18.08.2009

Well, I've reached the final point of my route! It's 7 AM, August 18, 2009, and I'm sitting here drinking coffee in San Francisco!

I'll spend the whole day here, and at 11:00 PM I'll head out to Dallas, which is almost a two-day trip!

I slept like a log last night, didn't even wake up during the stops—after yesterday's sleepless night. It's quite cold here! I hoped to wait out the morning chill over coffee, but it looks like it won't end anytime soon, so I'm off!

Oops, sorry, it's not just 'quite cold' here! It's freezing and there's a huge wind! I endured it, but then I couldn't take it anymore and wrapped myself in the blanket I bought yesterday for sleeping on the bus. I walked around like that for half the day, like an Indian :).

First thing, I walked down Montgomery Street, which is considered the Financial District here. I turned left and walked up the streets—holy cow, the incline! I don't think I've ever seen anything like it in cities before. Cars are parked at such an angle that it feels like they're about to roll away. I walked around, went up to Nob Hill—the highest point in San Francisco, looked down, then went online to check the bus schedule to Boston. It looks like I'll be going to see Aunt Inna after all, and that's cool because it should be interesting there.

Just then, the Cable Car Museum opened, probably the most famous symbol of San Francisco. It's cool: there's a metal cable running underground that moves, and the tram hooks onto this cable through a slot in the ground and moves itself. The cable is powered by massive engines located at the station. And since the museum is right inside the station building, you can see everything—how it all rotates and is set in motion :).

After leaving the museum, I wandered around Chinatown a bit.

Chinatown in SF is so huge, and there are so many Chinese people, that you can't tell if SF has a Chinese Chinatown, or if, conversely, Chinatown has a San Francisco district.

In their Chinese shops, they sell even ordinary, non-Chinese goods at very low prices. Just for fun, I bought some soy drink and some crunchy sticks. Both turned out to be mediocre in taste.

When I was heading back down to Montgomery Street, I saw a crowd of fire trucks, police, and other people. Apparently, there was a fire.

Getting closer, I saw a man with terrible burns standing and talking to a policeman. 'Holy cow,' I thought. 'He needs to get to the hospital urgently.' And only then did it hit me that they were filming a movie!

Reaching the center, I headed to a park that, judging by the name, should have been an arts center, but the pavilions of this very arts center were closed, and it was just a park around. Strange. An arts center without art.

From there, I decided to go to Coit Tower. I miscalculated the size of San Francisco on the map (the city is small) and overshot my stop, but I returned to the right place pretty quickly.

I climbed to the top. The view is cool! Of the bay, Alcatraz Island, the city... Awesome!

I went down, walked to the coast, and asked about tours to Alcatraz. It turned out they were all sold out. Oh well, I was doubting whether to go or not anyway.

I asked a guy about the Golden Gate Bridge, and he said it's 4.5 miles (i.e., more than 7 km) on foot, about an hour and a half walk. I asked about the bus, but he said it would also take about an hour and a half by bus.

I decided to walk. I grabbed a bite at Subway for the road and set off. I walked slowly, stopping at cool places. For example, there's a real submarine moored on the shore that fought during World War II and is now open as a museum. For 6 bucks, I went inside—very interesting. Everything inside is untouched, real.

On the way to the bridge, I saw a real hippie Volkswagen minibus, and I got to talking with a Rastafarian sticking out of it in an Ethiopian hat. He said he painted it and did everything inside himself, that it's his home, and he and his girlfriend travel around America, earning money by selling all sorts of trinkets they also make themselves. A cool dude, just dirty—he has nowhere to wash in the Volkswagen :).

I'm walking, and a wild, cold wind is blowing right at me. I wrapped myself in the blanket again, which helped a little. By the time I reached the bridge, I was freezing. But I made it!

I took some photos of it, though there was a heavy fog, so the pictures didn't turn out great. I climbed up and walked a bit back and forth on it. It's a grand thing, of course! Although it's not a golden gate at all, it's just a red gate :).

I was pretty tired, caught a bus, went to the center, got off a bit early in Chinatown. I stocked up on some fruit for the road. I went into a Chinese restaurant and decided to order Noodle Soup to try it and warm up, since it's soup. In the end, for $5, they brought me such a huge bowl that I barely ate a little more than half! And it wasn't soup in our sense, but noodles, meat, vegetables, a generous portion of everything, slightly drizzled with broth. These Chinese people are something else!

I decided to go to Starbucks to have coffee, write in my diary, and kill time until the bus, but it turned out to be... closed! Oh, America... for a cafe to close at 6 PM, and in a tourist city, in the very center!

In the end, I did what I wanted at McDonald's.

So, I'm writing this diary. In two hours, I'm leaving San Francisco to cross the American continent again, from the Pacific to the Atlantic.

I'll go through the South, through Texas, with side trips to Dallas and Memphis. In 4 days, I should be in New York. I hope the road goes well.

ON THE ROAD!!!

19.08.2009

Traveling, traveling, traveling... slept great, the two-hour transfer in Los Angeles went by very quickly, slept again until 11:30, then had a snack at McDonald's and slept again until 15:30. So it's almost 5 PM now, I'm sitting at the station in Phoenix, and I haven't even felt the trip yet :).

We're driving not far from the border with Mexico, and at the 11:30 stop, a customs officer (or whoever he is) came onto the bus and checked the documents of all non-US citizens. I saw through the window how several Mexicans, including a girl, were standing with their hands handcuffed behind their backs—apparently, they caught illegal immigrants.

It's very hot here; you get off the bus and the heat hits you right in the face.

We drove through the desert with a typical landscape of the American South: sand, thorns, huge cacti: thin but very tall.

Everything is cool! :) Tomorrow I'll be in Dallas for a few hours, then a night trip to Memphis, a day there, and then a full day to New York. I'll spend a quick night in NY, do my laundry, and run to the bus to Boston. That's the kind of traveler I am :).

20.08.2009

During the day, a woman sat next to me, => I wasn't riding alone in two seats anymore, so I couldn't really sleep during the day. Well, nothing—I looked out the window. We drove all day through Texas, this is the largest state in the USA by area. A customs officer came onto the bus again, they checked my passport again.

The biggest fun of Greyhound buses is that all of America rides here. White, black, young, old. Wherever you go in America, you only see some layer of the population—here mostly white, here black, here Mexicans. And they are all tied to one place, living in one city. Here, however, is all of America. In one bus, you can see a Hasidic Jew and an Amish man in a blue shirt, a black welder, and a young white guy in cowboy boots. They are traveling, someone is swearing, someone is laughing, they are eating, children are screaming, someone is listening to music too loudly, someone has smelly socks, and someone even has a dog. It's like a market—a cross-section of life.

And it's interesting.

At 18:20, I arrived in Dallas. I bought a magnet (by the way, at night during the transfer, I bought another magnet in El Paso—a city right on the border with Mexico) and went into the city.

Dallas is a typical American city, boring, quiet, uninteresting. But I liked its neatness, its 'southernness', the large number of pickups on the streets. I walked to the place where Kennedy was killed, strolled along the central streets, ate a Texan dish, Quesadillas—paid quite a bit for a small portion, but for some reason, I had wanted to try a Texan dish for a long time. Delicious!

I walked around the streets a bit more and went to the station.

Tomorrow is Memphis, the last point on the map of my backpack trip.

Today I thought that the length of my trip (2 weeks) turns out to be ideal: not too short, but not too long so that curiosity is dulled by the amount of information.

That's it!