← PreviousA road trip from Monterey to Santa Cruz: nature, butterflies and a funfairOur first night in the San Francisco Bay Area was in Mountain View, not far from Palo Alto. This part of the bay is home to the offices of all the big international tech firms. We expected everyone in the area to work for one of the giants, but to our great surprise, our Airbnb host was simply a teacher at a Jewish school.
She lived in a fairly large apartment that she rented for 4,000 dollars a month, an exorbitant sum even by Parisian standards. It was in a pretty complex with a pool and a gym. We were a bit too tired to go running, so we decided to try Five Guys, reputed to be one of the best fast-food chains in the USA. The menu wasn't huge like at McDonald's: you chose a burger and then everything you wanted in it. So every sandwich was made to order.
They were indeed very good and we tucked in. The restaurant had a touchscreen soda machine with more than three hundred choices. You could choose literally any flavour in existence. A lady of Mexican origin sat down at the table behind ours with her three young children, all on the road to obesity. We soon realised they were regulars when the youngest, six at a guess, went to the machine, tapped away quickly and got out his favourite drink.
The next morning we treated ourselves to a little tour of the GAFA offices (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple), expecting to see enormous buildings. Imagine our disappointment at finding truly ordinary buildings every time. The only distinctive signs were discreet boards saying you were entering an area belonging to the company.
The only impressive thing was the sheer size of the sites. Each firm had a dozen gigantic, neatly arranged blocks. We drove around each of them looking for an ounce of originality somewhere, but it was a lost cause. The most dazzling brands had opted for discretion and restraint, which you could hardly blame them for.
We hit the road to San Francisco, arriving around 11 am because of the very heavy traffic. We started with a coffee at Alamo Square. It was sunny but really cold, so cold that I went back to the car to change trousers in the middle of the pavement. I preferred looking ridiculous to a whole day feeling the cold pierce my bones.
From the hill there was a pleasant view over the city, and we felt silly, as if we were in a film. We set off on foot to delve into the city more or less at random. We were immediately struck by two things: the very European architecture and the number of homeless people.
Some buildings were sublime and the houses sported attractive colours, which made the streets very welcoming. As for the homeless, they were really everywhere, and we'd go from a visibly very upmarket neighbourhood to a street full of people sleeping rough.
Paris is no better in that respect, yet the atmosphere really shocked us without our quite knowing what made it different from our capital. We even witnessed a scene straight out of a film when two young people swapped money and drugs in the middle of a busy street, looking as relaxed as could be.
We walked along the waterfront and grabbed a bite in the covered market of the Ferry Building, clearly very popular. We then headed up to Lombard Street, the famous zigzag street lined with flower beds that you see in so many films and video games. We arrived at the wrong time of day, as the place was full of tourists and the traffic police didn't do American friendliness proud.
On a street corner, we settled down to watch a well-oiled routine that may be unique in the world. At the end of the cable-car line, the drivers had to get out of their cabs to turn the cars themselves. They grabbed a long metal bar and pushed hard to rotate a circular platform carrying rails, which then lined up with the existing track.
We were interested because the mechanism was obviously dated — it must have been revolutionary when the cable cars were created — but it kept its place and its purpose. It summed up how we felt about San Francisco: a modern city that didn't hesitate to lean on its history to exist.
We spent two days strolling the streets of the city of the Summer of Love, exploring and trying well-known restaurants that fit our budget. We climbed Twin Peaks to admire the view over the whole city.
From up there you could really see the extent of the city, sprawling every which way in every direction. Typical of American cities, the streets criss-crossed the landscape in a geometric grid. We did the obligatory visit around the Golden Gate Bridge, an emblem of America. Its slender shape gave the bay a special colour and expressed the genius of human engineering.
Alcatraz was a different experience again, and when you thought about it, it was really strange to visit a place where so many people had suffered. That too was the power of American soft power: how easily it unconsciously sells us tourist experiences we wouldn't necessarily consider in our own country. The penitentiary sits on a small island and the ferry takes you there in about thirty minutes. A staff member meets you on arrival to give you the safety rules and hand out the audio guide.
We walked the corridors slowly, looking at the tiny cells, the exercise yard and the guards' offices. The main attraction was of course the cell of Frank Morris, immortalised by Clint Eastwood in the classic "Escape from Alcatraz".
No different from the others, it had been restored to its former state and you could picture his life in that cramped space. The hole behind the toilet was clearly visible, perhaps to needle the authorities.
After this culturally intriguing visit, we witnessed a heart-warming scene that needs some context. In Australia and New Zealand, we'd found parents really lax, and it was impossible to go anywhere without hearing a child throw a tantrum. Parents scolded their children half-heartedly with very gentle "that's enough"s.
So when, in front of us at the harbour bakery, a French dad calmly but firmly told his children off, we couldn't help feeling proud to be French. We were starting to have enough distance from our country to appreciate its good and bad sides, and we sometimes missed French-style upbringing, so spoiled were the little Australians.