Angelika On December 30th 1996, I landed on San Francisco airport. Michael and our friends Sylvia and Richard welcomed me properly. Since I arrived at night, I could only admire the lights of the city. I was quite excited of our apartment and I have to admit that I wasn’t disappointed. Despite of only having two rooms, the apartment is spacious enough for the two of us because we didn’t bring that much furniture. I guess we’ll get pretty comfortable. We’ve already bought a futon-couch. It can be used as a bed for guests at the same time: You can tell, we’re thinking practically.
The transportation boxes from Munich arrive in San Francisco.
Angelika Let’s get back to our neighborhood: Another important fact is that Noe Valley is very safe, which means that you can walk around at daytime as well as during the night without being afraid. At the moment it bothers me most that you have to think about whether it's safe or not before you can go anywhere. Sometimes that ends up in taking a detour instead of crossing an unsafe area. In this respect, San Francisco is a typical American city: absolutely peaceful residential neighborhoods change to totally scruffy areas just two streets away, and you should try hard to avoid those at nighttime. I’m afraid Michael has a talent to wander into these scruffy quarters. Like last Sunday on a public bus tour, we crossed a part of town we’d even avoid to get off at daytime. There were burned car wrecks on the sidewalk, piles of junk evergrowing, and no white person in sight. The busdriver didn’t open the doors in this area though people were waiting on the bus stops. We found that he was anxious about us because he kept on looking in the rear view mirror and kept eye-contact with us. That was kind of calming. In such situations I'm longing for safe cities like Munich.
Angelika I'm sure some of you want to know now what I’m doing all day long when Michael is at work, working on his computer. At the moment, I’m still exploring the closer area and need to deal with the bureaucratic stuff. Living in America, respectively California, you can’t go without two things:
