a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
Here are pictures from the time I spent in the Ginza district and in Akihabara. I spent way too much time in the Yodobashi electronics store – some of it drooling over a beautiful $430 Seiko titanium watch (no! go and think about it first is what I told myself).
It’s November! The weeks seem to be turning into days as the year-end is rushing up at us, working away on our project. I do make a point of us to get out of the office over lunch time, and to go for a walkabout here in downtown.
Here are some interesting sights from Mission Street in downtown San Francisco.
Another week started in San Francisco for me. I went for a nice walkabout during lunch time. Sunny but mild outside (57° F/ 13° C), so light jacket weather – to ward off the wind chill from the breeze from the ocean.
It was a beautiful 63°F/ 17°C outside today when I took a walk at lunch time around the north end of Market Street here in downtown San Francisco.
Well, the heat is gone. It was decidedly cool tonight at 6.30 pm on San Francisco’s streets (57 °F/ 13°C), with the high buildings shrouded in the fog that blanketed the city.
There was a giant mosquito caught in a little spider’s web in the corner of my front door’s frame this morning when I left the house at 5.15 am.
Our flight out to San Francisco went without delay. There was no fog around, at all. The reason : it was a record (94°F /34°C) in San Francisco on Sunday, and still very warm today ( 90°F/ 32°C). It does look like we are on a cooling curve with the day time highs for the rest of the week here, though.
Every night this week, after taking the bus uphill to the hotel, I have walked back down to Union Square and Market Street to get something to eat.
The sun sets at 7.15 pm, leaving just enough daylight to check out the buildings that line Post, Taylor and O’Farrell Streets.
Monday was the start of another week for in San Francisco for me, and I’m staying in the Courtyard Marriott ‘Union Square’. The name of the hotel is a little bit of a stretch, seeing that Union Square is five blocks away. The area around the hotel does have a good inventory of art deco buildings, and art galleries.
I took the light rail train down to Pioneer Square on Saturday to check out the ice cube (that I wrote about last Sunday). It’s pretty cool (icy, to be exact), but not a solid cube. Afterwards I walked up six blocks to University Street station and stopped along the way to check out The Mark, a new high-rise building under construction on Fifth Avenue.
There was a picture of Lombard Street (‘the world’s crookedest street’, with its 8 hairpin turns in one street block), in my hotel room. And since it was just a few blocks away from the hotel, I had to go check it out.
There are several parallels between San Francisco’s Embarcadero waterfront, and Seattle’s Alaskan Way Viaduct. The Embarcadero had an ugly double-decker freeway (built in the 1960s) that was finally undone and demolished in 1991, following the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.
Seattle’s Alaskan Way Viaduct has been a long-time eye-sore as well; and damaged in the 2001 Nisqually earthquake. It’s demolition will finally be under way in the next 18 months or so, with the completion of a replacement tunnel.
.. and here are a few more pictures, these from my trip today to the camera store in South Lake Union. (The body of water visible at the top of the frame in the map in Saturday’s post).
It really is quite incredible
to look at a diagram of all the recent and on-going construction projects in downtown Seattle (on the right). At this time, there are 65 buildings under construction, with the total construction cost estimated at about $3.5 billion. The two pictures below are from my walk-about late Friday afternoon.
The weather here was finally warming up a little on Sunday, and I took the Light Rail train out there for a random walk around the campus. The 40,000-some students must be knuckling down right now in the dorms and in the library, and study for just a little longer : Final Examination (‘finals week’) starts next week.
The Marina district is named after the San Francisco Marina on the shoreline. There is also a strip of green lawn called the Marina Green between the water and the built-up area. 
Buildings in the Marina district have suffered damage to earthquakes on more than one occasion the last century or so, but as Wikipedia notes : physically, the neighborhood appears to have changed very little since its construction in the 1920s.
Four of us from work went to an Italian restaurant in the Marina district tonight, and I did the very San Francisco thing of taking an ‘Uber pool’ ride home. (Smart phone app used to summon a driver, shown on the map with his name and his car, as well as whom you will share your ride with, what the cost is, and what the estimated arrival time of the car is. Wow! That’s a whole lot of technology coming together!).
[From Wikipedia] 
Hamburg, a major port city in northern Germany, is connected to the North Sea by the Elbe River. It’s crossed by hundreds of canals, and also contains large areas of parkland. Its central Jungfernstieg boulevard connects the Altstadt (old town) and the Neustadt, passing Binnenalster lake, dotted with boats and surrounded by cafes and restaurants. Oysters and traditional Aalsuppe (soup) are local specialties.
I did the best I could with the day-and-a-half and rain/ freezing rain at times in Hamburg! I will have to try to come back in summer some time, when the weather is warmer. The HafenCity* area’s development continues, even after 15 years since it had started, and I would love to spend more time there when it had been completed.
*HafenCity is an urban center with many shops, restaurants, hotels and cultural venues as well as rising visitor numbers. More than 2,000 people now live in HafenCity as a whole; there are more than 5,000 students at the various academic institutions; upwards of 10,000 employees work in more than 500 businesses. It aspires to generate and use clean energy and be a model for the new cities that will have to be built around the world this century.
I could see a bridge far away from my hotel room and discovered that it is the Øresund Bridge to Malmö in Sweden : a combined railway and motorway bridge across the Øresund strait between Sweden and Denmark. The bridge runs nearly 8 kilometres from the Swedish coast to the artificial island of Peberholm in the middle of the strait. So! I have to go, I thought, and besides, my feet and legs needed a break from walking all over the city of Copenhagen in between bus rides and train rides. I literally just had time to make the ride out there, look around the Central Station for 15 minutes, and then catch the train back again.
Here are some of my favorite pictures from Saturday afternoon and Sunday. Yes, the Danes are very friendly and laid-back, and they speak good English. Watch out for bicycles : they go fast, so do not step into the bike lane or cross it before looking both ways! The public transport is top notch. Even the buses have display screens for the routes, and the connections at the next stop.
A visit to the Cape Town area is not quite complete for me without checking up on my old alma mater, the University of Stellenbosch, and the town itself. It was very late on Tuesday afternoon when I got there, though – and so the shadows were too long for taking fully lit pictures of the beautiful buildings. But here they are anyway.
