San Luis Obispo

After going to UC Santa Cruz to look around, I went around 150 miles south to San Luis Obispo. Once there, my mom and I went on a hike up one of the nearby mountains (?) for about two hours. It was a nice view, since everything is so green after all the rains.

Hiking is an interesting thing. It’s stupid when one thinks about it–you walk a lot and sweat and hurt your feet, just to get the top and look at a view and then go down. It’s not appealing at all, but it’s still enjoyable somehow. It is really satisfying once I reached the top, though, and I got a feeling of accomplishment by doing it. After that, we sinned with our dinner.

Pictured is a tri-tip sandwich, a fish taco, fries, and onion rings. The amount of calories is a number I would not like to see. The tri-tip really made me think about restaurants these days. They’re constantly striving to make these complicated burgers or sandwiches, like it’s a contest to see who has the longest ingredient list. I swear they’re actually doing that, or else they wouldn’t have those unnecessary additions to the words like “grass-fed beef” or “chicken touched by virgins on the island of Cyprus.” Anyway, they try all these complicated things, when the sandwich is still amazing even though it’s just bread, meat, and sauce. Perhaps that says something about our society, how we always strive for the complicated and amazing,when sometimes it’s best to go back to basics. I don’t know, I’m not Plato, but I swear you can write a paper about it.

I sometimes forget how nice SLO is. The city is clear about what is downtown and what is suburban. It’s clean and doesn’t have a lot of homeless people, which, coming from LA, is nice. It’s a very good place to live for a little while, especially a good college town. Speaking of which, I’ll be at Cal Poly SLO tomorrow, but until then, I’ll be thinking of the paper to write with that philosophy.