First Visit to San Francisco

Well, it has been almost two months since I first landed in California, USA. I was sent to California for technology transfer by my company. To be frank, it is really a different kind of experience as an expatriate abroad. Surely homesick does come to picture. However, there are also as good opportunity for you to experience the life style and culture of people in other country.

OK, i guess that's all for my long-winded feeling of been abroad in USA...Last weekend, with a couple of friends who are also expatriate from Malaysia to USA, we organized a trip to One of the bay city in California State - San Francisco. We drove our car and bike around the city of San Francisco. This city is about 2 hours driving away from the town which we are staying in - Folsom.

Alright, I think I should have a brief description of this city. San Francisco (Shan Fan Shi in Mandarin) is among the high density chinese populated city in USA. This is also the only city with significant Asian (majority chinese) population. Therefore, there are a lot of streets so-called - "Chinatown", "Japan Town" and etc. There are a numerous visitors spot in San Francisco which we have visited, mainly The Golden Gate Bridge (one of the most magnificant bridge highway in USA), The Bay Bridge (with double decker highway), The Fisherman Whalf (it is a seafood village), Pier of San Francisco (The Habour with 43 ports), The Palace of Fine Arts (very nice view) and also Chinatown.

Well, we spent almost a whole day in San Franciso bike around. We depart from Folsom around 8.30am and reach San Francisco around 10.30am. The weather in San francisco is nice and windy but it's a bit cold...probably the temperature is at ~40F-46F The very first thing in our mind is "We are very hungry, need to look for food!!!". Therefore, the very first spot we bike to is the Chinatown to have a taste of the famous hot and crunchy "egg-tart". Wow...the first bite really feel great as for quite sometimes I never have a taste of the "egg-tart". In fact, it is kinda difficult to fine an authentic chinese cousine restaurant but in San Francisco, you can have dozens of that...After the short breafast, we starts our journey where we first visited the Bay Bridge where it is my first time seeing a double decker highway on a bridge. From there, we passed by the Pier os San Francisco where we pass-through the 41 hbour along the pier.

With about 1.5 hours of bike, we reached the Fisherman Whalf which we have our lunch there with cream of mushroom and shrimp within the "huge-bread" - something like a coconut drink...we also have the fried "sotong" as our side-dish...Then, we bike along the beach to enjoy the view and sight-seeing of bay city and finally reach The Golden Gate Bridge. We bike across the bridge while we can see almost half of the San Francisco from the top of the bridge...The view is fantastic. Across the bridge, it is the other side of the city. We took ferry back to the Pier and it almost evening time. On the Pier, we managed to visit the "cowboy town" which we saw sea-gull on the port. Guess what, within 25 years of my life, I never seen a sea-gull in life!!!

From the Pier, we headed back to Chinatown (revisited). We went to the Ginseng shop to sop for some "American Ginseng" to brought home later. The owner is really friendly and he explained a lot on the Chinatown history and treat us a few cups of Ginseng tea. Besides, they also speaks local dialects like mandarin, cantonese and hokkien with us. This really make me feel at home...haha...After that, we are really tired and hungry. The owner recommend us to a cheaper and nice restaurant - Jiang Nan for dinner. This is the very first time I have chinese food since I come to California. We have "cucumber soup", "Ku Lou Yuk", "Chao Pak Choy", "Zha Ji Kai" and "steam Toufu" for only USD 22...This is really cheap for 5 of us...

After the dinner, we headed back to the place where we park our car and drove back to Folsom...This is really an enjoying trip for me although it is tired and exhausted. The visit to San Francisco really make me feel at home seeing a lot of Asian around, hearing familiar dialects which I use to speaks in Malaysia and eating the food which I used to have in Malaysia. I really hope we will revisit San Francisco again before my return to Malaysia during August...