Claire Connelly

Just back. Spent a whole day walking around the city with Melissa, pointing out places I’d been, things I’d done, and bemoaning our current hometown.

I work at Harvey Mudd College, one of the Claremont Colleges. Other Claremont Colleges are Claremont-McKenna College, Pitzer College, Pomona College, and Scripps College. There’s also a large religious (you can bet that’s Christianist) school, and the Claremont Graduate University, which turns out conservative scholars.

Claremont the town has a nice main street with lots of small gift and antique shops. There are a number of good restaurants (e.g., Walter’s, Claremont Juice Company) as well as some crappy ones (the French restaurant). Claremont is weirdly full of people during the day, mostly well-dressed, well-off women who apparently don’t have jobs and can afford to hang out in the expensive shops.

There are some cool stores, including the Folk Music store, which sells music and instruments, a neat old-fashion toy store, a store that sells rubber stamps and another that sells scrapbook supplies. My favorite is probably Raku, a gift store that has affordable (and odd) cards and gift items.

Claremont is pretty dead, culturally speaking. There are some things that happen at the colleges, but outside their campuses, Claremont is very suburban, fading into hard-right fundie Christian at the edges.

I’m living in Upland, in the first house I’ve ever owned. It’s a nice enough place to live—our neighbors are good people (at least the ones who don’t put BUSH FOREVER signs on their lawns), but it’s about as much of a cultural wasteland as the rest of southern California.

There are some nice restaurants in the town center—Molly’s Souper and Café Allegro in particular. The town is kind of weird, a mix of antique stores verging on junk stores and very strange specialty stores (such as skateboard shops and a huge Chinese medicine place).

As I say, it’s okay for where it is, but it wouldn’t be worth going out of your way to visit. (If someone knows about something here that would be worth a visit, please let me know!)

I lived in Vancouver (okay, Burnaby) for about four years. It’s a wonderful place, with a great climate, beautiful things to look at, and terrific neighborhoods with small shops, nice people, and things worth doing that you can walk to.

I wish I still lived here.