Most of the time the temperature was about 18 degrees celcius (I don't care if that's the wrong spelling, I'm used to putting that with the little circle thing and then a big C, but I dont know how to do the little circle thing so you'll have to make so with my bad spelling) so there was no fog but really bright sunny days. It was actually warm enough to wander around in teeshirts and maybe a light cardigan... in Feburary, let me stress that point, FEBURARY! It was beautiful.
We visited Alcatraz on one of the days and again had crystal clear bright sunshine so from the outside the little island looks like one of the most beautiful places on earth, but on the inside the light poured in on the cracked floors and chipped paint, giving all my pictures a really creepy, spooky feeling, like happiness was desperately trying to get in but couldn't quite make the place look beautiful. Wandering round taking pictures when you have the sounds of the worst of the wosrt prisoners screaming in your ears? Wow, it's a bit surreal. My parents were impressed when the memento I bought myself from Alcatraz was a baseball, I felt slightly wrong going all the way to America and not coming back with one! I got my dad a fantastic little book called "Al Capone does my shirts" about a man that was raised on Alcatraz because his dad was a prison guard. Some of the stories they told on that island were really freaky and I wish I could tell them, well I might in my next blog, because I don't want this one going on too long.
We also went to Castro, gay central. I bought a comic book for Luke from there which he has already finished reading because he liked it so much and again, there are many stories I could tell about Castro, but I'll leave them for another day.
We spent an hour or so in Berkley but never actually made it to the university. The people I went with decided they didn't really want to look round so we just bought a chinese (best chinese ever, second only to the meals WenWen and BaoBao used to cook me back in my old flat) and we used the tram system every day. Union Square is possibly the most expensive place I have ever been! One of the girls I met, Nikki, bought a tiny replica of the trams made from silver with a little moving man inside for $40, but I didn't want to spend that much on one item. There was a perfect little charm bracelet shop on the Pier selling charms of the trams, but I dont have a charm bracelet and already wear 2 necklaces so I wasn't going to waste $25 on one of them, although sometimes I wish I had because they were so pretty!
I must say, one thing I found really hard was finding suitable food. In our hotel room we didn't have the option of cooking for ourselves so we had to eat out for every single meal. Seriously, the only food I could find when eating out was steak, burgers and salads. You were lucky to find a place that sold vegetarian option burgers and some places didn't even do vegetarian salad! Of course this meant that by the end of the first week, I was really ill due to the build up of gluten from the non-gluten-free food I kept being served. The other people in the groups were saying they'd never eaten so much fried and junk food, I was saying I'd never eaten so much salad because that's the only gluten-free option I could find ANYWHERE. I was so relieved to get home, go to Wetherspoons and have my first jacket potato of the past 10 days. On the plane the people who could eat normal food had the choice of eating Pasta and I'm surprised but I haven't actually had any pasta yet. Probably because I only have enough for one serving and want my usual years supply in my cupboard before I eat any more!
Anyway, I would love to carry on babbling at you all but I have a video lecture at 1:30pm today and have a few "errends" to run before I meet up with Lauren in Starbucks (our usual meeting place) and head off. So I shall write again soon. hope you enjoyed this weeks edition of "random babblings of the Ella kind, this week in American".
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