San Francisco, the Home of Harmony

I spent the week of May 20 in San Francisco at ICSE'13. I'll write a bit about the area so that when someone offers me a job there, I could justify adding another dozen grand on top of it.

Overview

This is what San Francisco looks like to a tourist. A modern and sunny heaven on earth. But let's take a deeper look. 

The picture below summarizes the actual material essence of San Francisco: lots of skyscrapers and highways, and you see them from inside a car.

Oh yeah there's also the ocean (cold!)...

... and palms. That's about it.

Car apparitions also appear sometimes.

The place is essentially a desert except a thin coastline.

Less than pretentious areas still have this regular Californian look to them. 

Pasadena, is this you?

You may be waking up to an optimistic morning traffic jam. 

At evening hours San Francisco holds onto its special appearance.

In the night it's pretty generic.

Downtown

I stayed in the financial district and couldn't miss an opportunity to wander around.

The coastal sidewalk is a cool place to run.

This is the Hyatt where I stayed.
Never made it to the penthouse :(

The hotel from the other side.

From the inside.

A view from the window.

I've spotted several distant relatives of the Cathedral of Learning.

One.

Two.

Three.

In general buildings in SF are pretty rectangular.

Two styles combined.
Among few examples when it's not ugly.

So black.

So white.

Twins.

Triangular buildings, a rare exception to the overall boxiness, dominate non-orthogonal intersections.

While there are quite a few bikes and motorbikes in San Francisco, they aren't nearly as numerous as the popular culture suggests.

All those cable cars, trams, and trolleys are prominent in San Francisco. I was surprised to see that cable cars can alter traffic signals, which totally destroys the patterns of green lights. As a results, a car can catch five red lights in a row.

The famous cable cars.

They turned out to be shakier and costlier than expected.

One of the skyscrapers would fit well the bad guys from Equilibrium. I prefer to think that this is the headquarters of ZOG. There's nothing else special about it, really.

A little aside from all the big ass buildings is the Coit Tower. It reminds me of  the spiral minaret.

From the Coit Tower.

From the bushes near the Coit Tower.

Harmony

The spiritual essence of this city, however, isn't about skyscrapers and highways at all. It's all about harmony, peace, acceptance, and cultural integration.

This photo can be made the city's emblem: bury your weapon man, let's sit on the grass and enjoy the sun.

San Francisco has many parks to disconnect from day-to-day problems and chill out.

Rainbows are everywhere.

Seagulls are fully integrated members of the society.

This one fishes with fishermen at a pier.

This one takes a walk through a square.

Skilled hunters are always needed.

In ethnic neighborhoods road signs are written in local languages.

They aren't actually.

Old Asians dance on the streets. Nobody is weired out but me.

Everyone lives in harmony with homeless people.

At a local bazaar.

In the middle of the street.

In a shade.

It's ok to sleep in a lawn if you don't have a house.

An invention of the 21st century: a mobile house.
It's a shopping cart with all the possessions packed into it.

This is my favorite homeless. He was excited about me taking his pictures
and even gave me his email to send them.

The man below isn't homeless. He's from Uganda and makes casual accessories. I bought a necklace from him because he recognized CMU and said that CMU-Uganda has the biggest campus in their country.

Cool hat.

Pigeons are also integrated into life in San Fran.

I don't really like pigeons, but don't tell anyone.

To maintain the balance among all forms of life, SF has policemen (despite the popular city legend). Regular police cruisers do not look like very interesting. Also, SFPD doesn't sound cool, unlike LAPD.

In SF it was the first time when I saw a K-9 unit.

There's a german shepherd inside, and it bites bad guys.
Awesome!

Art

I could put dozens of pictures here. Let's just say it's hard to walk a block and not see an art installation.

It's ok to paint a side of your building.
It's not ok to hang your underwear on top of the painting.

Oh caramel brownie, what have they done to you?

Even windmills come have expressive shapes.

Boats

We went on a boat cruise and rode a ferry. I came to realize that the worst part about being on a boat party is that you cannot leave

Le CMU ISR team (partially) @ the boat dinner.

A ferry.

Bridges

What San Francisco lacks in quantity of bridges, it gains in their size. There are basically two important ones: the Golden Gate Bridge and the Bay Bridge -- they connect SF to the other sides of the bay.

Let's start with the Golden Gate Bridge. More than a mile long, it's an unofficial symbol of the city. In google image search Golden Gate is in six out of ten top pictures. It is gigantic -- 1.1 mile long.

I can proudly say I ran it both ways, but not excited to do it again: it was a painful and windy run

On the bridge.

San Francisco from the Golden Gate Bridge.

The Bay bridge is even bigger and has two independent suspension spans. It looks enormous, and it was not clear to me how the Golden Gate became the symbol of SF.

Left.

Right.

Night.

Almost untill the end of my trip did not I find a reason for the Golden Gate being more known: the Bay bridge does not permit pedestrian traffic. It cannot be run across under normal circumstances, and this halves my personal interest in it.

Prices

The gas prices have a 4 in front of them. This illustrates a higher gas dependency in the West coast, and I don't like dependencies. If I lived there, I'd have to adjust my driving habits.

This is not even in the city!
In Pittsburgh, a gallon of regular was 3.6 at that time.

As per housing prices, anecdotal evidence showed that renting 1BR in the city of San Francisco itself costs not less than $3k, and in the area is not less than $2k.

Subway

It's shitty, no illusions here. The subway of NYC taught the rest of the US that interior design cannot be applied to subways.

This looks like a nuclear shelter.

Everyone gave me looks.

Bay Area: Sausanito

Sausanito is a nice quiet small town on the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge. It's doesn't have all the traffic and has nice houses.

 

Europe, is this you?

Bay Area: Stanford

Three of us rented a zipcar mercedes C250 to ride around the Bay area and northern Silicon Valley. That was epic.

It is a luxury but relatively slow car with non-standard controls.
The sunroof helped.

I have trouble understanding how something as homogeneous and uniform as the Stanford campus could find itself near San Francisco. All the same color and style, this campus is much less impressive than the work done on it.

I didn't have lots of time to explore the campus, but I'd say it looked pretentious yet boring.

Arbitrary lights patterns provoke students' creative thinking.

A good thing about Stanford is that there's money on the ground waiting to be found.

The color of my face has no scientific explanation.
Too much sun maybe?

Bay Area: UC Berkeley

Although we arrived to UCB after dusk, I liked this campus more than Stanford: more diverse building, and the tower is not nearly as fat.

Bay Area: Facebook, Apple, Google, LinkedIn

Unlike universities, even the most prosperous companies cannot pump millions into making their campuses look interesting. Most of them look just like office buildings.

I was immediately conquered by street names for Facebook and Apple. Facebook is located at 1 Hacker Way, which is a reference to their bottom-up engineering practices.

Facebook. Shuttles with employees are leaving for home.

Google's campus in Mountain View is much bigger than those of other companies'. It proved to be a challenge to find something interesting there.

A googlebike.

LinkedIn.

Apple's headquarters in Cupertino are placed at a circular road Infinite Loop, and buildings have numbers 1-5. If you manage to escape an infinite loop, you're an exception. This is really cool!

It reads, "Apple Campus, One Infinite Loop."

Conclusions

So overall SF is a good place to live, but certainly not ideal. 

• +  Nice-looking.
• +  Artsy. Great for designers of all sorts.
• +  Close to Silicon Valley.
• +- Tolerant. If you're handicapped, gay, and an ethnic minority, you'd find SF your home.
• +- Very laid back. People enjoy their lives in San Francisco, and there's no doing it the hard way. I would miss that. 
• +- Hot sun and strong cold wind. I hated the latter, but I arrived
•  -  Weird-ass heavy traffic.
•  -  Expensive (very!). 

I had a great time, and would totally return as a tourist to see more of it.