The accommodation (including our "loved" communal kitchen...)

Our accommodation is generally spoken okay, it's just five minutes walking from the Union Square and therefore a really cool place to stay. 

The room and the bath are fine, it would be nice to have a bigger fridge, but we still manage to store our food somehow. In the basement of the building is a common room with a big DLP HD TV (a bit better than the one in our room), perfect for watching football games, and  billiard table (though a bit shabby). The "weigths room", the laundry and the kitchen are in the basement too.

There's a very accurate acronym to describe the cooking facilities... FUBAR. I'll probably post a picture later. Actually you can't use any of the pans there if you're a reasonable person. Therefore we bought us two at the next safeway. As soon as you're a bit used to the kitchen's deficiencies you'll manage to cook your dinner. Nevertheless you shouldn't try to produce gourmet dishes... You'll also never now exactly which hot plate actually works... they seem to change every day. 

The most annoying thing is, that there are a lot people who seem to have absolutely no idea of cooking, not to mention doing the dishes or cleaning up. However, the highlight of all kitchen stories so far happened the day before yesterday, as some spanish morons managed to set one of the (anyway sucking) ovens on fire! Their reaction was like this:

*Open the oven, oh fuck, flames!, close the oven, standing around and discuss what to do, open the oven again, even bigger flames...*   WTF!! I had to tell them where the fire extinguisher is... they didn't think about looking around.

  

Strolling through San Fran & Sunday Football

(49ers shirt: Chris, middle: Angelika, right side: me)

Sunday - Football day... that's what I learnt from Chris, a Swiss guy from our school, actually in the same class... He's a huge (and when I say huge, I mean huge :D) fan of the San Francisco 49ers.

However, because of him I spent my Sunday morning watching the 49ers game on TV. During the match, Chris explained me the most important rules (thanks!) and I also learnt that the playing time is just one hour (four quarters, each 15 min) but there are always a lot of breaks, mainly because the TV stations want to broadcast advertisment... It's kind of stupid... until the game is finally at it's end you're watching TV for more than 3 h.

But nevertheless, it's a real cool game and worth watching it. By the way, during the game you have enough time to do the laundry... 

As the game was over, Angelika, Chris and I decided to stroll a bit through San Francisco... Because of school, homework and stuff like this we hadn't had time during the week. We went straight to California Street to take the Cable Car. Of course we didn't sit down, it's much cooler to stand on the platform on the side of the car... "Hoooooooold oooon!" :-)

After visiting Lombard street (you know, this crazy snake-like, flower street...), a KFC :-) (we were hungry....) , and the Golden Gate Bridge, we finished our trip with a short stop at Fisherman's Wharf / Pier 39.

SF Giants - attending a baseball game

AT&T Park, SF "Let's go, Giants!!"

Last Friday we went to a baseball game, SF Giants vs. LA Dodgers, a couple of students from our school went to, and altough everybody told us that it would be boring, we had a lot of fun.

Actually I had never seen a baseball game before, so I was wondering how it would be... The game wasn't sold out, it was one of the last games of the season and didn't seem to be important anymore. In fact, a lot of the fans left the stadium already after the first three innings... they were all without a single point. Nevertheless, we saw four or five homeruns during the rest of the game, but in the end the score was very low and there wasn't too much action on the field.

The game went on for 3:33 h, which in the end was the only annoying thing.

As the baseball is at its end, I may visit an American Football match, should be more action... I've seen already a match on TV. 

However, tomorrow I will buy some tickets for a NBA game, I guess this will be quite cool to see live.

Hi there!

I've spent now more than a week in San Francisco, and I've come up with the idea to start a blog. 

As there's already a lot happened I will summarize the highlights, including the short stop in New York (3 days) on the way to San Fran.

By the way, I'm here to improve my English (and of course to have a lot of fun), so I'll do my best to avoid mistakes in the posts, but I won't guarantee anything :P

However, let's start with some impressions from Big Apple:

View from the top of the impressive Empire State Building

Well, it was quite windy on the top of the ESB.

A panorama from the same building at nighttime (obviously).

Unfortunately I had to size it down for the blog.

New York is a great city which never stands still for a second. 24/7 live pure, it's absolutely amazing. I can totally recommend to spend some days in this huge metropole. There are so many things which are worth being visited, it's impossible to do everything in just three days, nevertheless we (my girlfriend stays also with me) have seen a lot cool places.

 Besides the "must-see" sights as the Statue of Liberty, the ESB, Chrysler Building, the Times Square and stuff like this we also visited the Museum of Sex (really cool :-p) and made a 30 min trip on a speedboat with was a lot of fun too.

Altough there were a lot more things which we'd liked to visit we had to leave the city after three days (at 5 am!! wtf...) So we headed for San Francisco, our location for the next three months...