On last Saturday I finally arrived in San Francisco to visit Judith. She is currently doing an internship at SAP in Palo Alto and we will both spent our holidays here for the next two and a half weeks in the bay area (and on Maui 
).
I like driving around with Judith’s company car very much. The traffic rules here are sometimes different and are a strange from time to time, but it’s cool anyway. The bad thing is, that it is almost impossible to do anything by foot.
So far, what we did most of the time in the last days was shopping. 
I probably already spent several hundred dollars for new clothes. Most of the stuff is so much cheaper than in Germany….it’s unbelievable.
On Tuesday we went to San Francisco downtown. We started in Financial District, walked through Chinatown to the Coit Tower and afterwards to Pier 39 in the north. There we wanted to book a tour to the well-known prision Alcatraz, but unfortunately the tours were completely booked out until next Sunday. 
Therefore we enjoyed the view of the coast and got back to downtown. After visting the apple store (I want a black MacBook! – any generous people here? ) as well as some other shops, we took the trolley to Golden Gate Park. It is quite beautiful and a great place to relax. The bad thing was, that the way back to the place where we parked our car was very long. At first, we thought, that we could do it by foot, but after realizing that we are not trained well enough to walk up and down the streets (Yes – San Francisco is really mountainous ), we had to take the trolley.
Yesterday, we had lunch with Mark Heynen at Googleplex in Mountain View (2 miles away from Judith’s apartment). The Google headquarters are really amazing. In the entrance area they had a big display which showed a 3D model of the earth with lines of pixels comming from the surface of the earth. The length of the lines showed the amount of searches per area and their color reflected the language of the search. Unfortunately I did not take any pictures of it. (I’ll ask Mark, whether he can send me one or two…)
In the evening a friend of Judith, Becky, arrived from Seattle. We will go biking on Angle Island today. The island is right behind Alcatraz. So stay tuned for more news reports….;-)
