Dublin…so foreign, so Californian

Last night I stayed at the Hyatt Place in Dublin…California, not Ireland. I’ve been to Dublin, Ireland. That place is old. Most of Dublin, California has been built in the past 30 years. Dublin is a city of high tech industry, freeways, rapid transit stations, condominiums, new housing developments, and shopping centers. There is an older part of Dublin, California, but I didn’t see it.

Hyatt Place Dublin is just off the north side of Interstate 580, the Oakland-Stockton freeway, and one mile east of Interstate 680, located in the corner of a shopping and entertainment plaza with a variety of restaurants and a large movie theater complex.  Movies are really $11.50 these days? Ouch!

The Dublin area has been known as the crossroads of the East Bay, California for 150 years. In the gold rush era this was the overland route from the San Francisco Bay to the great central valley.  Large sections of central California were impassable by land much of the year due to annual flooding from the Sierra snowmelt. The latter half of the 19^th century saw the construction of levees throughout the California delta region, most of them built by Chinese immigrants. The water management system turned much of the California marshland interior into lush, cultivable farmland.

The Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta is the largest estuary on the west coast with over one thousand miles of navigable waterways. Ships can travel quite a way inland on the delta waterways reaching to places like Napa and Stockton.

The people you see, hear, and meet while traveling in the high tech areas of San Jose’s Silicon Valley and the East Bay corporate zone city centers are a global community. In the 24 hours I stayed in Dublin I heard Russian, African languages, French, German, Hindi, and Mandarin while sitting in restaurants and hotels located in this suburb community 25 miles east of the San Francisco Bay. This town would have been predominantly farmers, ranchers, and small town white folk when I was a kid in California. Computer technology has brought a diverse group of global humanity to California in the past three decades just as the Gold Rush did 160 years ago with the original California 49ers.

Dublin, California is a living example of the dynamism of California. The city was only incorporated in 1982. Since that time the population has more than doubled from 20,000 to nearly 50,000. The city has grown 60% just in the past decade. Driving around Dublin I was struck by all the newness.

Oh, and the Hyatt Place. Well, if you have ever been to a Hyatt Place, then you know what it was like. All the conveniences of home without all the inconveniences of extra fees common in upper-upscale hotels.