How to conquer San Francisco with no plan, no housing and no love

A short story about blind luck, funnel cake and gay culture.

It is a strange phenomenon, seeing a large group of people collectively easing into depression. It is summer in Norway. This year it was especially bad, due to the summer of 2014 being spectacular. Last year we soared, soared in a safe haven of warm water and cool beer, blissfully forgetting all the previous horrible summers, transforming old depression into expectations for perfect summers in years to come. Finally, a positive side of global warming, people quietly murmured.

Norway crashed, without the burning.

Me on the other hand, the pasty pale person, got some comfort out of the fact that everyone else was depressed. My summer had filled up with inside activities, where a full time summer job and a postponed school assignment chained me to chairs, desks and my bed. I will easily admit that I am sadistic enough to enjoy other peoples suffering, especially when I am suffering myself.

In the midst of the depressing months of June and July, my guess is that other exchange students was making plans. A semester or a year in San Francisco, oh, what a joy. My thoughts exactly – in March. When August came, my J-1 visa was barely on its way, I had not really been looking for housing and I had no actual plan. On top of this, I was not looking forward to leaving my girlfriend for a semester. Skip one week ahead, and a teary goodbye was followed by a perfectly nice flight alongside a product manager in Yahoo! Hints, tips, good wishes and smiles gave me some comfort, but when I landed in Oakland on a beautiful Tuesday, I had nowhere to live. Not even a hotel. I had two large suitcases, was dead tired and I had no actual plan.

About two weeks later San Francisco was conquered. Underneath this cool picture from an after-party, you will find a step-by-step guide on how to conquer this fabulous city yourself.

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  1. Barricade yourself in an expensive hotel room

The sunny California sky was making twisting my jetlagged brain, whilst a hard bench on Oakland International airport became my fortress for two hours. Airbnb, hostels, motels, B&Bs and couch surfing – everything was contemplated, but my loud inner cries for sleep made me settle on a hotel. A Bart ride with two young, professional fake iPhone sales representatives later, I arrived at the hotel. A water fountain greeted me at the door, gently whispering: “this is a hotel where you tip all the staff”. I regretted my hotel choice instinctively, but my urge to sleep trumped every other thought.

They say you should go outside to acclimatize to a new city, get rid of the jetlag and explore. I stayed in the same hotel room for about 48 hours, frantically searching for a place to live the next 3000 hours of my life. Blinds closed, bed nearby and good hotel food delivered at my door.

  1. Get insanely lucky

I would describe my nerves as chillingly cold. Drought, raging forest fires and earthquakes would not make me abandon my Indian-chief-like calmness. Searching for housing in San Francisco, well, that is another story. After two days and nights, the progress was limited. My parents were stressed and I was a bit stressed. My younger brother on the other hand, wise from experience, said that everything would be fine, seeing as “it always does turn out fine for you, whatever the situation is”. It usually does, and it did this time as well.

The barricade-yourself-in-a-dark-hotel-room-and-hope-for-the-best tactic worked. My first viewing of a house ended up in a signed lease about 12 hours later, a large private room for 850 – in a house that now is filled to the brim of international students. Did I mention that it is close to both school and public transport?

  1. Avoid the tourists

A prison, a bridge and outdated, slow public transport? Damn, that sounds like the perfect way to spend my first days in a cool, new city. Well, I have always hated being a tourist. Moving slowly forward in a large group, people talking too loud and taking pictures of things they never actually will cherish later. It sounds like torture light to me. This sounds especially excruciating when you actually can see these sights whenever you want. How about at a time when nothing else is actually happening?

My choice is to see the tourist traps completely random, maybe whilst daytime drunk on a Wednesday, where my actual goal was to eat some weird tacos I read about in a magazine. I think I actually will remember a huge bridge if I am slightly inebriated and have several tacos in my hands. I did see between six and eight old ladies near a park, while meeting up with other exchange students in a park. According to my local, Vietnamese tour guide, the ladies are a San Francisco tourist attraction. Beats me.

  1. Find local friends twice your age

Life goal: eat amazing food and listen to amazing music, without getting fat or losing my hearing before I am 50 years old. I love to cook, I love tasting new food and I generally enjoy concerts wherever I go. With this in mind, the seventh annual San Francisco Street Food Festival suited me perfectly. My new exchange student friends had the same plan for the weekend, just relaxing at a food festival that had constant hip music in the background. Well, they decided to abandon me. I arrived at Civic Center Station with a Norwegian friend, Julie, both of us heading for the food festival. She then skipped off to a park where students had gathered, naturally expecting me to join her. Well, screw that, I found a new friend in the attractive Tenderloin area.

Valentin, a cool 39-year-old guy who lives in San Francisco, overheard me saying on the phone that I was going to the food festival. After a futile search for a supposed shuttle bus, we shared an Uber. He worked in the movie business; he had been to every food festival and was on a special guest list. The random guy I had never met before became my companion for the next five hours.

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Pictures, from left to right: 1: Me and Valentin at the food festival. 2: Diabetes on a plate. 3: Niklas and Etiopian lemonade. 4: Greta and Ørjan in the VIP area of the food festival. 5. Me, Tony and Ruben outside a bar in Castro.

  1. Get diabetes

Valentin had no special plan for the festival, but he did receive a shitload of free coupons on arrival. And he gave me a VIP bracelet. Then we started to eat. Burmese food, German food, Korean food and lovely seafood. I ate what might be the greatest cheesecake I have ever tasted, with vanilla and bourbon. The highlight was still the first actual American experience for me in the U.S.: funnel cake. Fried cake dough with syrup, powdered sugar, strawberries and pecans. Valentin and I shared a funnel cake, after consuming every other ingredient known to man in the hours beforehand. It was diabetes on a paper plate. It was delicious.

I went back to the food festival the next day. Five new hours of street food heaven, this time with curious exchange students with me from almost the get-go. People are smart enough to not skip such an amazing event two days in a row.

  1. Just be fabulous

After almost a week in San Francisco, I had a roof over my head and I was just barely ahead of my eating schedule for the semester. On the other hand, I had been missing a huge part of San Francisco, but this Monday was going to change that. The Castro district in San Francisco, the gay bastion of the world, has a bar called QBar. Every Monday they serve drinks for one dollar, which for some reason seem to attract students.

I arrived late, wearing jeans and a Fleetwood Mac t-shirt. The friendly man who took my jacket wore tiny men’s briefs. He complemented my taste in music, saying that Fleetwood Mac was one of his personal favorites as well. I gave him a one-dollar tip. All in all a good start to a great night out, where volatile gin and tonics was accompanied by good conversations. The best conversation happened after the bar closed, in the heart of Castro.

Just outside QBar I met Tony, a 42 year old cheerleading coach from Orange County. He resides in Budapest, but was visiting San Francisco on official cheerleading business – accompanied by Ruben, a 22 year old Italian cheerleader and aspiring coach. Ruben did not participate in the talks this night, as he was busy devouring a good-looking Mexican man. Talks about life, love and everything peaked when six different gay men went head to head in a line of three. It was a grand sight. Still, the talks was even better, so I scheduled to meet Tony for dinner the next day.

I met Tony and Ruben the next day in a sports bar at Castro. I would say most people are more extrovert when they go to a new country, and extrovert people is a perfect fit for San Francisco. I have met so many cool and different people, be it on buses, walking in the city or in a bar. Tony was one of the best acquaintances I made during my first week in San Francisco. Oh, yeah, and he bought tequila shots for all of us.

The highlight of the night, and the highlight so far for me with gay culture, happened when a stranger walked up to our table. I would describe him as the gay man portrayed in movies, a little more outspoken than most people and very confident. This was a man in his 40’s, camp as anyone and with a small entourage of women. He walked up, looked at me and told me that he had been eyeing me since I walked into the room. To him, both my behind and my cheeks seemed to be just his preference, and he had walked over to tell me, Tony and Ruben just that. Apparently I reminded him of his first boyfriend, which he described as “a perfect fit for the Hitler Youth”.

Case in point: to conquer San Francisco you need to greet gay culture – it is fabulous and welcoming.

  1. Go with the flow

A huge part of being abroad for a semester is meeting new people. Moreover, not only meeting new people, but hopefully to make friends that will stay with you for the rest of your life. In today’s society, partying is big a part of getting to know other students. When you do go out: do it the right way. By doing it right, I mean that you have to talk to people in depth, avoid getting too drunk and not going to bed before the fun stats – go with the flow.

Drunk people tell you cooler stuff than sober people do 99 percent of the time, and when no one really knows one another that well, you have to talk. The ones you like, you end up talking to (or discussing with) for hours. Talking is also a perfect way to limit alcohol intake. Shots is not a part of normal conversations. Drinking Jägermeister is something you do when you run out of things to say, or the rare occasions when the atmosphere is just magical.

Still, the most important thing to remember when going out, is to not quit, meaning you should not go home when the energy is still on top. The after-party culture here in the U.S. is so-so, but the picture in the top of this blog post prove that there is enough fun even at 6 a.m. on a Friday morning.

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Some of the people I met here in San Francisco dragged me to the top of Twin Peaks. The view was okay, I guess.

I am now three weeks into this one semester exchange to San Francisco. Apart from despising sleeping alone and without my girlfriend, the time here in this liberal city in California is perfect so far. I am even satisfied with all five of my classes, especially since none of them starts before 11 a.m. and none of them occur on Fridays. Thank you, San Francisco State University, for giving exchange students priority choosing of courses.

This is the first of at least twelve blog posts from me this semester.

– Hans-Olav

Hans-Olav Rise
hans.olav.rise@gmail.com
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