After one and a half years, I decided to go back to what had been my first destination in the US - California. As the plan was conceived, it grew ambitiously from a long-weekend in California to almost ten days touring its entire North-South length. I took a week off from work, between the two long weekends of Christmas and New Years and flew westwards.
Day 1 (Friday 24th Dec 04’):
Raj and I left for San Francisco this morning, from JFK expecting to take our pre-scheduled flight at 10:30 am. As goes my luck with flights, this flight was oversold and all volunteers for the next flight were offered a free round-trip to any United destination in the US. Since we were on vacation, I was game but Raj was a little hesitant. Eventually though, as my luck would have it, I was scheduled to fly on the later flight and Raj could travel on the pre-scheduled one. But since we were travelling together, we both stayed back for the later flight and pocketed the free tickets. Started of the vacation in profit:)
On the flight, time was spent talking most of the time (This was our first flight together and I was telling Raj how much fun it was when Raga and I flew together earlier this year). I also discovered the assets of a long-battery life in a laptop (that Raj perpetually keeps bragging about), when we watched a Hindi movie (Hulchul) on his laptop and the battery still kept running after that. A six hour flight reduces to half its duration with a Hindi film. Cool!
At SF airport, our baggage had already arrived and with it we waited for Raj Sr. ( Raj's elder brother, a.k.a RajMohan) who was to pick up Raj Jr. ( a.k.a RajSekhar). For convenience and to avoid confusion, two years ago when I met them both together, I started using these suffixes for this set of brothers, both otherwise referred to as 'Raj' by their respective friends. After greeting Raj Sr. and chatting up with him for a while, we bid goodbye and I set out to take the BART to Powell Station, as advised by my host for the city, Kunal.
Kunal is a senior of mine from my MR+D (Masters' days) at SCI_Arc. Since our program is only a year long, the outgoing batch meets the incoming one, for exactly one day - their graduation. Around that time, in May 2002 is when Kunal and I first met in LA. Since then we have barely spent two days in the same city, but have graduated to becoming 'city-mates' ( a term that can be loosely described as a mate with whom a city is seen). Kunal showed me Los Angeles, part of New York and now San Fransisco.
In the BART, I looked at the SF city map, bleakly reminiscent of NYC. As I later told Kunal, SF was a lot like NYC on the map ( only without Staten Island and with Brooklyn actually extending further South of Manhattan), Of course later, I was to discover that the distances were far lesser in this city that I was going to transcend in the following two days.
Powell St. where Kunal picked me up from, is the shopping hub of SF. We walked from Powell Station, passing Union Square through a medley of tourists ( mostly Indians, to our astonishment and amusement). Later we realised, that since it was Christmas eve, we obviously would'nt find locals roaming the streets, unless they are really late in shopping for gifts. Union Square, reminded of a similar square in the heart of Downtown LA and of course of Bryant Park; a wide public space surrounded by tall buildings in downtown New York City.
As we continued to walk towards Kunal's place, I was introduced to the sloping SF streets, a characteristic of SF I will always remember. I remember telling Kunal at the end of my trip, that I barely remember my feet being perfectly horizontal in this trip. Besides, the two rare times that I wore heels, trekking up and down the slopes was quite a fiasco.
On reaching Kunals place, we invited his next door neighbour Viral over. "Mumbai-talking" is my personal phrase for the following: Meeting someone from Mumbai who knows the half of Mumbai I know. Viral is an architect from Mumbai, like Kunal and me, so we Mumbai-talked for a while, while Viral ate his dinner and we watched. Then we architects got in action - our natural instincts to conversate over maps got the better of us, and three of us delved on the SF city maps, trying to plan my weekend there.
Interesting aspects from the conversation were how SF was a square 7 mile x 7 mile city, the Golden Gate park was larger than the Central Park (in NYC), the various transportation options I could pursue in the city and that SF was 93% liberal and 7% conservative in the 2004 presidential polls. After planning tomorrows POA, Viral left to get me some more maps/ books on the city and his MUNI pass to use over the next day. Kunal later mentioned how he has never seen Viral be this generous to anyone.
What can I say Kunal, I just cant help bringing out the good side in everyone:)
After refreshing myself, Kunal and I left to take my first bus ride in the city to a place called Fillmore; a quaint little locality with exclusive designer stores, ranging from clothes to furniture; kind of like a SOHO equivalent, only more SF in nature. Every store window we glanced into, reminded me of the stores in London, where extensive attention was given to design. I remember telling Kunal how non-American the SF experience was because of qualities such as these. NYC has this non-American feel to it, it is lesser a part of America, more a part of the World-City syndrome. SF, on the other hand, just did'nt seem to care, like a reckless child, it just did what it wants and you can either accept that or leave it. "We are like this only" it seemed to say to me. Kunal mentioned as we looked up at a window in one of the buildings "Only in SF will you find someone putting up a lit "peace" sign instead of a snowflake at Christmas" As we walked upwards and downwards, the horizon kept decreasing to reveal a dark ocean with dotted lights in the distance. We finally paused at a junction where the road sloped so steeply, that the sidewalk was actually a stair...incredible! From there we took in the marvellous night view of the bay and the lights in the distance. It had still not sunk into me that I was in California, somehow this did not seem like the California I had lived in for a year!
We walked back on the other side of the street, looking for a store Kunal's office was designing at the time. Of the few restaurants, we found a Vietnamese place open, where we decided to dine and catch up on our lives since we last met. Post dinner, some walking and a bus-ride later, we got back home and called it a day, since I was still on NY time and tomorrow we were to set out at 6:00 am.
No comments:
Post a Comment