As my trip from Panama to Thailand needed me to fly through San Francisco, I had the chance to use my 5 hours stop over time for a quick visit to the city. San Francisco welcomed me with a sunny day around 20 degreese. At the airport I ask around how to go to the Golden Gate Bridge the most easy way and the local people recomended to me to use the fast train from the airport and back.
I was a bit surprised as the ticket for the train was quite expensive, around 15€ one way, but decided to go anyway. Maybe two stations after the airport, the people in the train mixed up to, from my point of view, the average people. I have to confess that most people gave me the impression of feeling unhappy, life in poverty, work very hard, don’t eat healthy, life isolated – or in other words – this people does not match my expectations from the everage american people that I had in my head.
The train was quick and as I left the train, I found myself somewhere in the financial district. The architecture was more then impressiv. This view totaly matched my expectations – but still people on the streets seems to be far away from each other. Maybe I come from a too small town, but I’m used to that people look each other into the eyes or face, say hello or smile when you pass them somewhere outside. Here it looked to me that only people who know each other have a connection.
I think thats why I’m so in love with Asia.
I walked down the street into the direction to the harbor. The harbor pictured with a very old and big building what might been constructed in the 1920th was a super beautiful view. Behind the harbor building I saw a big bridge and with my little knowledge about the world, in the first moment I thought this is already the golde gate bridge, but it wasn’t. It was the Bay Bridge but not less impressive. How is it possible to build something like this? How long has it taken and how many people was needed to work on this? Fantastic!
I took 30 pictures and then realised that the remaining time window will be to small as to make it to the Golden Gate Bridge. So I looked around to find a little souvenier for my guest family in Thailand. I remembered that they asked me for books with images and english words. Sadly in the small book shop at the harbor I could’t find anything nice. So I enjoyed some moments to watch the sunset and then head back to the train station. Temperatures was falling quickly and the waiting time for the train becomes very long and cold. As my next flight would be with American Airlines, I was sure that I won’t miss any comfort. 17 hours flight time. The longest distance I ever flew. Destination Singapur and one houre stop over. I worried how I will feel on my arival as my travel time will then already hit 35 hours.
With this thoughts in my head I entered the train and looked forward to get back to the hopefully more warm airport. In the train I had similar impressions from the people who sourounded me. One example quite shocked me a bit. A young women took the seat next to me. She was heaveyly overweighted and from our seat row with 3 seats, she filled two of them. As she constantly looked on her cell phone while sitting next to me, I’d rather could’t do anything else then look on her screen too. She was scrolling down her Instagram stream and all pictures in her stream showed mostly other young women but all of them was slim. As far as I could grab the topics about on the pictures, mostly it was about looks, fashion and make up trends. That was shocking to me, as I feel the huge pressure that last today on the young people, with images that are so useless and far away from reality. What kind of civilisation is this? Where most of us try to be what high gloss magazines want us to be? Where happy moments on Instagram becomes a currency?
The arrival of the train blewed away my thoughts and as I checked in my luggage already after landing, it takes me just a short time until I looked out of the window, ready for the next flight.
