diabolical views

I've only been here a few weeks, but at any given moment my mouth is hanging open, gaping at the crazy splash of fog and light and sea that nature throws at you. This is an incredibly beautiful city; I'm not sure that I've lived in a more stunning place in the world, although there were many beautiful moments in Los Angeles and New York. The air is fresh here too, incredibly so for a place like this, and we find ourselves constantly driving to mountaintops of which there are many.

We're tourists in the city we live in. People are always dropping by too; a friend we met in Berlin had been out of the country for six years with absolutely no visits inbetween. He's on this West Coast tour and we're having a lot of fun enjoying the crazy boisterous life in America. Only W can appreciate how weird and interesting America is, and he looks a little dazed, all this new information, all these incredible landscapes. We sit contemplating the Sonoma Valley, how beautiful it is, as the tour guide tells us tales of mega mergers and corporate distribution, and it's incredible how this small strip of land influences so much outside of its scope.

Most of the wineries we visit are not very exclusive, so they admit a certain kind of tourist like us, and we're fine with that, because I don't know enough about wine to know the difference between the really amazing stuff and the very ordinary. The really good places require guest lists and are quite particular; or so people say. i have no idea what it's really like. The guides are patient, treating us like very eager but stupid children, explaining in excruciating detail how to taste wine. It's not like we haven't done it before, but we've never had things laid out end to end.

There's this beautiful little Tuscan restaurant in downtown Sonoma with a huge poster of Lucca, and just like Lucca there are lots of little hokey touches to remind us that this is authentically Italian and indeed a family restaurant. Black and white photographs of grandma; when I went to Lucca the last time they did the same thing to assure us that everything was small-scale, even though they were more efficient and businesslike than they'd like to admit. The wineries in Sonoma are incredible stone affairs made to look like postcards from Italy, the driveways lined with incredible cypress trees.

A friend's family tells us where to go to get the very best South Indian food in the Bay Area, and they warned us that it would be packed, which it was--big brawling families and packs of tech workers and pairs of young men in North Face and preppy upturned collars.

They're working at these companies that we were always aware of when we were working in Berlin, addresses where important things were sent, where deals were made: Sunnyvale, San Jose, Cupertino, Mountain View... they're all mashed up next to each other at the south rim of the Bay.

Strangely enough, everyone's speaking English, and a wife lectures a couple facing her, "The wife makes these important decisions in the family," while juggling a child on her hip. I'm struggling to eat a dosa the right way, which is always the wrong way, and two guys next to me talk about some kind of industry stuff as a hovering waiter apologizes for my entree being later than my husband's. Everyone's teched out though, mothers pecking at very expensive new laptops and little girls mesmerized by their text messaging.

People my mother's age bike up incredibly steep hillsides, gray-haired women with incredibly muscular legs in designer bicycle wear, the logos and team jerseys from some faraway land across the sea, smiling good naturedly at us as we drive by. Everyone's invariably running, jogging or kayaking somewhere here. The uniform of the day is a hiking North Face jacket; if you're not careful you can go around being overdressed unless you're downtown, where you'll be spoiled by the slim and handsome shop boys in pinstripe suits smoking.

We drive to the highest mountain peak, Mount Diablo, which has the second clearest view in the world after Mount Kilimanjaro, and some bicycles are huffing and puffing up an incredible distance to the top, inadequately clothed in spandex. It's freezing up there, wind whipping you by, but you can run into the tower at the top for protection, which they do, or if you have a parka like me, stand on the cliff's edge and look down from what looks like an airplane's view.

We're always climbing peaks to get good views; from Mount Diablo San Francisco looks like my fingernail and the Golden Gate Bridge is nothing but a toy. As the sun sets, the mountain casts a long shadow across the valley below; I like to thing that if I point my hand upwards I'm creating night for hundreds of people. It's like playing God.