Brown Motion

America yet again celebrated Thanksgiving this Thursday.  A moment for families to attempt to get together and sit at the dinner table for some traditional or not so traditional meals as a family.  Which can be hard sometimes. We usually tend to eat as a family of three daily given the bulk of the extended family is a half planet away.   But we are thankful for a lot.  This time in California the big thanks goes to nature.  Nature who decided to shower this land with a bounty of fresh rain, a much needed downpour to drown out the fires burning among several communities and clear the air literally. Using that as an excuse to step out we went walking in a nearby wooded region to smell in the fresh moist air and give those stagnant limbs something to do.  Here are some pictures from that walk in the woods... Trading the indoor shopping craziness and clearances for the vast outdoors was and will remain the clear choice for us for any Thanks...

America's fascination with shopping is evident in their large malls or warehouse clubs that can double up as bomb shelters in case there is an all out war with another nation or a nuclear fallout.  There is tons of dried food, fresh food, gluten free food, beverages and toilet paper to take care of a small country. But another comparative data point when looking at how this engine works vis a vis another country where people go to the Souk, Bazaar, Mandai et al is the amount of real estate devoted to parking their automobiles - a short walk away from the center of all things bling or smart or XXL. These parking lots are large open to sky, paved tracts of real estate in sometimes the most expensive of neighborhoods - if all else fails they rise towards the sky competing with other structures which include the shopping space, air conditioned for plastic swipe excess. Thusly the lots have well marked zones for storing your chariots - at times resembling machines ...