This started as a letter to Minh, who told me several times that I need to go to Santa Cruz. But without a car, however, this is nearly impossible.
I finally went to Santa Cruz on Saturday night. I went to this comedy show fundraiser thing with me new colleague Ben, this Japanese student intern Ryuta, and a 14-year-old kid named Philip who Ben used to babysit. It was a motley crew. I took Caltrain to California Avenue where Ben picked me up in his parents’ car (he’s from San Jose, but now lives in the city). I should have known it was going to be a crazy night judging from the crew on Caltrain. It was the party wagon due to that evening’s Sharks game.
The comedy show was fun. It was sponsored by the Friends of Hue Foundation, a non-profit organization that sponsors a number of projects in the Thua Thien-Hue area of Vietnam. Then they had these three comedians who were variously hilarious. My favorite was the last guy, Sheng Wang. His first joke was that he had just become a friend of Hue, but that he’d been friends with Bun Bo Hue for a long time. Accept he’s not Vietnamese, so he pronounced it all crooked, and it took people a while to get it. He clutched the microphone like he was going to keel over from stage fright if he let go. I think that was part of the act.
The show ended at 10 and we had to get Philip home (10 pm is way too late for a 14-year-old to be out on a Saturday night!) Philip lives in San Jose, actually in Los Gatos. On the way down we saw a sign for Santa Cruz and we were debating what to do and Ben said, jokingly, “Hey, we could go to Santa Cruz.” Ryuta and I laughed. We dropped off Philip and were heading back to the highway and Ben said again, “So, Santa Cruz?” I have gotten so used to flaky people over the past few years that I had forgotten, Ben is definitely not one of them (side-note: Ben was a VIA volunteer in China, the same year as me. We met at training back in 2006, and now he works for VIA) So we get on the highway (freeway) and are racing down to Santa Cruz. It’s about 10:30. It’s foggy. The moon is about 7/8 full. It’s beautiful. We emerge from the woods and Ben says there’s a good place to get ice cream if it’s still open so we stop at Marianne’s and get ice cream. Then we head to the beach.
First we go to Capitola. The boardwalk is jumping with not-so-young drunken partiers. We put our feet in the cold water for a few minutes before hopping back in the car to go to another beach, Ben’s favorite beach. On the way we stop by a convenience store and buy beer for Ryuta (who is only 20). We got lost at least nine times on the way to Ben’s favorite beach, but when we got there it was worth it. Beach 26 had been recently deserted by partying surfers and they had left the coals of their fire glowing in the sand. After checking out the waves we sat by the coals and watched the ocean ebb and talked and Ryuta drank his beer. After about an hour we left and Ben gave us a quick tour of the boardwalk at Santa Cruz before we headed home, but this time the long way.
We drove along the coast, Highway 1, from Santa Cruz up through Half-Moon Bay. We were one of the only cars on the road. Ben pumped up the tunes of Santa Cruz U radio and we were singing and laughing to various genres of music. Ryuta was drunk and we had to stop twice to let him pee by the side of the road. When we got to Half-Moon Bay we turned inland and took Ryuta back to his homestay in Palo Alto. It was 2:30. Ben pounded some coffee and I took over in the shotgun seat, and we drove back to San Francisco talking about social justice and service and other good things. When we finally reached my house, it was 3:30. Apparently this is a typical Saturday night for Ben. Crazy. I fell into bed exhausted with the feeling that I’d had an almost-Vietnam-style adventure (the kind where you get into a vehicle with people you don’t know and hope that the destination is somewhere appealing.)
