Trip to San Francisco

19 Apr 2010

Posted by admin

Putting aside the main subject of my blog which is programming, I'm going to tell a little bit how my trip so San Francisco has gone so far.

The adventure of flying

My flight had the following itinerary: Jerez - Madrid - London - San Francisco. The day before, bad news arrived, "your flight Madrid - London has been cancelled", due to the volcanic ash plume. I had two options, my first though was to cancel the entire trip and get my money back. But for some reason the american spirit had already get into me and I told myself that I would not surrender so soon. So the next day I departed to Madrid and there I would see what I can do.

Barajas T4

Barajas was a chaos, the only option was to wait 3 hours in a line of 200 people with the hope to reroute my flight. The airport employee wanted to get rid of me as soon as possible, telling me that all flights to USA were cancelled or completely booked. So I have to push her and tell a list of american cities that I had seen on the screens. After near 15 minutes searching (and me showing that I would not go without a flight) she found a seat in a flight via Washington, the most incredible thing, it was for the same day. Volcanic ash plume dodged.

Once in the plane, seated and ready to take off, a guy approaches me and tells me that I'm in his seat, effectively my boarding card was the same, in fact they had the same name in it, his name. The flight attendant took our tickets and passports and after a while she came back and told me "sr, I'm sorry but you have to leave the plane and go to the boarding gate, so saying indignation words I got out of the plane, fortunately in the boarding gate they fixed everything and I could go back to the plane. Iberia incompetents dodged.

Ok, I didn't realized that in my boarding pass there was the name of an italian guy instead of mine, but neither any of the persons in the four security controls that I had to pass through did realized that the name in the ticket was not the same that in the passport. Like later one of the airport employees told me: "this is the false security that they want to sell us, that only serves so that some security companies make a lot of money".

Once in Washington, I must pass the immigration control. It's not as bad as some people tells, you can even choose the line so practically you are choosing the person that is going to "examine" you, although been educated and telling the truth should be enough.

After an 8 hours flight, pick up the baggage, check-in again, and another flight to San Francisco, all this in very little time, obviously in a more usable and efficient airport than Barajas.

I got at San Francisco at 1am, no metro, no bus. Taxi drivers almost jump into me for taking me to downtown, price $50. Asking the airport personnel they told me that there was a door-to-door shared van service in the other floor, price $17, easy to choose.

I arrive at the hostel (USA Hostels San Francisco) and I just want to sleep, San Francisco downtown by night is a little bit scary.

Touristic walk around

Next day I perfectly knew what I was going to do, go for a walk without any destination, I just wanted to walk and see the city and the country (also this is my first time in US). I did the typical touristic walk that I guess most tourist do.

San Francisco streets

More pictures here

It's true that everything here is bigger than in Europe, streets, skyscrapers, cars. Specially skyscrapers, I haven't seen any building like that in Europe. I'm not talking only about the size, the scale of every part of the building is also bigger, its like if giants lived there.

Saturday mornings seems like there is a lot of things to see and ways of having fun, markets, attractions, ferrys to Alcatraz, sea lions, a lot of places to eat any kind of food.

I only made a mistake, not wearing sport footwear, I killed my feet in one morning, I barely could walk at the end of the day. In the way back to the hostel I entered the Nike town, which is at the same street, an bough the sneakers that I'll wear the rest of the week.