The First Day at Monterey (06/23/2006 US)

This is a small town with beautiful and extraordinary views. Mountains, lakes, sea, you can see them all right here in this small town. What you can expect from this small place is friendly smile and greetings from people you don't know. A "hi" from strangers maybe queer in Taiwan, but it is not unusual to hear the word coming out.
Perhpas it was because of the jet lag, I woke up early. Fortunately, I didn't feel that tired as I thought I might be.
Vanessa and I decided to go to downtown to see if we can find the place for us to stay for the next coming year. Of course, we did make a survey on the Internet. Nothing useful came out, though. But we felt that going to downtown to take a look was definitely necessary for newcomers like us. We looked for information of buses to downtown Monterey. We thought the place we stayed was far away from bus stop, but it was really close and convenient. It didn't take us much time to walk to the bus stop, and the bus came within five minutes. As we were trying to make sure if that was the right place to take a bus, a man came over and told us the bus should come here within five minutes. Few minutes later, he asked us if we had any change. He didn't check if he had enough change for the ticket. Without second thought, we searched for change in our purse. Vanessa gave him $20 change. But a bad hunch caught her. Why did he have no change for bus fare if he knew he was going to take a bus? It was not that unusual to me, but Vanessa felt a bit odd about this. So we decided to go to the bank, just to make sure if the bill was genuine. Luckily, it was. I don't think we were too worried. One can never be too cautious when he is a total stanger of the place.
With a map in hand, we looked around place for rent. We went to agents, but nothing worked out for us. They had nothing furnished, cheap enough, and at great location. After searching for an afternoon, we had a clearer picture of the town. It's rather small. Though we did not find anything, but at least we were able to take a really close look at the town. That's one benefit, I guess.