San Jose

I will be honest: San Jose was not on our list. We had come to see San Francisco, an hour north, and San Jose was where the flights were cheaper and the friend we were visiting happened to live. “There’s nothing there,” she warned us, apologetically, the night we arrived. And yet the next morning, walking through her neighbourhood in the flat golden warmth — genuinely warm, ten degrees kinder than foggy San Francisco — Lia turned to me and said she liked it here. We both did. There is something disarming about a place with no expectations of you, that has quietly given up trying to impress and just gets on with being pleasant. By day two we had stopped apologising for being there.

The Winchester Oddity

The strangest afternoon we spent in California was at the Winchester Mystery House, the sprawling Victorian mansion that Sarah Winchester, heiress to the rifle fortune, supposedly kept building for decades to confuse the ghosts of everyone the guns had killed. Whatever the truth of the legend, the house itself is genuinely deranged — staircases that climb into ceilings, doors that open onto blank walls, a window set into a floor. Lia, who does not believe in ghosts, gripped my hand anyway in the dim corridors. Our guide told the stories with a perfectly straight face. We came out blinking into the sun, half-spooked and wholly delighted, agreeing it was the best money we had spent on the whole coast.

Downtown, Tacos, and the Real City

Downtown San Jose surprised us. We had braced for sterile plazas and got instead a lively, sun-warmed grid — the tech workers spilling out of glass towers into taquerias and Vietnamese cafés, because this is one of the great immigrant cities of the West. We ate our way through it. A bowl of pho in the neighbourhood locals call Little Saigon, then, another day, tacos al pastor in a mercado that could have been in Guadalajara, which made Lia and me both a little homesick for Mexico in the best way. The San Pedro Square Market became our regular haunt, all stalls and shared tables and cold beer, a place that felt like the city actually gathering rather than performing.

Roses and the Older Valley

Before it was Silicon Valley, this was the Valley of Heart’s Delight — orchards and flower farms as far as the eye could see, and you can still find the ghost of it. We spent a slow morning at the Municipal Rose Garden, five acres of it, thousands of bushes in absurd abundance, the air heavy and sweet. An older couple were photographing a single perfect bloom with great seriousness. Lia walked the rows reading the little name-plates aloud, and I lay on the grass and did nothing at all, which the California sun seemed to endorse. It was the clearest reminder that beneath the world’s tech capital there is still a warm, fertile, unhurried place, if you know where to look for it.

Getting There

Norman Y. Mineta San Jose International Airport sits remarkably close to downtown — a ten-minute drive, no more — with domestic flights from across the US and a handful of international routes. Many travellers, like us, find it a cheaper and calmer alternative to San Francisco’s airport an hour north. Once there, downtown is walkable and there is a light-rail system, but San Jose is a driving city at heart and a car makes the wider Valley, the coast at Santa Cruz, and San Francisco itself easy day trips. The weather is almost comically reliable — warm, dry, sunny most of the year — so come whenever suits you; we went in May and never once needed a jacket.