very nice (or are at least pretending to be :-). We are still waiting for the sofa and will have to go back to Home Depot and Ikea. But otherwise it feels like home already. Actually, I have to grab some flowers on the way home today. I love the evenings when the three of us are cuddling in a super comfortable king size bed :-)

We took a long walk around our neighborhood here in Palo alto and we have found a great organic supermarket just a couple of blocks away and a beautiful park with a playground just across the street. Great place for picknik! I am really happy that one of the first things we bought was a picnic mat...you really can use those in Calfornia all the time. We have actually spent the last three days on the beach in Half Moon Bay, while Andrej was at the Fortune Tech conference. Jun loves playing with sand and peting all the dogs that are running around on the beach. Beautiful.

I met a nice mom with to boys today in the park and she gave me a couple of ideas about kids activities...now we have kids museum, small farm and children's library on our list for tomorow.

It's nice to chat with other moms to get a bit of idea how things work around here. She said that schools are incredibly competitive in the Valley and some parents take their pre-schoolers (4-5 years) to tutoring lessons all summer before school starts in order to learn how to read, count and so on. I am wondering what is wrong with this world (it's actually not much better in Europe) to push academic achievement above any reasonable level. Kids need to play. Fullstop. And preferably they need to play without their parents being behind their back constantly. They need some secret life and we are not really helping them with it.

We take them to the park and sit next to them or even interfer in their own games and peer interaction. And this only gets worse. Later we check their progress in kindergardens and schools (in US parents can actually do it instantly on-line), check their web history and facebook profiles, etc.

I am thinking parents should maybe focus more on themselves and just let children be...as they are. Some are slow readers, some love construction, some love art and others cooking, some are geeks and some are born networkers. Do they really all need to get to Stanford or Harvard? Will early reading and math really help? I don't think so. In today's world we need creative and imaginatve people, most of the rest can be done by computers.

I think we should completely rethink the education system. And I mean completely!

European girl (ups, mama) in the US

After one week in the US I am still recovering from the cultural shock :-) Everything is at least twice as big as in Europe...and I mean everything, from bottles to cars, not to mention the distances.

We are currently living with our friends in a beautiful house in the Los Gatos mountains. It's such a pure nature, with deer and squirels all around the house and a lake just around the corner. Beautiful and relaxing. Jun is enjoying his time with a big dog and two cats, but they obviously can not "replace" his darling Shana. He is talking about her all the time.

But those of you who know us can imagine that afterw few relaxing days we had to take a new challenge...

We have spent the whole week searching for a flat in the heart of Sillicon Valley (Palo Alto/Menlo Park) and it was all new experience. After seeing the first three places I had to drop my European standards by 200%...no central heating, no tight windows, no brick houses and hard-wood floor seems as extinguished as some rare species. OK, I can survive with a wall-to-wall carpet but the place we will eventually rent needs some charm and it needs to be downtown. So, we kept looking. The renting experience is a very special experience down here...when you come to see the place, there are usually already few Stanford students looking at it and than you can add a couple or two and a professional single. This quickly puts your chances to actually getting the place to about 10%. But than you realise the chances are even lower, because it doesn't have much to do with combinatorics, but it more depends on your luck. So after you (and all other potential reners) decide you like the place the process includes everything from application forms (that you actually need to pay!!!), bank reports, personal references and so on. And than you wait for the results and you keep looking in the meantime.

Yesterday we have scheduled three appointments and in the evening when I have almost given up we found it. A cute little (I should actually say tiny) cottage in a quiet and green street downtown Palo Alto just few blocks from the University Ave. It has a patio and a little garden...and if I am honest, this was the real reason to rent this place. Jun will finally get some place for gardening and his own swing outside. Surprisingly, this was the first place he liked and he started calling it "hišica" (small house). We have celebrated our new home with some juice and cookies sitting on a carpet in an empty flat. And than we have realised that we have forgotten to ask about the laundry. (Who could blame a European who owns a washing machine and has never thought about it as a luxury). Well, we have just realised there is no washing machine in our new flat and no laundry in a near proximity :-(

Today we faced a new challenge...to buy all the stuff we need to move in. From furniture, bedding, towels, dishes, glasses, knives. The small stuff was easy to find (although there is so much offer to choose from that I instantly got a headache :-) but when it came to the furniture we had to face a different metric system. So I ended up recalculating from inches to centimeters and back until I gave up and started relying on my gut feeling. Let's see if we will fit the sofa and the bed inside the room :-)

Tomorow we are going to San Francisco. Can't wait.

Welcome to California