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 :)
