Out of Love with San Francisco
I’ve been to San Francisco a few times before. Experience so far suggested that SF is the only place in the US I’d actually live. Well, I’d have moved to the US to live there at some point in the past and gave it a go too. Recently I returned from a week in SF for work (Game Developer Conference) and I had but a spare day to do some proper sight seeing but every day, at least, I was walking through downtown and familiarising myself with the nightlife.
This time, however, I’ve decided I wouldn’t live there. It strikes me that’s a lot to do with the fact that I moved back to Australia and quite frankly Melbourne is just plain better than San Francisco in any way I care to measure. That’s got to be a bit part of it. However I didn’t even experience the stuff I liked in the past, instead it just felt like another big American city. Sidewalks packed with urine-drenched street bums, 70s-style steam-punk oversized vehicles wagga-wagga’ing down the road with their massive petrol V8s
Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of charm there. There’s some great architecture and some fascinating uniquely San Francisco features like those crazy steep roads, cable cars and the stuff which us foreigners often enjoy the first few times, American diners. Although we obviously don’t quite enjoy the bizarre currency and the whole tipping culture… I just felt less of it now, I felt soul-less shopping districts, deserted financial streets, overpriced tourist-trap coastal regions and generally a lack of places that I’d like to hang out. Bustle, dollars, commerce, being hassled on an hour by hour basis by pushy beggers. Baffled by the fact that every restaurant has a queue around dinner time…
Course I know what it is. It’s me, it’s not San Francisco. It’s just like when I declared I’d had enough of London (that took ten years though…) albiet for different reasons (I realised I could be in the process of being murdered in broad daylight and people would have stepped around you as an inconvenient obstacle). Also SF has trended towards what most US cities have seemed to become, this remarkable demonstration of the gap between the have and the have nots, the worship of the greenback and ever more cars, cars, cars and more cars.
The fact is that the US is about as far away from where I want to be in my life as I can imagine. I like a throng of people, but not a jam of cars. I like a bustle of commerce, but market trade and not chain-store franchises. I like street-art but not graffiti. I like eccentric characters but not street-brawling bums. I like multiculturalism but integrated multiculture and not enclaves of English-language-free zones and a race-based class pecking order.
To be fair, I bet you can get something like that in a million places in the US but not in the cities. Unfortunately San Francisco appears to have become just another city.
