San Jose was a really great place to visit because you can find just about anything you might want right there. On one hand, there’s definitely a sense of history and it was easy to see that the Spanish culture is still very strong there. At the same time, there is definitely a contemporary and cultured influence. San Jose has a symphony, ballet and repertory theatre as well as several museums and plenty of activities downtown for entertaining nightlife. The downtown area was really nice to explore. It runs about three miles and it’s shaded by great trees, making it nice to explore by foot, if you have a mind to do so.
We didn’t do the ballet or symphony when we were there, although I have heard that they are both really great. Since we weren’t going to be in town for very long we wanted to hit a couple of the hot spots that you can’t see and do anywhere else. The ballet and symphony are nice, but it’s not as if you can’t attend those in other cities as well. So, on our first day we headed out to the Redwood State Park. This is really worth a visit, if you ever happen to be in the area. You really can’t even begin to imagine the size of these trees until you see them up close. The weekends tend to be fairly busy, from what I hear, but we went on a weekday so it wasn’t too bad. Be sure to bring along good walking shoes and a big bottle of water, especially if you’re visiting during the summer because it does tend to get really hot.
The next day we visited the Winchester Mystery House, which I have to say was quite interesting, to say the least. This is probably the most famous tourist attraction in San Jose, so as you can imagine, it was fairly crowded when we visited. Apparently a very rich and somewhat eccentric widow lived there. Her husband had invented the Winchester rifle or something. Anyway, after her husband died, she tried to contact him through a spiritualist. She was told that the spirit world was filled with innumerable people who had been killed by the rifle her husband invented and they were really angry. Her only hope was to build a house and never stop building it, to keep the angry ghosts from settling in. So, that’s what she did and the resulting house is specifically designed to confuse all the angry ghosts. It was actually pretty cool. There are doors that go nowhere and long, winding staircases and windows that look inside instead of outside. I’m not much into the ghost thing, but it was pretty neat to tour the house.
