CA Days 10 & 11

I just realized my numbering is wrong. The first post should’ve been Days 1 & 2, so here we continue with the now correct numbering. Pizza & Beer was nice, Sonya’s friend had an unusal name I can’t seem to recall, but she and her boyfriend were really nice people. She’s from NY, her boyfriend is a graphics designer (kind of, or becoming one), so there was plenty of stuff to talk about. I didn’t have pizza, but stuck to a ‘small salad’, due to I felt like vegetables and vitamins and hadn’t much of an appetite. Turns out that a ‘small salad’ is more like a salad plate for two people, this thing was a dish on it’s own. But delicious. And I had another Hefeweizen. Hefeweizen around here is amazingly good, they’re doing it more sweetish and light-bodied than back home, it goes down like lemonade.

Later in the evening Sonya showed me a DVD about icelandish music and bands. At first I just was a little curious, but actually this is a really interesting documentary. I remember one quote that’s probably describing the whole DVD very, very well: “Musicians on iceland know that they are not going to become famous, they are going to sell only about 200 albums and no more. Therefore they just don’t care and make music as they want to. This is what makes icelandish music special.” Definitely worth seeing this documentary called “Screaming Masterpiece”. Go see it.

Now.

Next day we got up early because Sonya had to go to work. I joined her for the way to her office, which is actually on the hill on top over Berkeley and has a great view. IF it’s not foggy, that is. And, of course, it was foggy when I was up there. She also gave me a free pass for the museum, the Lawrence Hall of Science, which actually is a children’s museum about the bay area. I did it kind of quick because it’s for children and therefore not that challenging, but they’re having some pretty neat stuff going on there.

After my quick tour I headed for the bus stop. It said I missed a bus by 3 minutes and the next would only depart in an hour, so I decided to walk down the hill. Bad idea. It’s a steep hill and since obviously no one ever walks up or down that hill there’s almost no sidewalk, just an apx. 30cm wide area separated from the main driving lane by a white line which seems to be designated to pedestrians. Not very safe. Not very comfortable. It took me about 50 minutes to get back to Berkeley, but I passed the stadium and the fraternity-area, where literally every house has a fraternity-label over the door.

Back in a Cafe I realized that CouchSurfing finally was back online and so I wrote a couple more last-minute-requests for tonight, tomorrow and sunday. Bad luck that it’s been down exactly when I had to spontaneously arrange a few more couching-nights, but that’s how it goes. Matt had a few more suggestions on what to do and since the weather forecast finally predicts sunshine (IMAGINE!) I decided to do a little outdoor-activity-sightseeing-stuff, so tomorrow I’ll get up early to go visit Muir Woods north of San Francisco and on sunday there’s a trip to the Yosemite National Park, however that’s not for sure by now since no one seems to have good ideas on how to get there. We’ll see.

Matt suggested to skip the NFL-game-watching-thing in favor of the outdoor-stuff, since there’s a hell lot of NFL games going, while seeing the outdoor-things obviously only is possible when being around the area. Sounds logical to me. I then wanted to check out Matt’s suggested Sushi-place, but since I was on my own I decided to skip that and headed back to SF for a late lunch. It was sunny so the piers seemed like the place to go. When I arrived at the piers the sun vanished and fog took over. I had a burger at a place in the leftmost part of the Ferry Building, can’t recall the name, but that burger seriously SUCKED. It was a greasy, not-well-done collection of stuff that not only inevitably fell apart while eating but also tasted like crap. I advise you not to go have a burger at the place leftmost in Ferry Building.

After the bad burger thing and due to bad weather issues I headed back for downtown. I found a nice cafe with free wifi and tried to do some more couchsurfing-last-minute stuff, without much of success. Then more walking around. Finally I ended up in the hostel I already stayed before and now I’m sitting here on the first floor with like 20 other people in the lounge, everyone having his laptop open and surfing or chatting or whatever. Our generation is a degressed piece of laptop-addict-wobbley-dumbstuff. We suck. We all should be out drinking. And this is what I’m going to do now, since there’s an irish pub right around the corner.

I advise everyone going to an irish pub instead of staring at his laptop-screen. I love you all.