I made another pleasant discovery today. California drivers are extremely polite. Given that this is the land that coined the term "Road Rage", this came as a bit of a shock.

Every time I get to a corner and have to cross the road, I am very mindful of the cars turning into the road I am crossing. This is something I am used to doing when at home, simply because Australian drivers are amongst the rudest on the planet. If I stepped off a curb in Australia without checking and waiting for the cars on that road or turning into it, I could end up seriously hurt. At the very least there would be a blast of horn and screech of tyre. Not so here. Each and every time there has been a car that would cross my path, they have stopped and the driver waved me to cross the road. If cars had pulled out over the footpath when exiting a car park and saw me coming they would back up to allow me to pass, or at least offer to do so. Now I don't think that I am that intimidating, so I can only assume that this behaviour is par for the course. If so it is a very nice feature of the area.

One other not so nice feature is the abuse of the English language that occurs on a regular basis. I was at a rather nice restaurant this evening when I overheard a conversation where one participant could not string more than five words together without liberal sprinklings of the word "like". "He was like arguing with my friend" was one overheard snippet. Excuse me? If your friend shared your verbal aptitude then I assume you mean he was completely pointless, endlessly frustrating, of no consequence, or some other measure of banality. Similarly, "like" is not a valid sentence in its own right, nor is it an acceptable prelude to a sentence in which no comparison is being made. "Like, he just sat there". Sorry? What is like he just sat there, your ability to construct a sentence? No, that is more like an elephant trying to eat with chopsticks.

Once more on language, and I promise I'll relent (at least for today). When asked how you are going with your meal at a restaurant, it is a bad idea to respond "wonderful". It seems it is far too close in the American ear to "I want the bill". "Excellent" seems to be a safer choice, although it does raise an eyebrow or two when spoken with Mr. Burns' voice and your fingers tented.

Speaking of restaurants, I must make mention of the one I went to today. The "Mandarin Gourmet" is a rather unpretentious building, low to the ground and dimly lit inside. The food, however, was excellent, and the service first rate. I had a dish they called "3 delicacies Kung Pao style", which although it is supposed to be Szechuan style, it seemed to lack the szechuan peppercorns that I would have expected. Nevertheless it was an excellent meal, with extremely tender meat and the best scallops I have tasted in a long while. This, coupled with a reasonable Napa valley Pinot Noir (that could have been served slightly chilled to better effect), made for a very nice evening - overheard conversations aside.

One thing that struck me as odd was that I had to order chinese tea. In most asian restaurants I have frequented, the tea is a given and usually provided by the server prior to your ordering. I wonder if this is something peculiar to Australia, or if the lack of tea was an American quirk. Perhaps readers from other countries could provide their experiences in this matter.

In my last letter I spoke about the ethnicity statistics. I must apologise for getting them slightly wrong, but herein lies something rather odd and slightly disconcerting. The official statistics give a full breakdown of ethnicity, but the list I was looking at was the list of ethnicity within the schools of the district. Now I personally see these sorts of figures only relevant to demographers and others of a similar bent, numerically speaking. I can see perhaps that it would be nice to know that if you are of Japanese origin then around 1 in 20 of the people you meet may be able to give you a wave and say "konichiwa" in greeting. What I don't get is that "White" is an ethnic category and there are absolutely no breakdowns based on language or culture in this group. I also have a lot of trouble understanding why it is necessary to know the ethnic breakdown of schools in the district. Does it matter that your child will be mixing with people from other cultures, or at least descendents from people of those cultures? Do people these days really decide the schools they send their children to based on the ethnic mix and not the academic record? I surely hope not.