San Francisco has all the best that America can offer- Good food, friendly educated people, great weather and a sense of culture, coolness and taste.
My first night started with the Hostel pub crawl. Here I made a few friends from the hostel, including an Australian girl called Megan, who I spent the next few days with. Went on huge walk the next day, taking in the major sights, including the Trans America Pyramid building, which I was strangely fascinated by. By the end of the day, we were pretty exhausted, as most of the walking involved hills and some vicious inclines! We therefore decided we deserved a visit to a traditional American Diner, complete with dining booths, and huge menu and unlimited refills on coffee!
The following day, we were joined by Rob, a guy who'd traveled with me throughout New Zealand. As he was getting to grips with the city, Megan and me hired bikes for the day to cycle across the Golden Gate Bridge. This was great fun, and it was amazing to be finally cycling across this great icon I'd seen in so many films. It really is an amazing piece of engineering, completed in 1937. We were also treated to some great views of the city, as yet again the weather was perfect. We arrived on the other side in a village called Sacramento- with a trendy Putney-by-the-bay feel, where we ordered some amazing cheeseburgers before catching the ferry back in the darkness, with the city lit up across the bay.
The city has a different and more relaxed vibe than any other Western city I've visited. It was here the great flower power revolution started in the 1960's and it shows. I'm a huge fan of the place. As i write this I'm sitting on the grass in Alamo square. The air is cool but the sun is shining, and the place is full of groups having picnics and playing guitar. It doesn't get much better!
On my final days, I visited Alcatraz with Rob and Caroline from Ireland, who was also in the hostel. Alcatraz was one of the most notorious prisons in the states 'till its closure in 1963. Famously inescapable, it incarcerated some of Americas most feared prisoners including Al Capone- who was imprisoned for tax evasion! It was a very stark place as you would expect, no comforts of any kind, but was not a sad place in the same way I found S21 in Cambodia. Most people in here were served justice of a kind, handed out to them by a jury for a crime. It was interesting to experience what a prison can be like, with an excellent audio tour bringing the atmosphere to life. The thing which must have driven so many of the prisoners to attempt escape (none succeeded) was the location of the city such a short distance away. As it is only a mile across the bay, the sight, smell and noise of the city can be heard clearly, which must have just served to remind them of what they were missing. However, the current and icy water claimed all those who made it that far.
Following this, I met up with Roger, a distant cousin of mine who now lives out here- we went for a great Mexican, and he gave me a few pointers for taking in some final areas of the city I hadn't yet visited, including the gay district Castro, which was surprisingly sedate, rather than the in-your-face campness (bad choice of phrase!) that we were expecting as the gay center of America. The only obvious indicators were the rainbow flags along the streets and the rather enlightening selection of DVDs in some of the shop windows!
Sorry for no photos this time- there's not a single internet cafe that will allow me to upload any photos here! Hopefully I'll add these later!
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