We walked thru Santa Cruz with our packs looking for a good place to cook lunch and the sell the jewelry we had made. Unfortunately just as we were about to get settled on the board walk we saw a ill humored police officer giving a woman a ticket for selling beautiful necklaces (gorgeous cords with huge purple and green teardrop stones)...
So much for that idea. And with that and with all the signs saying things like:
No littering
No Loitering
No camping
Violators will be arrested
So much for easy breezy hippie town
I would think that selling what you have (if you cannot afford rent, overhead and all ) would be a way for people out of work to doing something enriching and keep them from needing to panhandle...one could even work one's way up.
But obviously the powers of commerce do not lay in the hands of ordinary people.
WHY?
People come to places like Santa Cruz to experience alternate cultures. Buying cool stuff from hippies with dreadlocks is one of the fun things to do here. If I want delightfully amateurish jewelry, I'll buy from them...If I want high end stuff, I'll go to a store...don't see how the two venues have to compete...now if the stores want to sell stuff that is mass produced but seems like it might have been made by an artisy hippie that is another story...I don't understand the conflict
Whoa...
We also had a scary moment in which James was threaten by a 4ft10in guy with too much vodka in him...Guy kept bragging about his baseball bats (arms) and how he was going to slug them into James. I stood up with my walking stick, put my pepper spray in my pocket...but James did a great job at diffusing the situation and the guy finally walked away once he saw none of us were going to take the bait.
It felt good to know that I had a plan in my head and wasn't afraid at all.
We also lost the wonderful peas that James had cooked but the walk back to Natural Bridges was so beautiful that we quickly forgot about the beans and the crazy midget
Susanne
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