San Francisco

June 28 — July 1, 2015

I arrived at a historic moment — just after same-sex marriage was permitted in California.

There’s never been a shortage of rainbow flags here, but today they were out in particularly large numbers.

Someone was so overjoyed that they knitted a rainbow scarf for this traffic light.

After dusk fell, people were treated to the Capitol Building lit up in rainbow colours.

Fancy seeing you here! We saw this local rubbish bin just the other day in Metz, France.

In all US cities they make all the pavements by pouring concrete into formwork.

This doesn’t look as nice as pavement tiles do, but on the plus side it does leave some room for freedom of expression. In San Francisco they press letters into the concrete at intersections so that pedestrians always know what street they’re on.

Parking meter.

Bicycle hire.

Trolleybus in a colour-marked lane.

Tram.

Public transport stop with undulating roof.

San Francisco is a remarkable place. Here, they’re very tolerant of, well, everything. That’s why they adopted the same-sex marriage law. That’s why they have enormous amounts of all sorts of expats working in countless Silicon Valley start-ups. This is why part of the city is beautiful:

Meanwhile, the other part is ugly as mortal sin. And yet this is not some backward backwater, these could well be the offices of leading global companies.

And it’s precisely because of this tolerance towards any viewpoints and any manifestations that San Francisco has unbelievably high hobo numbers.

They can spend years living five metres away from the offices of some billionaire.

They sit on every street in the city centre.

They’re everywhere.

Most importantly, they don’t bother anyone.

And no one bothers them either.

At this point it’s time to get into a small private Cessna and fly north, towards Alaska.

And to spend the night somewhere near Seattle, before setting off again in the morning.