The trees do eventually lose their leaves, but not until late November. The only time you can find a good pile to go crunching through is in the early morning before they've been swept up and stuffed into plastic trash bags. Poplar leaves are good and crunchy.
In the winter the bushes wear coats. This is true not only on campus, but along the big boulevards, too.
Pizza can be successfully made in a toaster oven with regular bread dough and imported spaghetti sauce and Land O'Lakes cheese (they're in the international foods section of the big grocery store).
Oh, and a picture I'd saved from last summer, so you can compare a burning California with every day Asia (see the earlier post for the satellite pic of Beijing, and see here for an article on the Brown Cloud that Hangs Over Asia, as we've started calling it, in capital letters because that must be its proper name).
