I already knew about the traffic problem...back when I worked at McDATA, we had acquired some companies out here in the Valley (that's Silicon Valley, for you non-tech-types). One of the companies had an IT guy, who became a part of my department and with whom I worked very closely on several of my network projects. He used to describe his commute...it consisted of a 1-1/2 hour drive each way. This is not too remarkable, until you consider that he only lived about 15-20 miles from the office!!! Apparently, the old statistic about California having more cars than people is entirely true, and they're all on the road simultaneously.
It's also, as previously stated, incredibly expensive to live around here. Now, some of that is a byproduct of the salad days in the tech sector a few years back. San Francisco and the surrounding area have always been noted as a very pleasant place to live, so real estate values were already pretty high. Then, along came the tech boom. Back when you could get a tech job with a salary at about $90,000 a year but that was really truly worth about $50,000 a year, you had lots of folks flush with new cash, cash like they'd never seen before. They would then take that cash and buy expensive cars and homes, driving up prices. A house that costs about $200,000 out here would go for about $150,000-160,000 in Denver (and even less in Oklahoma, maybe $80,000-90,000).
San Francisco is also notoriously liberal. Now, I'm a fairly moderate conservative; I have several stands I take that are conservative, but I also have some stands that are not-so-conservative. But San Francisco is far too liberal for me to even consider spending any significant amount of time here. Let's take a quick stock with the following list:
- The University of California at Berkeley. Now, Berkeley was once my college of choice, mostly because I wanted to do physics and they have a great school for physics. (Instead, I went to the University of Chicago for my freshman year...still not too shabby.) But Berkeley is regularly noted as one of the most liberal college campuses on the planet. Students routinely walk around campus naked when the weather is nice. Just go to Google and search for "naked Berkeley students" if you'd like some proof.
- The whole gay thing. In my post yesterday, I called San Francisco "the city of brotherly love", and I wasn't kidding. San Fran has one of the highest gay populations of any US city, if not the highest (strangely, I couldn't find much on this...one site has some demographics, but only for same-sex couples). But apparently, the gay thing is serious enough here that they've started legalizing same-sex marriages, as we saw last year.
- The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. For those of you unfamiliar with the Ninth Circuit, these are the kind folks who struck down the Pledge of Allegiance as unconstitutional, because of the words "under God".
All of these things being said, there are some VERY nice things about San Francisco, things I noticed right away, and a few things that are fairly novel, even for a town like this.
- A beautiful, rolling landscape that is incredibly green, even at this bleak time of year. Mid-February is not noted in other parts of the country for its green, and certainly not in Denver, where the only natural green objects are evergreen trees. But as we drove into town from the airport, it was impossible to notice that everything was green. Lots of deciduous trees that still have their leaves...lots of lush green grass...lots of plants growing along the sides of the road...and all green as though it were the end of spring. It was a wonderful thing to see right now, after seeing no green for a few months.
- The Bay Bridge. Now, I haven't seen the Golden Gate Bridge yet; I'd like to try, if I have some spare cash (and some spare time) to get there before I leave on Friday. But I did get to see the Bay Bridge, and I've gotta tell ya...pictures and movies really don't do it justice. It's HUGE!!! And I don't mean huge like your regular huge...it's IMMENSE in a way I would never have thought possible. Its tower on this side of the bay easily reached many stories into the sky...it was easily taller than many of the buildings on this side. I would estimate that the roadway of the bridge is easily 150-200 feet above the bay, and possibly more. All I can say is....wow, and double wow.
- Tons of motorcycles and scooters. I'd say that probably 5% of the motorized vehicles I saw on the way in and parked around the downtown area were two-wheelers. Not surprising, given San Francisco's famously mild climate. As mentioned above, the last few days haven't exactly borne out that conventional wisdom, but it appears that riding is a very popular pastime here.
- Cable buses. In the tradition of the old cable cars, most of the buses in the downtown area are attached to overhead cables that power them as they wend their way along the streets. There are the old cable trolleys, as well...not the Rice-a-Roni kind that we're all used to, but a more streamlined, 1940s model that zips up and down the larger streets. But seeing the buses make their way around in the exact same way, attached to overhead wires by grotesque mechanical appendages that jut rudely from their roofs, is a unique experience.
- Billboard advertising. After living in Denver for so long, where billboards are mostly banned for aesthetic reasons -- no one wants to mar the mountain skyscape -- any billboards I see really stand out to me now. On our way in, I saw something that nearly made me laugh out loud. I saw a billboard....with some company advertising on it. I really hadn't heard of the company before, but maybe you have...it was some company named Yahoo! or something like that. They appear to have something to do with the Internet, but I couldn't quite tell. Seriously, seeing a New Economy company, a company whose very name is a household word throughout the civilized world, a company known for its Internet advertising savvy, advertising on a BILLBOARD IN ITS OWN HOMETOWN, was one of the most surreal and ironic experiences I've ever had. I also saw billboards for other well-known tech companies who call the Valley and the San Francisco area home; Cisco Systems, the huge networking bellwether, was another notable one. Do the marketing folks at these companies seriously believe that there are people here in San Francisco who DON'T know who they are? That would be like United advertising on a billboard in Denver, apparently believing they need to somehow claim even MORE of the traffic out of DIA. Well, Jesus said a prophet is not appreciated in his own hometown; maybe a technology company isn't either.
- Adopt-a-Highway. OK, this one isn't so strange; lots of cities around the country have a program like this. But one stretch of Route 101 that ran directly alongside part of the San Francisco Bay really caught my notice. The adopt-a-highway sign for the stretch near Candlestick Point (where old Candlestick Park still stands) said that it had been adopted by Robin Williams!!! A quick search on the Internet revealed this story, demonstrating that it is totally legitimate. Well, that's probably the closest I'll ever get to Robin Williams..."I once rode on a portion of highway adopted by Robin Williams!!!"
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