Changes
It’s almost a year since I wrote this blog, and so many things have changed in that time. As I write, Tibetan peace flags are blowing in a San Francisco wind outside ‘my’ room, and mellow jazz is playing on a local radio station. An orange coloured cinnamon and clove candle is burning on my windowsill, a bamboo style mat takes up one-third of my minimally furnished room, and – besides the bed – most of the rest of the space is taken up by the long relaxed body of Finn, a black Airedale/Labrador mix, who is one year old, with a pup’s attitude to play but the wisdom of ages in his steady brown eyes.
The house is home to an Irish woman, Ciara Kinsella, a talented mural painter who has lived in San Francisco for twelve years now. Finn belongs, body and soul, to her, but, if Ciara is busy and there’s any chance of a walk or play with someone else, Finn has been known to be fickle, -which is why he has a paw resting casually on my foot as he sleeps.
For half of July, and all of August, the house and Ciara and Finn, as well as tall Trace, their American ‘room-mate’, have become home to me, too. Mary, who is French, would normally form part of this circle, but she’s gone back to France till the middle of August: this put paid to my guilt-reducing intent to practise that language with her.
Why the guilt…? Well, last September I started a four year degree course in European Studies in Dublin (the reason why this blog hasn’t been updated since August), and the third year of that course (2009/2010) will be spent studying at a French university, as part of the Erasmus programme. As I’m studying French for the first time, spending a summer there, practising, would have been a sensible – and fun – thing to do. It would have been even more sensible to have chosen Spanish, which I speak quite fluently, as my language of choice for the degree. Especially as it’s as easy to speak Spanish as English in San Francisco.
Instead, I chose to learn a completely new language, but – when I discovered that there is no upper age limit on a J1 student visa, enabling Irish students to travel and work in the United States for the summer – I fell straight into temptation. France is close to Ireland, easy to travel to, and better known to me. The United States, other than New York, was an unknown, magical and mysterious land, divined from films and T.V. In size it’s as big as continental Europe (which is almost on my doorstep – begone conscience!). It’s the land where so many of my ancestors emigrated and found refuge. It’s still a land of diversity, both in geographical terms, and in terms of culture. Even its climate varies…
When I arrived in the United States on June 23rd, I expected it to be hot, and it was - Boston was humid, occasionally producing quite spectacular thunder showers; Chicago was cooler, living up to its ‘windy city’ title, but with soft, warm winds and blue skies that were a delight to the senses; Los Angeles was hot and dry; and Las Vegas was scorching, literally.
…But San Francisco… I was warned to bring layers of clothing for summer here in the city because of the mist from the Bay, but nobody told me that the layers should number preferably around ten, and that you sometimes need to wear all of them together!
Yet, I’m glad – immensely glad – that I chose to come here for the longest period of my stay in the States. San Francisco is compact, easily traversed by public transport, and it’s friendly. Here people talk of ‘community’, rather than city or state: they measure neighbourhoods in terms of people, more than property, despite the fact that very few people can afford to buy homes in the city. Having a family might mean having to move further out, where space is more affordable, but people live for years in rented accommodation, rather than make that move: that’s why rent control (a ceiling on rent rises that benefits tenants) is so important here.
The city is full of murals, too, and jazz, and giant agapanthus plants outside buildings that rarely resemble their next door neighbour, even if there’s hardly a foot of space between them. Beautiful ’painted ladies’ – gorgeous old narrow houses that are called ‘Victorians’ here, but don’t in the least resemble Victorian houses in England or Ireland with their intricate detailed colour and decoration – are side by side with modern apartment blocks. And from the tops of all the hills of San Francisco – and there are many! – you can see the Bay and/or the Pacific Ocean, provided you don’t get run down by a cable car in the process of staring. The Golden Bridge, Alcatratz, Fisherman’s Pier, and Pier 3, as well as the cable cars, are all well known icons to tourists, but places like the little streets around the Mission, the small grove in Presidio Park where the spring was sacred to the Native Indians, and the old white timber San Francisco Fire Depot, built in 1893, that looks more like a small church, in Pacific Heights, are things that you only discover when walking the streets of the city, with a dog at the end of a lead.
There are so many stories in San Francisco alone, that it’s hard to tell them all, never mind the stories of the other parts of the States that I’ve seen so far, and those I heard on the Amtrak train that carried me across this vast country, from Chicago to Los Angeles. It’s a bit like – on a very different scale – walking into a grocery store here and being overwhelmed by the choice of food. …But I’ll try…