24 Aug Limey in Fog City: First Impressions

Hey, I’d like to welcome you to my weekly/bi-weekly blog in which I’ll give you guys an insight into what I get up to during my semester in the Golden State.
I’ve been living in San Francisco for just over three weeks now and so far it’s been a lot of fun, and along the way I’ve met some interesting characters. Yesterday after ten days of sharing a house with 16 people, I finally moved into my College dorm.

So far I’ve done some of the must-dos such as walking the Golden Gate Bridge and visiting Chinatown, On top of that I’ve visited some other cool areas of the city such as the Mission, which is home to a fairly large Latin-American community and Japan Town, where I came across the world record holder for Paper Airplane distance (‘Starstruck’ would be an understatement), I even went to two Baseball games. I’ll maybe review some of these outings on a later post.

I’ll dedicate this first blog to a few general characteristics of the City by the Bay, and my attitude towards them. I’ll open on a positive note, San Franciscans are friendly people; I’ve had a fair few encounters where people have just stopped me on the street to have a quick conversation, in one case an old Gentleman stopped me on a stroll through the park to tell me a story about his university days in London, and about how he was in ‘Nam, before offering me a hit off his pipe (I politely declined, it wasn’t quite what I was after at that time in the morning). Another thing that got me pretty quickly about the City was the Hills and the Fog, they’re a mixture of really cool, and really frustrating at the same time, the Hills contribute a lot to the city’s beauty and character, also contribute to tiring walks, the same is true of the fog, at times it creates an amazing eerie atmosphere, but then on another day it stabs you in the back, like when you walk to the top of Twin Peaks only to be rewarded with views of pure greyness. One characteristic of the City (and America in general), that I feel I have to write about in this post is the Coffee, its so unbelievably damned good, like ridiculously so (am I doing okay at conveying to you how much I like the coffee here?), for someone with a mild caffeine addiction like myself this is paradise!

I’ll end this post with a few quick observations about the city that I may discuss in more detail in later blog posts:

1. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen more people smoking weed than people smoking cigarettes

2. It seems like there’s a cool view wherever you are in the city
3. The homelessness problem in San Francisco is really as bad as it’s made out to be
4. The cost of living in San Francisco is higher than in Hull (To say the least)
5. Being under-21 here is as sad and disappointing as I dreamed it’d be.

*drops mic*