Travelling from Cusco to San Francisco was, quite literally, a pain in the ass. In total, I stayed awake for almost 46 hours with only 2 hours sleep on the flight. After leaving Cusco, we flew to Lima. On the way we could enjoy a beautiful sunset, making the curvature of the earth visible.
Lima itself is pretty darn big, as we noticed again during landing. Over 8 million people live here – comparable to the population of Austria. At the airport, we had dinner – I had subway – before boarding our flight to Fort Lauderdale. Here is what Lima looks like while you’re landing.
From Lima, we flew to Fort Lauderdale, where we had two hours to immigrate into the US, get through customs, get our luggage, check it in again, go through security and board our next plane. Many of us, me included, almost missed the next flight and had to run to the gate, and one student and Tashi actually missed the plane.
From Fort Lauderdale, we took a 6-hour domestic flight to San Francisco. There, our science teacher fainted at the airport and seemed to have a seizure.
But eventually we got on the road and headed to our residence in San Francisco – having “lost” only three people on the way.
My first full day in San Francisco started after much-needed sleep at 8:17am. Breakfast ended at 8:30 and we left to walk to the pier of the ferry to Alcatraz Island at 8:45.
From what I have seen so far, San Francisco is my favorite North American cities – of the cities I’ve seen, which are Montreal, Toronto, Ottawa, Windsor, Chicago, Washington DC and New York. It is very diverse, and the architecture, largely from the years following the 1906 earthquake, is quite neat. Here are a couple impressions while we walked to the pier today.
We also passed through the outskirts of Chinatown on the way. The liveliness of the people, culture and all the food really make this part of town quite special, hiding the “dark” history of discrimination against the Chinese in America. China town formed, at least to a certain extent, because Chinese immigrants were only allowed to live in the region designated to them. But it remained because of the strong and unique sense of community that has formed there. The culture there is neither Chinese nor American, it is the culture of Chinatown.
Then we made our way to Alcatraz Island, the former high-security prison – by boat, since that’s the only way to get there.
Alcatraz used to be the prison with the highest security in the US, and during its entire time in service, there hasn’t been a single confirmed successful escape. There are numerous dark stories, both fictitious and real, surrounding Alcatraz. The battle of Alcatraz is an example of one of the real stories – a riot by the prison inmates, which resulted in several dead officers and prisoners.
Today, Alcatraz is a National Park of the US, and a lot of emphasis is put on the nature of the island. What they also stress a lot is that the movement of Native Americans to claim the island as their land was an “occupation” of the island.
Oh yea… the view from Alcatraz is pretty darn neat.
After that (and some real bubble tea), we took a tour of downtown San Francisco, where we got a lot of background and insider information, and also visited the iconic pyramid building of San Francisco, which was built in a way that it can withstand very powerful earthquakes – which could strike at any time in San Fran. Our residence itself is only about 15 walking minutes away from the San Andreas fault.
