Stupid Awesome Cupertino

It’s been a month since we arrived in California and, as a result, I’ve written this first blog post at least a dozen times in my head. And that means that now that I’m sitting down to write it, I have no idea where to start.

One of my pseudo-entries opened with a joke about time warps in California, which is why it seemed like it had taken so long to write this blog post. Really, it had only been a few moments for those of us trapped outside of time (so no getting mad at me).

In one of my pseudo-entries, I decided to calculate how many elephants it would take to get from Cupertino to Calgary. If you know me, you know about my fixation with elephants as a unit of measurement that started in a college astronomy class (it’s only fair to call it a fixation when you’re reasonably sure all of your friends have heard “who measures things in elephants?” more than once). I’m still going to do that, because, well, it’s a fixation! And now I’m curious! And it feels like my blog will be more professional with some math in here.

So! It’s 1,336.7 miles from Cupertino, California to Calgary, Alberta (according to google, anyway, and who questions google? Certainly not me — they can actually find me and beat me up pretty quickly now, since they’re only about an hour or about 7,656 African elephants away — just a second, I’m explaining my calculations here, I promise.)

So, the average African elephant is apparently 30 ft.

I say apparently because it’s really hard to find out how long an elephant is. They’ll tell you how tall they are, sure, but what good does that do you, unless you’re counting how many perfectly–vertically-laid-out elephant carcasses it takes to get from Cupertino to Calgary, and that’s really morbid.

I did find one site that told me they’re about as long as five to six dogs.

Oh good; dogs are a much better unit of measurement.

But what kind of dogs? That could potentially be a pretty small elephant.

So I had to go with a random answer I found on WikiAnswer, so it’s probably completely inaccurate. But it’s all I had to go on. I mean, if I wanted to, I could tell you very precisely how many elephant penises it takes to get from Cupertino to Calgary, because searching up “How long is an elephant” is a really bad idea, because no one on the internet means the elephant itself, they obviously mean its penis. But I’m pretty sure my mom is going to read this, so I’d better stop talking about elephant penises.

So, assuming that this random person on WikiAnswers is right, we’re looking at 30 feet for an African elephant. I found another source that said 21 feet for an Asian elephant, but when you say elephant, you think Africa. Also, it’s already clear to me that this math is going to be ludicrous and going for the smaller elephant is just asking for trouble.

SO! 30 foot elephants. Google tells me that there are 5,280 feet in a mile. Hoo boy.

I better break out Excel for this.

So, we’re looking at 1,336.7 miles x 5,280 to get the number of feet, which is… 7,057,776 feet. Then, we divide that by 30, right? Oh, why am I showing my work? If I had just said that if you lined up elephants between Cupertino and Calgary there would be a gajillion elephants, who would have questioned me? But now, now you can see all the flaws in my logic.

Well, no turning back now. So, 7,057,776 feet divided by 30 feet per elephant gives us… 235,259.2 elephants. I feel bad about the point two, because I don’t want to have to be the one to hack that bit off an elephant just to get that last step to Calgary, so we’ll call it 235,289 elephants.

See, and it’s a damn good thing I picked African elephants, because my good friend WikiAnswers is telling me that there are between 450,000 and 700,000 African elephants in the world, but only 35,000 to 40,000 Asian elephants, so if I’d picked Asian elephants, I’d be stuck in like Oregon or something.

So I’m pretty sure people aren’t reading this to hear about elephants. I should probably talk about California.

I’ll start with a map, because those are educational:

On this handy dandy map, you can see San Jose sort of in the middle-ish, and then off to the left is us — Cupertino. If you swing all the way north and west, you hit San Francisco. It takes about an hour to get there on the freeway, while San Jose is about 20 minutes away. Fingers crossed that gives you at least a vague idea of where we are.

If you want to get more specific, we’re here:

Knock knock...

Yep, that’s our front door.

No, there will be no pictures of the inside, because it looks like a cardboard bomb went off in here.

Okay, it’s not that bad anymore. But still, I want our friends reading this to think of us as actual adult human beings, and that won’t be possible if you see our box fortress. (Although, I guess that ship sailed when I started talking about elephant penises, didn’t it?)

Cupertino is a small city with a population of about 60,000 people (there’s a Wikipedia link there too, for you nerds), and it’s probably best known because Apple’s headquarters are here. In fact, it seems like Apple owns just about half the buildings here — walking down the street, you’ll see Apple logos everywhere.

Obviously, Lab126 (the company that makes the Kindle, and is part of the Amazon group of companies — yes, you have to say it like that, you can’t just say “it’s owned by Amazon” because if you do, your head will explode. Ryan actually explained all the legal reasons, but it made me feel like my head was going to explode, so I’m going to go with exploding.) is also here (although the Amazon headquarters are in Seattle).

If you head over to San Jose, you’ll see the head offices for just about every tech company you can imagine — we’ve seen Adobe, eBay, PayPal, Cisco, TiVo, and a whole bunch of others — it’s a little surreal. It’s like you’re travelling in the internet. Except with less elephant penises. (Sorry, last one.)

But the only way my brain can really think of it is that San Jose is like downtown Calgary, and then all the little cities that surround it — Cupertino, Sunnyvale, Campbell, Los Gatos, Santa Clara, Mountain View — they’re all communities. Except they’re not, they’re their own cities, and they have their own little downtowns. It’s weird.

Cupertino itself is basically the most expensive area around because of Apple and because of the school systems. The city has one of the top-ten high schools in America here, so people come from all over the world to send their kids here, and apartment prices are at a premium. Since I can’t work (I’m here on a dependent visa, so telecommuting for a Canadian company is about all I can do unless a company down here will sponsor me for a visa), I figure my best bet is to try and infiltrate this high school. I’ve decided that this time, I’m going to be one of the popular kids — I’ll be the slightly chubby cheerleader that is therefore totally non-threatening to the other cheerleaders, but makes them feel better about themselves. I also have an older boyfriend (younger boyfriend, maybe? I dunno if Ryan can pass for older than a high school student, let’s be honest) so I’m no threat to their boys, while being someone that they can look up to, because I’m totally experienced.

Yes, yes, it’s all coming together.

I keep getting distracted, don’t I?

Here, let me distract you with some pictures of our apartment complex!

Our complex:

A little park across the street:

Corporate housing across the street from that:

Inside the complex…

Into our little area…

And up the stairs to our door!

There, now we’re back on track!

As you can see, it’s pretty beautiful — I actually took those pictures yesterday, so you can see that it still looks like we’ve only just hit fall here. Ryan and I went out for lunch yesterday and I was walking along in a short-sleeved sweater and shoes with no socks, and there were people walking past us in toques and jackets, so I asked Ryan if he could tell I was from Canada. (Speaking of, yes, I have called someone a hoser, but only because he asked me to “talk Canadian”. ;D)

The weather, which everyone asks about, has been in the mid to low 20s every day, so I guess I won’t be able to break out my snow pants for Hallowe’en this year. (But all of my costumes are fat somethings. Fat ghost. Fat bride. Fat Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. I guess this year I could go as a ghost who has just come off a really successful diet.)

And now we come to it, I’ve talked about being far from home, I’ve talked about the area and where we live now, and I’ve talked about the weather, so now I have to talk about the food.

I’m not even talking about amazing restaurant food, although there is that here. Okay, I’d better talk about normal person food first, and break out the pictures.

Everywhere has glorious unsweetened tea to drink, which makes me both stupidly and obscenely happy.

The food is also truly awesome. That’s Figgy Piggy pizza from Pizza My Heart — it has bacon, black figs, fresh sage, and feta cheese. It is totally amazing. They also have an equally amazing Watsonville Apple with green apple slices, pepperoni, sausage, bacon, green onions, gorgonzola cheese, and garlic. So yes, I will be about 300lbs when I come back for Christmas.

There’s also a Japanese Curry House (above is a picture of Ryan with a delicious lime float, and the cutest smile!), an Indian restaurant, a really wonderful Italian place with a wine bar (it’s okay, they let us in even though we’re not cool enough to drink wine), a little bagel place, and a bunch of other places, all within walking distance.

If you go a little farther, there’s also an amazing candy shop in downtown Campbell that has a bajillion flavours of salt water taffy including maple bacon, root beer, and coffee.

Please just attach the bag to my face.

But now that the normal person food is out of the way, let me tell you about the junk food.

Look. Just look. Bask in its glory:

What is that gentle friends? That is the gajillion kinds of pop tarts they have down here. You may notice Cupcake Pop Tarts, Apple Pie Pop Tarts, Hot Chocolate Pop Tarts, and Cookie Dough Pop Tarts, which leads me to ask… what did Canada do to anger the Pop Tarts people, and how can we rectify it?! Because when I come back, there’d better be Cupcake Pop Tarts waiting for me, or there’s gonna be some kind of Pop Tart incident at the first grocery store I hit. (Sprinkles and frosting everywhere!)

I have to say, the choice here is flabbergasting. There is a cherry variety of every pop ever. And there are fancy cookies as far as the eye can see. CHEETOS COME IN FLAVOURS HERE. FLAVOURS, MY PEOPLE!

It is indeed a glorious place.

And really, isn’t that all you actually needed to know about Cupertino?

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