This adventure starts about an hour before taking the previous photo. I had decided I wanted to go visit the Golden Gate that day because I already had tickets for Alcatraz for the day after which was my last day in San Francisco. The grey tint on buildings and cars, the white sky, the steep road ahead of me… The hints were everywhere but I wasn’t looking at them.

Last week I was in San Francisco. After New York, which reminded of the Grid from Tron, San Francisco felt like a 3D collage. I will show a few examples of what I mean:

The day after I arrived to New York I went to buy some clothes. While navigating through the city in search of a clothes shop (I’m not too experienced in this field) I discovered how useful the street naming and layout systems they have used are. North South streets are named “1st Avenue”, “2nd Avenue” and so on while East-West streets are named “1st Street”, “2nd Street”, etc. For someone like me who easily gets lost without maps having a deterministic street layout and naming system is a blessing. I felt so confident about my navigational skills that I almost didn’t have to look at the 2 paper maps and the GPS-enabled digital map that I carried with me.

I am writing these lines sitting on my bed after the first few hours in New York where I will be staying for a few days.

After living in Dublin for some time the noise and pollution of New York were one of the first things I noticed. But that was after I spotted the beautiful skyline of the city. A few fresh impressions follow: