touristy?

[Because I am not one for following directions, I did use the Internet when I wrote this. But I knew EXACTLY where the photos were (they're mostly mine) and I swear I didn't venture off into the rest of the Internet until later when I added the one not-mine image. The whole idea came from a picture I had in my head (of a picture I took) so it seemed only right to put them in.]

San Jose fancies itself a cosmopolitan place. In terms of population and land, it's bigger than San Francisco. But it's called the San Francisco Bay Area, not San Jose Bay Area. Ok fine, that's probably because San Francisco has a bay and San Jose doesn't, but really—when someone says "Northern California," you think "San Francisco," don't you? Not San Jose.

So, back to the point—San Jose fancies itself terribly cosmopolitan. The Cinequest film festival is in San Jose, not San Francisco. As you can see (in the kind of crappy cameraphone photo), the downtown movie theatre gets all gussied up for the event—everything is shiny and new! Of course San Jose is the "IT" destination for up-and-coming filmmakers. Who would ever think otherwise? Well, those of us who know the rest of the city has a tendency to look more like this tunnel o'graffiti than the shiny downtown pavilion (which, incidentally, sat empty for five years during the dot-com boom-to-bust—the empty movie theatre reflects more of the true San Jose than the Cinequesty one).

If you're looking for the shiny and new or the ivied and old—the stuff of picture postcards—it's not difficult to find. But the interesting stories are not those made from money. In the shadow of Tower Hall is its antithesis: Peanuts Deluxe Cafe. Don't let the "deluxe" fool you. Just after I took this photo, I flicked a cockroach off the counter and settled in to eat my breakfast. I went there almost every day.

If you click through the photo and look in the background, you'll see a fellow serving up the food. His name is Minh and he's a Korean immigrant. The Korean immigrant owns the American diner and the Chinese place next door, and serves a student population in which Caucasians are barely in the majority, in a city built on Ohlone land by Spaniards.

Then there's the Crepe Lady, whose name I don't even know. On Saturday mornings, this Vietnamese woman—just a few hours after closing up shop at the Chinese restaurant down the block—spends four hours making crepes in the front of a coffeeshop in a relatively tony part of town. She could never afford to live there, and no one she cooks for looks like her. If you pay close enough attention to the financial transactions that go along with the crepe-making, you'll see a lot of white guilt makes its way into the tip jar.

When you visit, what will you see?

[Graffiti picture by Flickr user caracolski, other photos by me.]