As we arrived in San Francisco, Immediately the contrast with New York and its surroundings hit us – Nicki said it looked like the Mediterranean more than a big city. The scenery is bay, hills, few skyscrapers and calmer streets. Of ocurse, we have flown 6 hours across America – same country, but incredibly different city.We picked the car up and headed straight for the Golden Gate Bridge.It is such an iconic place as a piece of American history – a place we've both seen so many times in movies and on TV series – and we loved driving over it.
In February 2007, I was exhausted from working and travelling too much. I came away to San Francisco for relief and the first place I was lucky to find outside the city was called Sausalito, the first turning after the Golden Gate. I needed some calm and I found it there. The happy memory guided me and we headed there directly from the airport.
It's a beautiful little town that was once a hippy retreat but now seems like a carefully preserved village with a harbour full of small yachts, beautiful local shops and art galleries, and fantastic views across the bay to San Francisco. In case you're interested, Fleetwood Mac recorded their album “Rumours” there too...
The bay of Sausalito is full of Pelicans soaring across the sky and suddenly darting at an almost zero degree trajectory into the water after some fishy prey. Especially at dusk, the sky is full of them. As we sat and enjoyed the evening coming down, we also caught sight of seals poking their heads out of the water.
Accommodation has been a thing of contrasts even in these two weeks, and San Francisco is no exception. We are staying at Jimm's place, via a website called AirBNB.com. It's his apartment and we have a bedroom and a bathroom in it. After the milkcrate-bed in New York, we have a memory-mattress which seems to hug you to sleep – luxury. After a good sleep, I sit in Jimm's beautiful apartment at a classic wooden dining table, sipping Earl Grey and looking over one of San Francico's many hills, with space to move and feel comfortable in a real home.
San Francisco is a further 3 time-zones East (we are now 8 hours behind UK, 9 hours behind Amsterdam) so at 7pm we were tired and ready for bed. But as a jetlag buster, we headed to a Sky Lounge bar recommended to us by Jimm. We sat in an almost deserted bar with a peaceful view across the San Francisco skyline when a bunch of about 40 young Americans came in, excited and ordering champagne. Who celebrated on a Monday in this town?
On talking to the people, it turned out that they work for an Internet start
-up called AdMob.com, and they were celebrating just being bought out by Google. The excitement was immediately understandable and it seemed we could almost feel relief as well as joy. It was like their own personal recession had come to an end. They popped the champagne, apologised to us for spoiling our quiet evening and pured glasses for us too. We loved being a part of their celebration, and to feel some good news around us.Epilogue. The following morning I checked up on this Admob acquisition. It was a $750m buyout! One of the biggest in Google's history, amazing considering the company are 140 people and started just 3 years ago. It seems we were there at a real San Francisco success story.
