San Francisco Trip |
Matthew
Stibbe's Homepage
San Francisco TripSan Francisco |
Summary:
In August 2002, I went to San Francisco for a month's working holiday. These pages record some of impressions the trip made on me.
Believe it or not, the view from my desk
I worked in my flat on a couple of articles but it was hard to concentrate with this view out of the window. When I came home I realised I had taken about 150 photos of this same view. Each time it is different. The fog comes in and out under the bridge and sometimes it would seem to snake along the very streets below my window. Ships were always moving out in the bay - warships and big container carriers mainly. On good days, the bay would fill with little yachts and the sky with light aircraft.
A street near my flat, looking East to the Bay Bridge
Coffee is my secret weakness. I gave it up a decade ago during a long week of cold turkey headaches. But every now and again, the smell of a good espresso hits me or I catch sight of a pretty girl sipping a macchiato and it just looks so inviting. My San Francisco diary is full of Pepys-like admissions: 'latte', 'double espresso,' 'too much coffee.'
During my first week, I heard that the man who had invented the frisbee had died. I don't think this fact was reported in the UK, or even outside California, but it symbolised for me the death of innocent fun. The exuberance that the frisbee represented is visible everywhere in San Francisco but just out of reach, like something archaeological in Rome or Athens, and not accessible to us any more. Luckily, there's still plenty of cynical, self-conscious, post-modern fun to be had. Like drinking coffee.
On one coffee adventure, I saw a parked car being broken into. Another driver saw this and realised that they could park in the soon-to-be-vacated space and stopped - holding up all the traffic behind her - until the thief had broken the window and started trying to jumpstart the engine. This took too long for the jam forming in the street and somebody started hooting their horn. Eventually everyone was honking and the thief was looking really stressed out and rushing the job. Eventually, he did it and sped off while the woman parked. THAT'S how bad parking is in San Francisco.
Fog-mountain, ocean-field, bridge
My view of the American legal system had been coloured by the famous story of the woman who sued McDonald's because she scalded herself on their hot coffee. I always thought this 'victory' was fatuous until I heard on the radio that the woman had had third degree burns over 6% of her body and needed hospitalisation and skin grafts. Also, the coffee was served at an incredibly high temperature - far hotter than we have it at home - and that McDonald's had previously received 700 complaints about it.