Well, that was an amazing day.
I'm currently in San Mateo, just a little south of San Francisco. After spending my day in downtown San Mateo, I walked back to my hotel. If you know me, you know I'm fond of walking and the fact that all I really had to go on was a general direction and a vague mental picture of some maps I had looked at was no issue. It took me almost an hour to get back but it gave me some time to think about the left coast.

The first thing that struck me when I got here was the serious lack of color outside. I got off the plane and noticed that someone had loaded the 20 year-old film on to the reel-of-life and everything outside looked washed out. Then I realized that it wasn't true at all... California just looks like that. The trees? Grey-green. The grass? Yellow-green. Lots of brownish dirt. In fact, it's the same feeling that you get when you're at the Jersey shore. Since most houses there are only occupied for 4 or 5 months of the year, barely anyone grows grass on their property. They just replace them with pebbles. Even more similarly, the Jersey shore has such high property value that every ounce of land is taken by houses or tiny fenced-in 'nature preserves.' Or sand. I forgot about sand. Here in CA, every ounce of land is taken by buildings or highway probably because if there wasn't anything there, it would be pretty dry and boring. So my first physical detail of the east coast to miss is the large green trees and shade. Even in the Philly 'burbs, you can't drive a mile without seeing a patch of trees that haven't been developed yet.

Anyway, I'm having a pretty good time. It's still really intimidating to be in a strange city without anyone you can trust but I'm trying to keep myself busy. I'm going to try to get to downtown SF tomorrow and hopefully it'll be as nice there as people claim it is.

Anything I should really do before I leave? I don't really have much access to transportation but I might have one empty day to take a suggestion.