San Francisco 🌉

New continent - new adventures! With this attitude, I crossed the Pacific Ocean to the USA. My first stop here is San Francisco for the next 3 days. My excitement and curiosity about what awaits me here is hard to describe in words. After I brought my backpacks to the hostel, I went on my first exploratory tour of the city center. I immediately noticed that I had imagined San Francisco to be more touristy, busier and bigger. But all of this was a positive surprise! After breakfast, I walked through the city center to the ferry terminal and all the way to the end, to Pier 39, to finally catch my first glimpse of the Golden Gate Bridge. After looking at the seals here, I made my way to a lookout point on one of the many hills in San Francisco. I walked all the way up to the Coit Tower to look out over the city and San Francisco Bay. I sat down there for a while and tried to realize that I had really just arrived in the USA. Completely overwhelmed and full of impressions, I went back to the hostel and took a nap before eating my first American burger in the evening (even though it was vegetarian). But then I fell into bed, dead tired. Of course, I wanted to make the most of the next day and started early with a homemade breakfast in the hostel kitchen. Something that I missed more than just in the last few months in Asia! We then went on a city tour, which was really quite interesting to get to know the background of San Francisco. After that, I really wanted to see the Golden Gate Bridge up close and walked there. On the way, I looked at the Fine Art Palace. I walked all the way along the beach until I was standing directly under the Golden Gate Bridge. That was pretty impressive, I must say, and I spent a while just looking at the bridge. However, I was not prepared for the cold weather in San Francisco and so it got chilly pretty quickly and I went back. In the evening, we looked at the skyline of San Francisco at night from a park near the hostel. The next day I visited a few more districts of the city before going on a tour to Alcatraz in the afternoon. The ferry only takes about 15 minutes and you have a wonderful view of San Francisco city. But that's all for now, because Alcatraz was a maximum security prison for 30 years. Today it is a museum and a breeding ground for various birds. The museum itself is quite exciting to see and hear the stories of the prison behind the scenes. After a windy 3 hours we went back to the mainland and back to the hostel. We got a few beers in the liquor store and made our way to the Golden Gate Bridge. We planned to watch the sunset from the beach but unfortunately the clouds spoiled our plans. So we just sat there for a while looking at the bridge, drinking our beer and chatting. For me that was the perfect end to San Francisco. Because the next morning we went back to the airport quite early and continued on to the north of the USA to Oregon. 🫶🏼