Day 4 – San Jose – Los Gatos – Santa Cruz – Sezdah Bedar – #travelingwithbaby

We had another Sezdah Bedar celebration yesterday. Our first one, was smaller, with about 100 people. Yesterday, there were thousands of people. Most of those photos are on my real camera or Shah’s phone, but I’ll go ahead and post photos from my phone of the event (it had ducks) and then our time later at the ocean (it had birds).

Sezdah Bedar is special.  Apparently, the whole country, and all Iranians living abroad, go to the park and eat. We have done this the 13th day of every New Year, Norooz, Spring, since he has been there, but we have been at the park by ourselves.  What I didn’t realize until this second Sezdah Bedar celebration (Iranian’s abroad sometimes celebrate on the weekend closest to the real date), is that everyone is supposed to share their food and that you can eat anything anyone has.  Before and after the Bedar in Berkley people kept talking about all the food we were going to eat.  We brought pumpkin seeds and our host brought chicken to grill and watermelon, bread, and cheese.  It was good, but not exactly a feast.  I talked to Shah about this later and that is why he explained I could have eaten anything that anyone had brought.

This second Sezdah bedar down near San Jose was HUGE.  The pictures only show a fraction of the people.  We had tons of food.  Iranian’s basically cook “kabobs” on big swords.  None of those tiny stick things that I would use for a kabob.  You can see both them putting the meat on the kabobs and taking it off.  It was delicious.

I love learning a new language, and everyone we were with tried to speak a lot of English with me as well, but it was still nice to use baby as an excuse to go see the ducks and let them relax in their own language for a whiel.

So after that picnic (we stayed for 3 hours, instead of the 6 or 7 the day before), we drove over to see the coast in Santa Cruz.  It was simply beautiful.  There is something about the light at sunset.

 

This trip made me remember traveling abroad with my cousin in college.  We saw the museums and other important sites, but what we loved and where we spent the majority of our time was in nature.  We stopped traveling for the last 3 days of our 3 week backpacking trip and skipped several planned cities just so we could explore a beautiful a small lake town in Austria.

I realized on this trip that I am very grateful that my husband has the same travel priorities.  On a six day trip to “San Francisco” we only spent one day in San Francisco.  He loves and appreciates art and cities, but we both priorities the beauty of nature.  But I promise, I am getting to the San Francisco part of this trip.  If baby cooperates, I’ll post about that tomorrow.