We made it to San Francisco. We’re staying in a flophouse that calls itself a hostel south of Market Street. Residents here are not really travelers as much as they are just people avoiding the street. Everyone’s nice, but pretty out of sorts. Our room intersects several unsecured 802.11 networks, which makes looking for jobs cheap and easy.

Most days we get up, make coffee, find more of our food stolen, check for new jobs, check on Dan, have breakfast and learn more than we want to about the trials and tribulations of our hostel-mates: ex Penthouse Pets and their kids, narcoleptic taxi drivers, severe ADHD cases, people looking for work and the owners who insist religion is the solution to most problems. For many of the residents it might help. Then we explore the city on foot.

Readjusting to the States was a little jarring. Three dimensional faces took a moment or two to get used to, they look a little grotesque at first. The power we have to ask anyone anything and understand the answer still hasn’t sunk in. American greeting customs still baffle me.

Its dirty. All the building are grey boxes. All the cars are trucks. The trains don’t go very far. Chain stores drive things down to the lowest acceptable denominator. Everyone’s fat. People wear corporate ads on their T-shirts without irony. Xenophobic militarism. There are a lot of homeless. The income disparity here is amazing. It doesn’t look like the richest country on the planet. The only place we traveled to with comparable extremes of wealth was Bangkok.

On the plus side, there is an unequaled diversity of people and languages on the street. You can say (almost) anything you want and despite the Patriot Act you can still tell cops when to piss off. You really can’t do that anywhere else. There’s also a rumored class mobility.

To be fair, we didn’t get outside the showcase cites of Europe all that much. First time and all; gotta see the churches and castles. I hear some European cities are dealing with sprawl problems. Hugging medieval cores like we did, we only caught glimpses of it from the air. The rest of Britain is likely to be less pretty. I know France puts a lot of national money into making Paris the unearthly place that it is. Japan and Italy sure seemed nice, though.