So it’s been almost a month since I moved to this crazy city.
Some things I’ve noticed and seen:
- It’s cold here. Like REALLY cold.
- My first homicide crime scene, blood, police tape and all.
- A live protest, down in the Mission district.
- The number of people who don’t seem to be able to dial a phone number correctly. I’ve had my phone line maybe 2 weeks and have had something like 10 wrong-number calls. Back in Sydney I got maybe 1 wrong-number call every 3 months?
- The US bureaucracy is just as bad as people say it is. It took me THREE WEEKS to get a SSN, and until I had that ‘magic number’ everyone treats you like you’re laundering money or are a terrorist or something.
- Rampant consumerism, everywhere.
- Homeless People, again, everywhere in this city. Isn’t this supposed to be the land of limitless opportunity?
- Really slow Internet. People in Australia are complaining? Australia has 24mbps ADSL. American is capped at 6mbps. And forget about cable – the terms and conditions of sign up and usage are just ridiculous.
- Really bad English. I don’t know if this is just because San Francisco is something akin to a ‘first stop’ in the US, but there are a LOT of people here who just can’t speak English properly. And this includes people working in service industries and government. They either have really strong ethnic or localised accents that are really hard to understand.
- Starbucks on every street corner.
- American currency. All the bills look the same. Ten cents is smaller than one cent which is smaller than five cents.
