Redwood City :: USA
I ain't getting out of my damn car for no-one!
Places: San Francisco Bay Area
Coolest thing I did: Found out that there was a whole garden full of Rodin bronzes in the grounds of Stanford University. UTS didn't even have grass.
Coolest thing I didn´t know: You can buy an iPod from a vending machine. You know something is a commodity when you can get it out of the same machine that sells you M&Ms and bottled water.
Due to some wonderful wrinkle in how training gets organised at my company I managed to get myself a 4 day trip out to the San Francisco Bay Area, not knowing I was going on Tuesday and landing on Sunday. It’s pretty easy to say ‘yes’ to these kinds of things on the spot when you don’t have spouses or kids to worry about.
It’s interesting to come back to this part of the world, which was my first taste of America and pretty much how I saw the country in my head for years, a nation completely made up of low-rise office parks and freeways. As a tourist you probably would never venture this far south of the city, except perhaps driving through on your way to Los Angles and to tell the truth you wouldn’t be missing much. Silicon Valley, that stretch of the east side of the bay between South San Francisco and San Jose is what I thought America was. It’s been almost a decade since I first came here, at the height of the dot-com boom when people actually walked the streets with the initials ‘MOP’ on their T-shirts (Millionaire On Paper) and the banks would lend people money against their unvested stock options and right now as a second boom comes to an end (for the whole country this time) the mood is nothing like it was back then. For the second time in 10 years there seems to be some questioning of whether working constantly for the promise of stock that may be worth something by the time you can sell it instead of having a life is a good trade off.
This trip was really too short to spend more than a little time in the fine city of San Francisco itself, having only a single jet-lagged Sunday to be a tourist before having to spend three days in the office. I took the hire car out to Half Moon Bay, where I went to last time I was out here but have since learned overlooks Mavericks, one of the world’s heaviest (in the sense of volume of water, as opposed to 80s surfer talk) waves. The wave breaks offshore, over some rather pointy looking rocks that give it the nickname “the meat grinder” so it’s hard to see but looking before I left on Google Maps I reckoned you could drive right up to the headland and look down on it. The trouble was the day I showed up was completely flat, enticing no surfers out that far and the bluff overlooking it is also a US Air Force missile tracking station, crowned with massive golf-ball antenna. You could kind of see something that might have been waves crashing over rocks, but it wasn’t all that spectacular. It looked better on YouTube. However, it was a very nice afternoon and lunch at the microbrewery set me up well for a long afternoon of trying not to fall asleep at the wheel.
I’d forgotten how stupidly small the micro-climates are, the fact that it could be 30 degrees at the hotel in Redwood City, 25 at Half Moon Bay and 19 and foggy in the city. I decided a good way to stay awake would be to drive up and have another look at the Golden Gate Bridge, because you know, that’s what you do here. By the time I’d driven up to the Presidio, parked the car and walked up to where I should have been able to see it there was fog so think you could consider it a landmark. I then got back in the car, drove under the bridge to the other side and the sky was blue again. Behind me you couldn’t make out the bridge, but the fog seemed to be fairly heavily sticking to it. I imagine if this was the first time you were seeing it you’d be as annoyed as I was when the only time I was in New York they had scaffolding over the Flatiron building and a picture of it painted on a canvas hung over it.
Sydney is a city that is rapidly being rebuilt around the car, however the Bay Area has been like that forever. Bar the inner city of San Francisco itself I have no idea how you’d even attempt to get around on public transport. Having said that, the city is a bit of a nightmare to get around when you’re driving an unfamiliar car, on the wrong side of the road and in serious need of sleep. I kind of decided on skipping all remaining sightseeing opportunities before I got pulled over for drunk driving while sober.
I had made a promise before I left that I would attempt to keep burgers and chips out of my diet for as much as possible, kind of as a challenge. This forced me to dig around in Google a bit for places to eat that weren’t the hotel bar and I got to look at some of the other towns in the Valley, most of the best places I found keeping me returning to Palo Alto and the area around Stanford University. Palo Alto is kind of like a Disneyland version of America in the 1950s. It’s disgustingly clean, the concrete is white, the roads are a contrast of flawless jet tar with perfectly straight lines painted on them. There’s no rubbish, no gum stuck on the footpath and the trees are all identical. While I imagine if you were teleported there from a village in Africa you’d have think you had actually died and gone to heaven I kind of found it a little creepy.
It’s the same kind of creepy that all those perfectly manicured business parks have. The Openwave office is in a complex at the end of 3 miles of salt flats and the port of Redwood City, however it juts out into the bay with its polished glass and exactly 1 inch long lawns. There’s a beach volleyball court, gym, pool, basketball court and countless other leisure activities I can’t quite bring to mind right now because there are simply so many of them. The hotel I stayed in was in a whole bunch of similar parks, EA being right over the road and the imposing towers of Oracle’s headquarters being the first thing you look out over at breakfast. I went running around the place and it was the same thing, lawns that look like they’ve never had touch or soccer played on them, empty basketball courts. It’s like the companies are saying “if you become a fat slob because you’re at work all the time don’t blame us, there’s a tennis court right out the window”. You really do accept that work is going to be your entire life when you come to work on these campuses, and the scary thing is they’ve attempted to export this model overseas. The Sun campus they were building in Surrey while I was working there worked on the same principle, with the only problem being no-one wants to play volleyball when it rains 9 months of the year.
With all this technojiggery going on you forget that long before the nerds spread out from Menlo Park and Stanford all of Northern California was the domain of the counter-culture revolution. Occasionally you’re reminded, like when you’re in a restaurant where steaks are $40 a go and two 60 something ladies are all overjoyed to have just discovered that they are both Virgos. Another time I overheard a slightly younger bunch of high powered business type women have a serious conversation about how someone wouldn’t work on their project team because he was a Sagittarius. I wonder if you can take them to court for unfair dismissal for Zodiac-based discrimination.
When you travel for work and you’re the only out-of-towner you do spend a fair bit of time sitting at bars to eat. At the hotel on the night I checked in there was a wedding going on and occasionally the guests would come out to the hotel bar to jump the queue at the actual wedding bar. Not one of them ordered beer. I think this is why we don’t understand the Americans as drinkers, it’s all those heavy spirits they insist on drinking. No wonder they only have two speeds, sober and drunk – without beer it’s very hard to take a meandering journey towards being blotto. It probably doesn't help that the vast majority of their beer is, as the French would say ‘merde’.
You can do everything in a car here, get coffee, pick up your dry cleaning, even get money out of the ATM. Add to this the fact that McDonalds are currently advertising a 1/3rd pounder (no, really) and the mystery of why the average American is large than the average Frenchmen becomes apparent. Having said that, I did break my no fries rule for my last meal on this trip in order to experience In-N-Out Burger. It’s a California-only burger chain with practically nothing on the menu. You can have a cheese burger or a double cheese burger. Unless you know the secret code. One of the guys in the office told me to go in and ask for a 3x3 Animal Style with Onions. It’s as wonderfully filthy as it sounds and I suspect I might be skipping the first 2 meals on the flight back. Any chain that lets you pick the exact beef patty:cheese ratio on your burger is strictly for the discerning, you won’t get that happening at Burger King.
So my one real cultural experience came by accident. During one of my crazy awake-at-strange-hours-of-the-morning periods I was flicking through the supermodel-thin guide to the highlights of being a tourist in the San Jose area. Wedged in between the descriptions of restored historical down town areas and shopping centres (which apparently double as tourist attractions here) I saw that Stanford University has a whole garden full of Auguste Rodin bronzes, including his famous Gates of Hell, the original backdrop for The Thinker. I've managed to see quite a few of these before around the traps (most notably at the Rodin Museum in Paris) but they're always pretty good and there's something different about seeing them outside in that soft Californian light, totally different to mid-winter London or Paris. Some people get a bit annoyed to discover that Big Rodes' (as he was known to his mates) work was copied fairly liberally and there are actually several copies of the big name works like The Thinker or The Burghers of Calais (which I personally like better) around the various art galleries of the world, like they aren't looking at the original but "just a copy". You get the same thing with Edvard Munch's The Scream but I guess both these dudes came up at a time where mass production was already the norm in industry and publishing, so why not art? Big Rodes was a genius full stop and it's always pretty damn cool to see his stuff out in a park somewhere. You miss that kind of stuff in Australia.