Trapped In The East Bay
Like Blanche DuBois, I have always relied on the kindness of strangers. When a lad with scarcely a clue arrives on foreign shores he really has no choice but to. And like that hothouse flower, I (being the lad) has to struggle to keep my fragile sanity intact as I was besieged on all fronts by something I hadn't expected, but had been warned about: the friendliness of the Americans. Being English -- and I only say this as a point of fact -- we are raised believing the only place the Yanks will be civil is in the hinterland.
The anticipated cold, heartless "big city" welcome never materialized as I stumbled out of the SFO shuttle. Somehow, I still can't recall how, I had managed to bypass the heart of the airport and was transported to a fairly robust urban center. I would come to find out this was South San Francisco. At the time, I thought I had arrived on the outskirts of the City itself. Little did I know I was still within a stone's throw of the airport.
As I made my rounds at the San Francisco airport hotels, searching for a front desk clerk who would accept pounds Sterling as payment, I was struck by how breathtaking the area was. if this was merely a city some fifteen minutes from the actually City, I was filled by a strange sense of anticipation and dread. I likened the feeling to smiling too often, and for too long -- after a bit you being to look and feel like a psychopath.
Simply glancing at a regional map in my hotel room, it was striking how incredibly cozy the Bay Area was. It seemed to me one could easily jaunt across the Bay, into say Berkeley or Piedmont, have a cuppa and then hop over to Sausalito for a bit of sightseeing and then be in San Jose for lunch. To my chagrin, this was far, far from the case. In fact, simply crossing the Bay was strenuous enough to constitute a day's work. had I the capital, I would have simply stayed the night.
Once I had crossed the Bay, via the metro system that actually takes you under the Bay, I emerged from darkness to find myself somewhere in Berkeley or Oakland. I disembarked from the metro (known as the BART) and found myself thrust into the bustling, fashionable center of Berkeley -- or was it Oakland. There is always some overlaying of the cities and often it occurs at particularly fashionable streets. I had much to learn and an entire day trapped in the East Bay to learn it.
