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San Francisco, California
Hey all, so Laura and I landed in SFO Airport at around 5pm or thereabouts on Friday the 30th Nov after our 11hr flight from Heathrow at the beginning of our years adventure. At this time though we were both feeling pretty tired, were slightly tense and only moderately excited, it then suddenly dawned on Laura and myself that we had made absolutely no plans, no bookings and had not even bothered to research a damn thing about San Francisco and our arrival.
Ha ha, and so it began!
It must have took us not far from an hour or so, maybe two to actually exit the airport, we spoke to the people at the tourist information kiosk who were of Chinese origin and all they managed to do was make me feel even more lethargic and slighlty more confused! Then after some bum directions, and further useless information Laura and I conferred and decided to get the bart (train) from the airport to Union Square.
We headed for the train finally and were confronted by an automated ticket machine, oh my god I just cannot deal with this right now! We had to act fast so I interupted a couple of American guys in a fairly in depth conversation and proceeded to instruct them to buy my tickets for me, they did and they were infact really cool and friendly. So we got on the train and headed for Union Square, 20 mins later and we were there, we found our way out of the subway easily (we're pretty experienced travellers by now) headed up and Bang! we were in the centre of San Francisco like that, it was so cool but quite a shock at the same time.
We spent the next 2-3 hours walking around taking a few bits in and looking for a place to stay - bumping into schitzo's, crack w****s and homeless people all over the place, this made us try to find one quicker! Whilst searching for a place and trying to avoid getting into any trouble being the way we were presenting ourselves, we also saw about 1000, nah maybe 10,000, or, s*** I dont know how many - but a frigging lot more bicycles than I've ever seen at one time and we had to wait about 10 minutes or so for them to pass just to cross the street, we still don't know for sure what it was all about but you could probably have a few guesses hey?
We finally opted for a place called the Spaulding Hotel after denying a hostel we found but really didn't like the look of, well, the Spaulding Hotel was a s***hole and after being in our room 5 minutes with paint flaking, damp, windows open, and dirty looking bedding we went downstairs, were typically un English and demanded our money back, we got it and we were then of walking again! We ended up at a hotel called the metropolis we had seen earlier which was for similar money as the Spaulding but way way nicer, nice decor, clean bedding and a flat screen, sorted we'll take it!
And that my friends was pretty much it for our first night in San Francisco.
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