Walnut Creek

May 20th, 2008

Yesterday we went to Walnut Creek, and although I had always hear Mr. Dao talk about the “kids at Walnut Creek” I had never visited. I actually didn’t even know where it was located. When we got off Bart, I was very surprised due to the fact that everything looked
so clean and to some extend “perfect.” A perception I had before going to Walnut Creek was that the majority of the population there would be Caucasian. I thought that we would get weird stares from people there, because we are a very diverse group. Walking down the streets there, I felt like I didn’t belong. Several eyes kept looking at us, almost like they were thinking, “Where did they come from? What are they doing here?” I began to think of their perspective and maybe they were simply not used to seeing minorities
in their own community. When Mr. Lee assigned us to do 5 interviews, I honestly didn’t think it was going to be possible. Everyone there seemed to not like us, or feel awkward
just by our presence. I came to realize after going store to store that there was a lot of Caucasians in Walnut Creek. There were some that were friendly and some that were not. Many of them described their community as being very diverse and of course to me it
was the opposite of diverse. The majority of the Latinos that my group and I saw were the ones that were on a construction site. Once in a while we will see different ethnicities, but that was rarely the case. After my visiting at Walnut Creek I feel like it is not a diverse city or at least in comparison to Oakland. The other Latino we saw was the chef at a
restaurant called “Crepes restaurant.”
When we were at that restaurant, several of my group members were talking to the Chef. While that was happening a woman, dropped her baby’s shoes and exaggerating it, she looked at them several times very angry and said “Excuse me!” I thought she was just annoyed by us being there. Since I have lived in Oakland my entire life, I am completely aware of how my community looks and what
not. I can say that there are a lot of differences between Oakland and Walnut Creek. First of all, Walnut Creek was very clean, there was very few garbage in the streets. Another big difference that I saw was that the streets were very nice, they were not destroyed, and worn out like Oakland’s. When we were given time to eat lunch, I realized that there were no liquor stores, therefore there were no people just hanging out in front of stores. The bus at Walnut Creek was FREE and it had good air conditioning, did I mention it was free? The buses in Oakland are definitely not like that. I really can’t think of any
similarities because everything was different in my opinion. The food there was very different. We couldn’t even find a Taco Truck, like the thousand that we have in Oakland. The environment was different, the people, the air, even we acted
different. That was the day that nobody jay walked.