First of all I have to say thank you to the embassy of the US in Moscow, who “generously rewarded” me with visa for 3 years. Have no idea why the States are so generous comparing to the EU (who asks for dozens of papers and give visa for one year only). Anyway. The fact that I have visa in my passport made my trip to the US possible.

1st of June, the exact day of departure, we started our packing. The idea of the trip was bag-packing. We had tickets: Stockholm-San Francisco-Stockholm. We had a friend, who wants to take us camping. We had no certain plan.

The flight was nice. Seriously. 9 hours flight can be nice, if:

-you booked your good seats in advance

-you don’t drink alcohol onboard

-you have snacks with you

-you are flying with “Norwegian”. They have nice modern planes with extra conditioning and special light-system, which helps you to avoid jet lag and no…they didn’t pay me for an advertising 🙂

Since we were jet lag anyway, our first night was weird. Waking up every two hours, talking, falling asleep again. Our main entertainment was the view…Window view from the 27th floor was astonishing. San Francisco seemed to forget its hippie heritage and become the concrete jungles. We could always hear the sound of cars and ambulance/police, running every 3 minutes on our street. I don’t know if this city ever sleep, to be honest…
First day (night or whatever we felt it was) started with China town and tea tasting. I’m surprised how could Chinese make their own country inside the States. When you come to China town in CA, there are only Chinese people and tourists around you.
It smells like China, it tastes like China and sounds like China (language and music from the shops).
I got really excited to see the Russian district as well…to see how much of Russia it has. People say that there are “The Russian hill” or something. Will go there, check and let you know how it was. We are going to look at the Sea Lions now.

The very touristic point in SF (San Francisco) is for sure Pier 39 . Everyone go there to eat famous cream soup with shrimps and other sea insects, to take a boat towards “Golden Gate Bridge” and to smell the sea lions. They stink, by the way 🙂
Click above on “Pier 39” and you will read all the history and bla-bla-bla about that place. The most interesting to read is why are the sea lions occupied the Pier and almost never leave it.

This handsome guy was our captain on 10 dollars boat trip. If you easily get sea sick, but love water and don’t really care about crossing the waters under the Golden Gate – 10 baks boat is best for you! 30 min trip and some simple info about SF from the captain included.

Being jet lag and sea lag (not sure if it’s possible to be both at the same time) we went to the “Museum Mecanique”. Really cool place, entrance is free. The only costs is 25 cent for each automat. You run around the machines and play with them like a kid. Our friend Wyatt tried the electroshock.

From the Museum we went to the street which is parallel to the Pier. It was full of people and all kinds of shops. For some reason we went to spices store and boys tried the most spicy spice in the world. Five drops of it is enough to make a big pot of soup super spicy.

Don’t do that. Your mouth will be burning for at least 15 min. That was enough for our jet leg heads. We took delicious Irish coffee at “Buena Vista” and headed back home with a cute little tram.