My first week in San Francisco passed relatively quickly in a fairly regular routine of wake-up, catch shuttle, work, catch shuttle, sleep, repeat. I did manage to walk around some of downtown San Francisco on a couple of evenings, but it gets dark around 5:30ish here at the moment, so there isn’t alot to see by the later evening.
My impression of San Francisco is fairly neutral, there is nothing that I really dislike about the place but it certainly doesn’t grab me or make me feel like I would like to stay here for an extended period of time.
Yesterday (Saturday) I met up with Sam (an old colleague from Waikato Uni, and now a colleague at Google) who has recently shifted over here to do a bit of sightseeing. Sam had car which is pretty much a requirement to get anywhere other than the very center of the city itself. We headed out over the Golden Gate Bridge and up to redwood forest 20 mins away called Muir Woods. It was very nice and rural, and refreshingly close to the city. I got my weekly quota of exercise with a 4.1mile hike to the top of a ridge on the Dipsea trail where we enjoyed some nice views out over the Pacific ocean.
After that we meandered our way back into town and had a nice late lunch at a small restaurant in the ‘Little Italy’ area of town. An interesting thing to note about San Francisco is that despite being built on a fault line (and hence being very hilly) the city is laid out in a strict grid, which leads to some very very steep roads, including one that we drove down that has to resort to a series of sharp S bends in order to descend the hill and keep the grid pattern mostly intact.
Today I spent the afternoon at the SF Museum of Modern Art which had quite a few interesting exhibitions on, I skipped through the painting section fairly quickly having seen enough paintings recently while we were in Paris! The photography exhibitions were excellent, Jeff Wall‘s photos in particular were very dramatic and appealing. He puts a remarkable amount of effort into the shots too, including hiring someone to furnish and live in an apartment for six months so it will be their ‘home’ when he takes a portrait, and recreating an entire streetscape outside a nightclub in intricate detail within a studio. Highly recommended.
I have four more days working here before flying backing home, which I’m looking forward too. It is very good working here in Mountain View and meeting people who I work with day-to-day basis in person for the first time, but it is a long time to be away from home and living out of a suitcase!
Finally, it seems that I’m either loosing my New Zealand identity or I adapt very quickly to wherever I am. Over the past few months I’ve been stopped on the street in Luxembourg, Paris, Dublin and today San Francisco and asked for directions to some obscure place that only a local would know. To top it off I discovered that half my colleagues thought I was Irish (the conversation started because someone asked me why I was wearing a t-shirt with a Kiwi on it…) and during a dinner conversation on Tuesday night with a group of people I was meeting for the first time my accent was guessed as being Australian, New Zealand, English, Irish and even American!
I still feel like a New Zealander (whatever that means), but the rest of the world doesn’t seem to think so…
Comment from Gill on 2007-12-03
Ha- people stopped us in Paris and asked directions too- must be that kiwis are adaptive and look purposeful and/or relaxed at any given moment