Down in Monterey

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"Slide into the Home Plate for a home run meal" 

How could we resist? A cute tiny place in the neighborhood with great reviews and baseball memorabilia on the walls.

Interestingly, all the the servers were Thai and had on matching T shirts with writing in Thai. Reminded me of the Cuban restaurant in Houston owned by a Vietnamese family. 

(The cooks at the Home Plate were Hispanic, of course. If you've read any of the Anthony Bourdain books, you know that at restaurants at every price level, the people making your food probably speak Spanish, maybe Portugese.)

But I digress.  Here is a haiku by Mark about this morning at the El Castell Motel. 

      Mist tickles my face
      As I head for bad coffee
      The smell of curry

This morning at our Spanish named motel owned by a family from India, a quartet of German speakers eats starchy motel breakfast while an Orthodox Jewish man dressed for prayer in tallit and tifilin crosses the parking lot to his Prius where he fetches a well worn book while nearby, chattering Chinese tourists with selfie sticks pile into their SUV. 

As Mark noted, if someone was xenophobic, this place would make them crazy. 

It felt like the crossroads of the world, here in a small city on the California coast. 

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