Angelika Around May/June 2021, San Francisco awakened from its Sleeping Beauty state. The above average vaccination rate in the city and surrounding county had lowered the incidence count to one-digit values per 100,000 residents. For weeks, the numbers were hovering under 2! Something like euphoria began to develop. Had they indeed beaten the virus? Consequently, on June 15th, all restrictions were lifted, and city life lovers pulled out all the stops. We saw packed restaurants, with tables both inside and outside, and more people not wearing masks, even while shopping at grocery stores. Only the non-vaccinated were required to wear a mouth and nose covering.

Michael We're regularily watching the "Tagesschau", a daily German evening news show, and can't help but notice that it regularily shows politicians who can't stop complaining about the high cost of housing in Germany. Laughable! Compared to the irrationally fueled real estate market in San Francisco, houses in the most expensive German cities like Munich are still bargains. Granted, the bubble of the Bay Area's and especially San Francisco's housing market has shrunk a bit lately due to residents leaving in droves for more reasonably priced, safer, and more competently governed cities. Lots of tech workers are no longer required to come to the office every day and can work from anywhere, and many a coffee shop milk foamer expert no longer sees a reason for scrounging together exorbitant rent payments every month for a city which has hardly any entertainment options left to offer. That brought a stop to the hyperinflation-style real estate gains recently.

Angelika During the pandemic, San Francisco restaurants have gone through tough times, and only as of recently, the few establishments which have kept their doors open, are now starting to thrive again. Many old and established restaurants had to close their doors indefinitely, there's a long list of those. Also keep in mind, that it's actually quite difficult to maintain a steady revenue stream for restaurant owners in San Francisco during normal times, thanks to the competitive environment in such a culinary hotspot. Rents have always been crazy high, and finding qualified staff quite a challenge. Profits are generally minimal, and for a restaurant to survive, it's basically required that they fill every last table, every night.

Angelika It's not as outlandish as you might think that a seated governor gets recalled before his term is over. Remember 2003, when voters decided that then-governor Gray Davis was to be recalled, and a new round of elections determined that movie actor Arnold Schwarzenegger would be his immediate successor? Now, back then that was indeed the first time something like this had happened in California history.

Michael Because of Corona, we haven't gone out to eat at a restaurant for a whole year, but one luxury we allowed ourselves at home was good coffee. According to my research, in Germany, any average household owns a space age technolgy coffee machine costing more than a thousand Euros a piece. That's been standard for at least the last 20 years. If you don't have one, you're considered a poor wretch. It's different here in America: the trend is going back to the 60s, and to Grandma's coffee grinder and a porcelain filter attachment, trendily called "V60".

Michael After a regular reader based in the Frankfurt area (name known to the editorial team) recently complained that I did not feature a "top product" in the last issue of the newsletter, I am quickly making up for it here. Recently, I got rid of the last two PC towers in our household and switched to Mac Minis, which practically don't need any space because you can drape them under the desk while the keyboard and monitor are on the desk.

Michael No doubt that Joe Sixpack can nowadays shoot videos with a cell phone camera and then upload them to YouTube, but if you look around the platform nowadays, you will mostly see professionally looking productions that can compete with television documentaries. Video bloggers no longer speak into simple webcams, but set up full frame cameras with high-quality lenses in video mode. The sound no longer comes from a cheap headset, but from a pretty expensive studio microphone, whose output is fed directly into a connected computer by a digital preamplifier.

Michael Do you know what's the most successful newsletter article of all time? It's called "What Germans Do Wrong in America" ( Rundbrief 08/2000 ) and explains the correct tipping etiquette in America. Back then, 21 years ago, I was still upset that German tourists in the US often don't tip enough in restaurants, thus unfairly reducing the wages of the local work force. And to this day, according to Google Analytics, this treatise gets the most hits of the entire site.