Gentle people with flowers in their hair?

We are in San Francisco! By the way, would any of you prefer that I write in Norwegian? Er det noen av dere som foretrekker at jeg skriver paa norsk? Dersom noen onsker det kan jeg selvsagt skrive paa norsk. Vi onsker ikke aa eksludere folk som ikke er engelsktalende!

So, I start again. Right! We are in San Francisco. Wow! What a city! I love it. There are so many different areas in this town. It is just amazingly diverse. We have seen old Victorian houses, the gay district, run-down Mexican streets that are decorated by artists (taggers), sea lions (yes there are a few here now, around 60). We have seen so much that I find it difficult to mention it all.

What really strikes me about this city though is that there seem to be so many different kinds of people here. By different kinds of people I mainly mean different styles. We have spotted so many tattoos and piercing in the last couple of days. Not to mention pink and blue hair. My 18 year old self would have fitted in here quite well! It is also nice that this town is so Gay friendly. Although this can result in old men wearing not so flatting leather trousers… or even worse; tights. We saw about 30 naked men cycling passed us in town yesterday. You don’t see that very often! I don’t really blame them though because it was so hot that day. We were going sightseeing to the hippie area, but we had to head back home almost as soon as we got there because we felt that we were not far away from getting heat strokes!

Today we went to the very exciting Alcatraz Island. It was really interesting to see how the prisoners lived there. And it is intriguing that a few of them actually managed to escape.

One thing we do not like about this city is the enormous amount of homeless people we have seen. It is heartbreaking. We have seen hundreds.

The hostel we are staying at is OK. We have been eating dinner here twice for $5 each. You can’t complain about that! It makes Matt really nervous eating there though because of all the young, crazy people. Off course I find it difficult to not talk to people who sit next to me, so we end up getting in some strange avoidance situations at times  who’d want to hang out with us anyway? We feel so old. You will not find us in a pub crawl, NO WAY! We will wake up at 8 or 9 fresh and ready to start our days filled with culture, food and interesting facts.

Fact of the day: Sea lions may look like they are dogs when they swim in the water… but they are not. They are sea lions. (yup I went "Oh there's a dog" to my embarrassment when we were listening to a tour guide. We were standing on the Fisherman's Warf, and I did not expect them to be there at all).

Subfact of the day: You get sooo sick of bagels when you have them every day!

Betta&Mattt