Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

One of the nicest things about living in a city with a high expat population is that you're constantly bumping into interesting people. Maybe the boring ones avoid me, but every gringo I've met down here has been a fascinating character (Johnny Strike for example).

Today I talked to two new people. The first is an old (well, not old, but older than me) sixties radical (now with the new left) from San Francisco who works at The Exploratorium and is relocating down here with her husband to escape a dying regime. The second was a pilot of thirty years who after retiring swore off airplanes and moved onto a 32' single hull sailboat with his wife — in the slip “next door” to him is a couple who just finished a twelve year old circumnavigation of the globe… Oh yeah, and his brother is Norman White, an eccentric robot artist that I'm sure some people reading this must know.

And the wonderful wonderful punchline is that the photo above is the heart of the downtown core of this city — no crime, perfect weather, friendly and interesting people… You know, we spend a lot of time in Canada, America, and I'm sure Europe as well, boasting to ourselves about how great a society we've created. But we're so inward looking. The more I travel and the more I see of this planet and its life, the more wonderful the world feels, and the more my concepts of hierarchy fall away.