Well after a long sleepless flight I have arrived in San Francisco. It's sort of what I expected, but nothing like I could imagine. The first American I saw sounded like Bill Clinton, the third had a gun. Everything went through smoothly including I even had over the alcohol allowance. I thought it would be a major headache trying to exceed allowances, but they never asked, so I never lied, they only asked for monetary values of what I was leaving here. Which brings me to my deal of the century. I'll compare this to the one in one hundred year storm in Northland that happened twice, three months apart. When I purchased two $1 bottles of 2-liter banana milk, I never thought I'd see such a good bargain. Then I saw it. $1 bottles of spirits. And these aren't fun size that kids would enjoy before school, no, this is 1L+ size. So I purchased a bottle or Coruba rum and a bottle of Whiskey (1125ml) and handed over a shiney coin. I win.

The city itself is pretty amazing, the roading system is quite simple, but the grand scale and distances to get round the place are quite significant. I went into a few department stores to get a few things, turns out products here are ridiculously over sized. Giants bottles of mouthwash, detergent etc..

Me and Manik went to see the SF Giants play the Florida Marlins, we were a tad late and missed Barry Bonds get his 754th home run, one short of equaling the record, but the game was good and I would recommend that anyone who wants to get a good view of Americans in action then a baseball game is the way to go. The game went quite late, but it was a Friday. A lot of people left after Barry Bonds walked in what looked like would be the last batting inning for the Giants, a lot of people left. I guess they were there just to see history. The Marlins nearly came back and won. Think the score was 11-9. After the game they had an awesome fireworks display for AIDS or something. Quite they way to cap off the longest day of my life, after 30 something hours without proper sleep I was doing fine.

We got dinner in some diner in downtown San Francisco. I sort of got the grasp of tipping. It basically is $1-3 dollars for a standard meal (~$15) on the way back to the car I saw they have a few homeless people. I gave 35c to some guy without legs. Tip to the guy 30m away also trying to bum some coins. If you have no legs, don't try and get money from people next to the legless guy, it just looks like you have it all.

I'll try and upload pictures when I can/know how to/can be bothered