I've visited a lot of places in the world but I still wasn't prepared for what even landing in San Francisco was like. I can only compare it to how I imagine Wall Street to look like back in the 80's (?) when the stocks and bonds market exploded.
The guys at the shoe shine booth were the most surprising to me. I've seen those shoe shine stations all over the world. In New York, Nashville, London... but I've never seen them being used. I've seen them used in the train stations in NYC but I'm pretty sure never in the airport. Until I landed in SFO I believed these shoe shine stations to be skeletons of a past time. This was not the case in San Fran. These stations were BUSY! They had real people getting their shoes shined by real people!
In addition to the busy shoe shine stations, there were business people EVERYWHERE. Mostly men which is a let down but still...people were in the middle of a work day. The airport itself looked brand new and no costs were spared for high tech looking gadgets or art pieces. It's certainly not an airport that you would worry about spotty wifi in. When you bring up the wifi even the name of it is well presented. Something simple like #SFO WIFI. This is super different to the Boingo Hot Spot I've become accustomed to.
I fly into LAX a lot and couldn't help comparing SFO to LAX. No one seemed to have a care in the world at SFO. It was as if everyone had recently made a shit load of money with bitcoin. Whereas LAX teases you with an "LAX FREE WIFI" option and then makes you suffer with Boingo. LAX also feels like it has let the dust/pollution in from outside whereas SFO has a spring freshness to it's air.
From this point I'm sure you can tell that I was impressed with San Francisco from the moment I landed. After leaving the airport I took a shuttle called the Airporter Express to my friend's place who lives in Santa Rosa. Santa Rosa is just outside of Sonoma which is in the Napa Valley Region aka WINE COUNTRY. I don't drink wine so you'll have to suffer with my reviews of the airport! Sorry Steemians!
We headed back into the city the next day and did the Hop on Hop off Tour. It was much longer than we expected but well worth it. We highly recommend it to anyone visiting the city. If you purchase the pass online you save 5% ;)
What I also didn't expect about San Fran is how easy it would be to fall in love with the city. I've always spent my tech time in Los Angeles because one of my primary businesses is in Beauty but visiting San Fran has really made me re-evaluate this.
Remember that movie called Pleasantville? The one that started in black and white and ended in colour? That's what San Fran is like. Nerd Style. Instead of the town going from b&w to colour, the city goes from the regular world into the tech world. Everything in San Fran is ultra tech/entrepreneur forward. All the ads are for Fiverr (as seen in the opening image), air table, slack and airbnb. I'm interested to see these ads leak into other cities and eventually to Canada. Most ads in Vancouver, Canada where I'm from are for shopping centres and Yellow Pages...pretty lame in comparison. Definitely no suggestions on how to be more efficient in your work.
Everything was out of a movie or facebook. See here a game of bubble soccer about to start!
That's all for now. Reach out with any specific questions you guys have about the city and I'll do my best to answer them!