We are Californians for the next ten weeks! Ben has 67 days of med school left- but who’s counting- and he’s doing it in Kern County.

Every time I tell someone we’re living in Cali for a while, they get excited about the beach and tell me how awesome it will be to live by the ocean. I guess when you live in Arizona, any proximity to water is exciting. A sad but true bit of Arizona trivia is that real estate with a canal view is expensive.

Actually, though, it’s winter in NorCal. Or is this central Cal? So there’s that. Also, Kern County is sadly nowhere near the beach, and even if it were, I wouldn’t be that excited. After two years of living a five-minute stroll from a Caribbean beach, the cold, sharky waters on the nearest coast aren’t worth the drive more than once or twice. I think I might be ruined forever, as far as beaches go.

Beaches aside, it’s kind of fun to live under the bear flag for a while! So far, we’ve been two places. The first is Wal-Mart. We discovered that you have to pay 10 cents per plastic shopping sack here. As inconvenient as that sounds, I was actually kind of glad that we’ll be forced to use our own shopping bags here. In Detroit, where we lived last year, most people apparently hate the environment because there is trash literally everywhere. Not kidding… People on our complex used to chuck their trash bags off the balcony into the trees when they didn’t feel like taking it to the dumpster. We got so sick of it, we started taking reusable bags to the store as a silent protest against littering. Unless we went to Aldi, it was easy to cheat on our resolution… But you better believe that won’t happen here. No way I’m paying for bags.

The second place we went was the Civic Musical Road, which plays “William Tell” when you drive it! It’s so cool! Ben and I were both grinning like little kids on Christmas when we drove over it, turned around, and drove it again.

I didn’t take photos of Wal-Mart, because that would be weird. I also didn’t take pictires of the musical road, since I was driving. But here’s a picture of Kito in our Cali home to hold you over til the next California update!