Every year for the past 15 years my wife and I have been going to the US to visit our aging and increasingly ill family and friends who live in and around Philadelphia, Pa. This year our trip was different. We took our two middle grandsons on a vacation to California for a pre and post-barmitzvah celebration to Disneyland and the other major amusement parks. We had done this five years ago for our two oldest grandsons and decided to change the venue this time because of the awful heat and humidity we confronted in Florida while visiting Disneyworld and Orlando in the summer months.

We hadn't been to the west coast in more than 15 years and the time before that was 41 years ago. To say that America has changed is inaccurate. California is like an entirely different planet than I remember. The Latino influence is incredible. I'm not making a value judgment on this or any of the other very different faces of America that I saw and experienced. It's just changed and entirely foreign to what I had seen and experienced on my two previous trips to the west coast.

All announcements at the airports are made in English and Spanish. The service personnel we came across almost everywhere were primarily Latinos. This was true in the hotels, in restaurants, in the amusement parks and in all the shops. In Disneyland every announcement and/or event was made in English and repeated in Spanish. Almost all of the directional and informational signs were in both languages.

Yet, there were inconsistencies. I had read before the trip that the largest Mexican population in California could be found in San Diego, because of it's close proximity to the Mexican border. In San Diego while visiting the zoo, a safari-like park north of the city, and Sea World, the announcements relayed to the public were only in English. In a fancy steak restaurant close to our hotel the waitresses and waiters were all Anglos, yet the clean-up people were Latinos as was the case in the hotel where we stayed.

Sometimes the background of the service personnel did cause problems. Once in an ice cream shop in San Francisco while trying to repeat the complicated order for one of our grandsons, a Mexican immigrant repeated herself at least six times to both my wife and me before I realized what she was trying to say. I'm sure that in her mind she was speaking perfectly clear English. In Anaheim at a 711 store when we couldn't find tomatoes we had a very difficult time explaining to the Pakistani working behind the counter what a tomato is, practically drawing pictures, and he honestly didn't understand what we wanted and just said they didn't have any.

The other major change that I noticed was the number of Asians that one sees. In the amusement parks most of the visitors were of either Latino or Asian descent. This was not true in either Sequoia or Yosemite national parks where most of the visitors were Anglo Saxons with a few Asians and a few Latino service personnel in the shops or hotels.

In San Francisco most of the shops even outside Chinatown were manned or run by Asians, who almost always spoke a perfect English. In San Francisco we took our grandsons to a lovely hands-on science museum called "The Exploratorium" and 90 percent of the people visiting were Asians and the remainder Anglos.

The other tremendous change and shock to us was the size of the people. To read in the newspapers that one out of every three Americans is obese and that more than 50 percent are overweight is one thing, but to walk around in these amusement parks that draw tens of thousands of people everyday is really shocking. This was not confined to any one area or locale. San Francisco is a city where many people are outdoors and walk around the streets, yet the overweight problems there seemed as severe as in Anaheim, San Diego, or any of the numerous amusement parks we visited. In the east coast the situation was equally bad, whether it was in an airport or a mall.  It seemed as though every other person we saw was extremely obese or certainly close to it. We saw a huge number of Americans who either because of their size or a related health problem had to get around on some sort of motorized vehicle. They were not old people, but in their 30's to 50's and it certainly sent up a red light to us that there is definitely something sick and not right with the immense size of such a huge amount of people.

With all the talk about the lack of health care and the world political crisis facing the US, if I were a leader or a military person I would certainly be concerned about the physical shape of the citizenry. I've also read studies that say close to 50 percent of young people are obese and unfortunately we saw much of that too, but you also can't help but notice that it runs in families and when a huge adult was walking or riding in a cart and a child was with them, invariably the child was also big.

I've read demographic studies of the US and it's estimated that within another 40 years Anglos will be a minority in the US. I don't know what the situation is in other states but with California being the most populated, from my perspective I would say that number is way off and today's minorities will be the majority much sooner.  I wouldn't want to speculate on what effect this will have on the US economy, its politics or its place in the world. I have also read that less than 50 percent of all Latinos finish high school. As the child of immigrant parents in the US, education was always valued and a Jewish dropout was jokingly referred to as anyone who hadn't acquired a PhD, maybe it will be so with the Latinos too.