Barack Obama won the presidential elections, which I watched with my international friends when all the Americans were puzzled by the idea of election night party. Proposition 37 did not pass, which I'm happy about - but it leaves me hoping that GM labelling will become a standard across the country without exceptions and with companies providing accessible info on the genetic manipulations done on their crops.
Excitingly, Boyfriend arrived to California for a couple of months. We've kept surprisingly busy - there are people to dine with, games to play, movies to watch, stuff to do all the time. Davis keeps delighting us with its friendly people as well as dining and entertainment options, and the fact that everything is very close - walking or biking distance away.
Boyfriend's been pleasantly surprised by the food selection at the local grocery stores Co-op and Nugget. Also, after seeing the wonderful movie Samsara and having a couple of conversations about animal welfare in America, we've started buying more and more humanely raised, free-range and local meat... which I realised that I had already been doing to some extent unknowingly, as I had found Nugget and Co-op meat much better quality than anything else available.
Thanksgiving was a great experience. As a holiday, it's something very American, and even there is a slight Christian side to it, it seems that it is celebrated in many households of different religions too. I've found that America is very diverse and there are not many traditions and celebrations between the different groups, but I haven't (yet) met anyone who wouldn't celebrate Thanksgiving in some fashion.
We had the pleasure of having a (vegetarian) Thanksgiving dinner with one of my colleagues and her extended family. I felt welcome to their holiday celebration, which after all is in the spirit of Thanksgiving (natives helping the newcomers through their first winter) and definitely something I want to learn from. The dinner was delicious and contained a lot of traditional American dishes that I hadn't tried before - awesome! Thank you to our hosts!
The weather has been varied, a lot of sunshine over the Thanksgiving weekend and beautiful trees in autumn colours. A large storm front went past Northern California this weekend, some power outages and fallen trees due to this, but mainly just a lot of rain. Here's a picture of a typical residential street in Davis (copyright belongs to Boyfriend):
