City by the Bay - Blogabond

That's it! I am sitting at the airport, waiting to board a plane to NYC. It just got dark, I am sitting by the window watching lights across the bay blink in the distance and smelling kerozine from jets taking off one by one. At this time I'm also enjoying the meal that you can see on the picture - a good way to save some money and time at an airport terminal.

I could see that there were a few hits on the blog, more or less equal to the amount of people I shared the address with. Unfortunately I was not able to keep you updated due to lack of internet connection at my hotel and a busy schedule. But nothing's lost and I will make up for it in the near future.

What can I say - San Francisco is great, California is great. But first thing's first - the flight. It took me over 3 hours to get to the airport because something has happened in Manhattan and all the bus highways were standing still - noone knew what happened and the drivers were trying to find out from one another without success. Luckily I accounted for some delays and made it in time.

Knowing that this would be a cross-country daytime flight I had booked a window seat - and it was worth it. Everybody knows more or less how big America is across - but flying over it makes you actually realize that. The flight took nearly 6 hours, which is only 2 hours less compared to the flight from Warsaw to New York . But this one was within one country!

Round fields in western US

It is interesting to see how the landscapes of the US change. Having taken off, the first hour was over the eastern states and to be honest, the view from above was very similar to what I know from Europe - meadows, some forrests and cities every now and then. Maybe except that the cities were visibly square - consisted of the grid I wrote about some time ago.

A Pac Man inspired field

Moving on, the landscape changed - the cities became more scarce and gave way to huge farming areas. With time, those areas became surrounded more and more by yellowish rock-and-desert areas. I suppose due to irrigation the fields had a round shape. Some of them must have been inspired by PacMan.

Rivers

Then the landscape changed from flat to more rocky - you could see valleys carved by rivers, some with interesting reddish shade around them. From the plane it looked flat though - for now. No sign of towns and cities for a while already, just loooooong loooooong roads going straight as far as I could see (and I guess I could see far from 10,000m). No wonder they call it the fly-over zone!

A fault visivble among the clouds

Eventually the landscape got totally red, without any trees. Unfortunately it also got cloudy, but when it was possible I could see great canions, mountains and faults. That must've been Colorado.

A canion

Eventually from red the ground turned yellow again, with high mountains and sparse plants scattered around. On the 1-hour approach towards San Francisco International Airport I saw two major fires - one of them on the hills just across the bay from San Francisco and one of them was showed on the news that evening.

Lake Mono nearby Yosemite National Park

If you're interested in comparing airplane photos with Google Maps, here's an example. It is Mono Lake, just at the outskirts of the Yosemite National Park. http://maps.google.pl/?ie=UTF8&ll=37.974515,-118.917389&spn=0.257103,0.617294&t=h&z=11. Note that not all the pictures from the plane are included in this entry - if you're interested in more, browse photos tagged "airphoto".

Downtown San Francisco

The weather in San Francisco was more or less the same as in New York, even though, technically, after the 6 hour flight it was 3 hours later than at departure. What was different was the great, relieving, chilly breeze from the Pacific. That was such a great change from the humidity and stuffness of New York.

Going on the train through some suburbs of San Francisco I was amazed at how nice they looked in terms of architecture. Stretched across the hilly landscape were very colorful houses - all in light, pastel colours, with nothing standing out too much. As it turns out, the houses which today reach exorbitant prices (the 2007's peak average for a house was over 800,000 USD) were built by several developers for rather poor people. In order to make them inexpensive they were constructed in a mass manner. In order to let people find their homes among those of the neighbours, the houses were differentiated on color - yellow, pink, green, orange, blue - hence the pretty, colorful mosaic.

A street car house

Along the same lines, when the city was going through major development periods in the late 19th century, and rapid re-development after the "big one" - a 8,1 Richter scale earthquake of April 1906 people had to reinvent ways of getting a place to live quickly. One fo them was to get barracks in which they resided immediately after their houses were destroyed, and remodel them, sometimes join them together or put one on top of another to build a nicer house. Some even constructed, what came to be called, carville - decommissioned street cars, when combined together, could serve as houses. Pictures courtesy of http://www.outsidelands.org.

Since bording time has come, I will write another entry on the first impressions of the city once I have the opportunity. It's going to be a tough overnight flight - full plane, lots of kids as it seems and an aisle seat. Landing at 6am and then getting through Manhattan morning traffic to get to West New York. With me luck!

In the mean time - goodbye California! Song for today? I left my heard in San Francisco!

written by

lagrange on August 5, 2009 from San Francisco, United States

from the travel blog: Artur's Blog

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