Wednesday, November 08, 2006

San Francisco


It needs the excersice
Originally uploaded by delta_avi_delta.
I was over in Palo Alto last week for work - my first trip stateside and it was a blast - many cultural learnings.

I'm not a fan of the ingress process though. You have to give details of your stay before they let you on the plane, and you get photographed, fingerprinted, and mildly questioned when you get off. *Fingerprinted*. I may be old fashioned but I consider all of that a privacy violation. Oh and you have to put your potentially explosive deodorant in a little plastic baggy so at least it'll be neat before it goes off. Who comes up with this stuff?

I had thought that staying in San Francisco might mean I'd see some of it, unfortunately work was intense, so I mostly saw the inside of Caltrains and a couple of interesting restaurants, but hey, good food and I'm happy. Uniformly fantastic coffee too and I'm ecstatic.

Wow, the food. I'll put it like this - I rarely, very rarely, oh so rarely leave food behind me, but was defeated two meals straight, dinner and breakfast, and I'm a big fan of Irish breakfasts so you can imagine what kind of monster the Big Breakfast Burrito was.

People seem super-friendly if you're straight over from Finland. Strangers and wait-staff will initiate conversation at will or over trivialities, and assume a level of friendliness that's initially slightly disconcerting if you're used to how things work over here. Of course, I'm pretty certain this is how I come across in Finland. There's a massive dose of spoken formality too - "sir" and "ma'am" you don't get here either, nor in Dublin for that matter.

The usual self-evidents:
1) Everyone drives everywhere. It's at most a 15 minute walk from the train-station to work. I was considered crazy for walking, and kind people went out of their way to drop me off despite my protests.
2) Many people are terrifically fat - you can guess this when you see defibrillators lining the arrival terminal walls.
3) This ain't no social society - I hadn't seen anyone eat from a bin in a long time. Fish in a bin for empties to return for coins for booze yes, fish for dinner, no.
4) A certain sense of paranoia abounds. At every train station, and at the airports you get "if you notice suspicious activity..." messages, and you're constantly reminded "we're at Homeland Security Threat Level Orange".

No other clichés for now :)

4 Comments:

Blogger Ciaran said...

Man I had the same experience (fingerprinting etc.) last year on my way to New Zealand. I must say I resented having to give GWB my fingerprints just because my flight had to refuel in LA for a few hours.

Thu Nov 09, 12:38:00 p.m. GMT+2  
Blogger delta said...

Yeah, that's even worse, you were never leaving the airport. You don't need to do that entering Russia, and you don't need to do that entering Europe, and both have terrorism issues.

Thu Nov 09, 12:50:00 p.m. GMT+2  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

They fingerprint even EU citizens? Christ! I knew it was getting scary but that's freaking ridiculous!

Welcome to the new fascist states of America. With any luck things will begin to swing the other direction with the recent changes. Too bad it took the public this long to realize how f-ing stupid they were to put the current government in power.

Oh, and just in case it doesn't start swinging back, do me a favor and save a spot on the couches over there, aye? Free thinkers are usually the first to be the first put up against the wall.

-The dirty hippie
(Now back in his own scary homeland)

Sat Nov 11, 05:32:00 a.m. GMT+2  
Blogger Trey said...

Sometimes people walk their bikes in my neighborhood. I'm forever sweeping up the leavings. Bike droppings--horrid!

Sat Nov 18, 09:49:00 a.m. GMT+2  

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