The city by the bay

One day I woke up in northern California. In a city that was once known as The Paris of the West in the early nineteen hundred; San Francisco. Today, it is known for its iconic Golden Gate Bridge, cable cars, the colourful Victorian houses, and one of Al Capone’s home; Alcatraz prison. My emotions had mixed feelings of anger and despair after my application for my Canadian permanent residency had been rejected after four long years of living in Toronto. It had left me no choice but to leave the great big white north forever. "They can take their cold weather as well as their Tim Horton's coffee and shove it", I said to myself miserably. My issues with Canada would not be resolved too soon. It was time to move on with life and make the best of the current situation, investigate the tranquil streets of The City.

The hostel offered a free walk tour and I wrote my name on the list before I crossed the road to buy a tall can of beer from the store while my empty stomach rumbled. I felt too melancholy to eat anything. I waited patiently in the main lobby as I drank the cold beer slowly. Seventeen strangers from different parts of the world followed the young American host down the hill towards Post and Powell Street as we set out to see the Union Square's heart sculpture. Everyone in the group exchanged their names and country of origin with enthusiasm. The beer had certainly shifted my mood for the better. Over the first hour, we walked up and down the steep hills in the warm early spring season, scouting through the rich history of Chinatown and the delis in North Beach; Little Italy. The smell of the bakeries made my stomach eager for food, and a drink to quench my thirst; a bottle of soda, and a bourbon miniature.

Snap snap and the photos load onto the SF album in my phone as I admire the view from Coit Tower. San Francisco is truly beautiful. A city is full of character in between the sea and the surrounding, dynamic landscape. Canada was no longer a distraction. The Bay had blossomed into something new, fresh, and exciting. Something that no other city in North America had offered. It only took me half a day to fall in love with the hilly city. The tour finished at Pier 39 in the fisherman’s wharf. Small groups of people divided off into different sections on Beach Street and I glued myself with a few travelers from Europe. We discovered a bar by the gentle Pacific ocean and sat out on the thick wooden patio, exchanging few words with each other as we drowned our beers in the cool Californian breeze, observing the beautiful scenery of the Golden Gate Bridge.

After a few days had flown by in this magical place, it was clear that I had to extend my stay. My finances had to be taken into considerable matters and had to be spent carefully; reduce the liquor consumption and limited the nightlife. Minimise my smoking habit to half a pack a day no matter how my cravings hounded me and cook pasta to stretch the food budget out. Generally, most frequent travelers learn the struggle of funding and end up learning new strategies to benefit themselves as well as helping other unknown backpackers. We build relationships and find new ways to seek out adventure and experience the wonders of new, strange places: Hire a car to drive out to Muir Woods, the group chipped in to minimise the overall coast for our shared experience. We hire bikes as a group ride and settled a negotiated price with shop the owner; Seven bikes for a day rental at a fifteen percent discount. The United States is a country known for its opportunities. God bless America.

Hostels are the equivalent of a university course in travel, teaching an individual the main elements of survival and providing real resourceful techniques on how to get through the challenges in this world.

A backpacker from New York who I had only known after a night drinking, had asked me the next day on a dreadful hung-over morning if I would accompany him to visit the famous ally that was named after a famous author of the nineteen fifties, Jack Kerouac. "Sure, I have no idea who he is", I said to him curiously with a dry sore throat. He was overwhelmed with a trill of joy, "Great! Awesome man! It's gonna be lit!" When we arrived at Jack Kerouac Street, it quickly became too much for me to bear his reactions as he asked for numerous photos of him under the author's street post. My head was already spinning as we entered a bookstore that is internationally recognisable to all book lovers as the City of Lights. I witnessed a thirty-something old man behave like a child in a candy store, I had seen enough and made to leave."Are you ok man? You don’t look too good" the yank had asked with an unpleasant look on his face. "Hearing-impaired people and literature have never been in a good relationship" I explained to him as I walked out of the store with a cigarette in between my fingers. Life is full of unexpected surprises; Three years later, I would fall into a life of heavy gambling and drinking which caused me to drift along a very similar path to Charles Bukowski without me recognising it. He had helped me to discover a passion to write about my travel experience and share with the world my deepest sorrows and baggage. And with that, I had read three books by Jack Kerouac and learned that I had lived in the same arrondissement as Hemingway in Paris. We can never truly know what our journey through life is all about, but if we take a moment to step back from all the distractions, we can find all the deep and hidden connections that lead us to certain points in our lives.

Fourteen hours and fifty minutes was the flight time from San Francisco to Sydney. The day had just begun in this big city Down under and the sun shone brightly across the east coast of this new land. I looked out through the porthole window of the airplane, I shred cold tear for my old life of travel and braced myself to start all over again from scratch. It was time for a new beginning after living abroad for more than a decade, and there was no doubt in my mind that it was going to be difficult to adapt to the Australian lifestyle...

#Travel #USA #Lifejourney #SanFrancisco #Lifeexperience #shortstory