Vincent is right, it is an odd paradigm here, where village meets techtopia. The streets have lights and names, and the homes are single story, but overseen by the occasional ‘skyscraper.’ There’s a suburban train system, but it connects as easily to the national network as any Union station.

The people are the oddest part of it, with a nouveau riche gauche-ness and a hippy granola earthiness—its nice if you let your mind go out of focus a bit and stop comparing it to European places, but that fact that I compare it to European places at all is a kind of esteem.