| March
25 I visited San Francisco again. This time I went with Leukena, a
collegue who works on the same project as I do (the RNAi screen). We
took her car and went all the way up highway 1 to San Francisco. I took
a whole bunch of pictures and finally I've put them here for you to see. |
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 Highway 1 goes along the coast of the pacific ocean. You pass through a national park named big sur. We stopped several times besides the highway to take some pictures. At one time we stopped at a roadside restaurant to have lunch. We discovered that there was a trail behind it leading down to the beach, and at that place there was a waterfall coming down the cliff.  Here is a picture of Leukena in the redwood forest, she likes to climb trees you know.  |
  We made another stop in Big sur near a place called Pfeiffer falls. There we had a chance to walk through the redwood forest and see some more waterfalls. Redwoods are ancient, gigantic trees with a typical reddish color. Below you see the californian poppy, the state flower.  |
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| With
all the breaks we made and all, it took us from 11 in the morning to 9
in the evening to get from home to our hotel. The highway network in
San Francisco is a bit of a maze and we got lost twice before we found
our hotel. On saturday we went to the nearest station of the BART, the Bay Area Railroad Transit, and left the car there. We walked through the city until dark. We saw chinatown, made a ride on the famous cable car, and we visited fisherman's wharf. The cable car is pretty old fashioned as a means of public transport, but it is good for the tourists anyway. There is a nice view at every corner, and the city stretches out in 3 dimensions. One of the nicest views we had from the base of coit tower. Coit tower is on a small hill in the middle of the city. It's a nice climb to the top of the hill and the view is the best reward you can get. |
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  chinatown |
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largest building you see on the pictures below is called the
transamerica pyramid. All the skyscrapers are concentrated in a small
area that is called the financial district. |
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| San Francisco is located on a small peninsula with the pacific ocean on one side and the bay on the other side. The city is smaller than you'd think, only 700,000 inhabitants or so. But many more people live on the other side of the bay. Two bridges connect San Francisco with other cities in the area. The golden gate bridge is shorter than the bay bridge and carries less trafic, but it is just prettier. Sunday we drove across the bridge and we had a long hike through muir woods, another national park. Before we went back we also drove up the hill on the north end of the golden gate bridge and from there you have a spectacular view over the city and the bridge. | ||
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| We
decided to stay half a day longer just to have a chance to see
alcatraz, the famous prison that you can see in movies such as "the
rock" and "escape from alcatraz". The prison is located on a small
island just 2 km from the city. It doesn't seem that far really and I'm
sure you can swim to it if you wanted to. From 1930 to 1960 this
building was the most secure prison of the USA and it housed famous
prisoners such as Al Capone. Alcatraz was more a publicity stunt than a
real improvement on the prison system. It was supposed to be highly
visible and the people who went there were all very famous criminals.
The goal was to show the american people that the gouvernment was
taking action against criminals. Touristic as it may be, the audio guided tour of the island is really worth the trip. Former inmates and guards get to tell their stories and we also got to hear about escape attempts. |
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 on the way home |
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