I guess it’s been nearly two weeks since I last wrote something here. Why you might ask? It’s not that I have exams or other commitments taking up my time, I suppose it’s just because I don’t have much to report.

Alas, it’s the end of another month and again I question where the time has gone. It hasn’t been the most spectacular of months, mostly working and trying to sort some things out back home. In fact, I’m still looking for somewhere to live when I get back home in September so if you can help with that then you’d be a rockstar.

So what’s been happening over the past two weeks? A couple of Sundays ago I rented the incredibly touristy Go-Car. It’s basically just a scooter chassis with a fiberglass shell over the top, and has room for two passengers. It looks kinda like a side car on a motorbike from days gone by. It was fun, but not very powerful. It gets up to about 30mph and you can feel every bump on the road. I really wanted to take it up Telegraph Hill to Coit Tower, but wasn’t sure if it would make the climb. To it’s credit, it did ok and we made it!

The only down side of this little car is that it’s really expensive. It cost me $100 for 2 hours, which is a lot more than renting a real car for a whole day. Worst of all, when I mentioned it at work I found out that I could have gotten it for free if I had mentioned that I worked for a tourism company. Oh well, maybe I’ll do it again some time.

Last week Valerie’s parents came to visit for her graduation. It was a good week for Valerie, she got an internship at the prestigious Westin St Francis hotel on Union Square as a manager (congrats by the way) and then her parents arrived. Her parents are great, very funny and don’t speak hardly any English between them. Still, I’ve had to exercise the old French GCSE lingo which seems to be getting me by so far. ‘Salut, enchante, ca va…’. They’ve been very kind taking me out for dinner and ice creams. On Tuesday they left for a short 3 day trip to Las Vegas and Bryce Canyon with Valerie. They also bought a video camera for the graduation which they are planning on leaving with us, so I may be able to shoot some video of my last few months here.

Tomorrow my friend Gaelle leaves to go back home to France. I will really miss her, she’s one of the few French people that lives in my building that are actually friendly. The rest of them seem to stick to a little clique. Late last year she moved to Berkeley for college and I didn’t get to see her as much as before. Sad that I may never see her again after tomorrow, so tonight she invited me and some people out for dinner to say goodbye.

My boss is in Ireland at the moment on a month-long trip to Europe. He’s been interviewing some people at Jordanstown about coming out here to take over from me when I go.

Oh, just one more thing - check out mapjack.com. It’s like Google Street View, except with hi-res photos. They’ve got the whole of San Francisco covered, Lake Tahoe and a few other places. Check out some cool places in SF, search for Fort Point, Coit Tower or Golden Gate Bridge. You can actually cross the bridge in hi-res, it’s awesome. My house is on there too - 580 O’Farrell.

Charlton Heston

So, famous Hollywood star Charlton Heston died a little over a week ago. Of course it got a mention in all the newspapers, but this one from the Onion had me in fits of laughter. You can tell they’ve been sitting on that headline for years.

Joe Satriani

I also took this short video of Joe Satriani from Guitar Center a few weeks ago. The quality is poor, but you can’t expect much from a tiny camera. This video is the last bit of Satch Boogie. Listen at around 1:00 minute into the video he does one of his trademark squealing divebombs!

Great America

Getting onto the real subject of the post, at the weekend I went to Great America, a theme park close to Santa Clara. It’s not very far from San Francisco - about 30 miles or so - but we had to take public transit as we don’t have a car. That involves taking the Caltrain to Mountain View (where Google is), and then the VTA to the park. In total it’s a little under two hours travel.

At Mountain View, there was a little fresh food market right beside the station, so while we waited on the VTA to come, we indulged in some awesome strawberries. This would prove to be a mistake to a certain person later on in the day…

At Great America, I was expecting long queues for each ride, as last time I went each ride was approx. 30-45 minutes wait. Looks like we picked a good day as the lines were super short; I think the longest we waited was about 10 minutes and most of the big coasters had essentially no queue at all.

The weather was really sweltering, I’m sure it was close to 100ºF. I slapped on the suncream though and managed to survive the day with minimal burning. I really think I’m adjusting to the warmer climate.

There’s a big Nickelodeon theme at the park, so I got my photo with Spongebob Squarepants. I also have a rather attractive Patrick hat photo.

Valerie screamed with genuine terror on most of the rollercoasters, but in the end admitted that she enjoyed them. However, the Survivor ride was a little more than she could handle and she made a quick exit to deposit the aforementioned strawberries. It wasn’t the greatest ride, to be fair. It basically just spins you around and around. Maybe it’s called Survivor to see if you can avoid spewing at the end. Who knows.

I think we pretty much visited every ride in the park, except the water maze in the kids area. I was absolutely roasting and really wanted to run through all the water fountains, but they have a stupid rule that adults can only go on it if accompanied by a little one. They must suspect that everyone over 4 feet tall is a pervert.

I’ll upload all the photos to Flickr later. Check them out if you so choose.

I got up yesterday and went to work, and it was really warm for a change. In fact it was near 9 o’clock when I was walking home and I was warm just wearing a t-shirt. Then today I get up for work and it’s actually warmer! Absolutely no hesitation - it was shorts and t-shirt today.

Right now Google says it’s 31?C (87?F) in San Francisco. That’s crazy, it’s usually quite mild here! I went for lunch and opened the door to a pleasant draught of warm air. It’s just a shame I’m at work and not out enjoying my day at the beach or somewhere. Valerie and friend Gaelle are out on a drive to the North Bay today, visiting some stuff north of wine country. They were going to go to Santa Cruz but there isn’t much to do there, other than the beach. If I was off today, I’d join the girls and go to Santa Cruz and spend the day surfing.

Alas, all good things must come to an end. This little spell of unseasonably warm weather is fading fast and by Monday it’s going to drop back down to about 14?C (58?F). Tomorrow, I do however have a day off and I plan to go to Great America, a theme park near San Jose. I’ve been before, and it’s a lot of fun so I hope it’s not too crowded because of the weather.

I was also thinking about Hawai’i again this week. I’ve been thinking about going back and spending my month before I come home there, but in the last week or so, two of the major low-cost airlines out to the islands have filed for bankruptcy and have ceased operations. Aloha (the ones I went with before) and ATA Airlines have both cited rising fuel costs as the reason for bankruptcy, with ATA also losing a huge contract with FedEx which ultimately caused them to go under.

To that end, a flight out to Hawai’i is not going to come cheap anymore. At the moment, minus taxes etc., booking a flight to Honolulu round trip for August is around $550, with quite a few of those flight going via LA making the trip over 15 hours. I paid less than that booking last minute (ok it was off-season to be fair), but I’m so glad I went when I did and also glad that I didn’t book early with Aloha for this summer. What are all their passengers going to do now?

Anyway, I’m off for a coke now and going to relax with the 10 minutes I have remaining of my lunch break.

In about 5 minutes, the Olympic Torch will make it’s only North American appearance in San Francisco. As you’ve probably seen on the news, the whole Torch Relay thing this time around has caused riots in several cities. Protesters are protesting against alleged human rights violations in Tibet, which China claims sovereignty over.

The police have been expecting massive riots here, since the city has both a reputation for political activism and a sizable Chinese community, so police have been out on force all morning to make sure everything goes as smoothly as possible. The planned route was supposed to begin near the ballpark and make it’s way along the Embarcadero (the city’s waterfront) before turning and coming back again. Violent clashes this morning have meant that the cops are considering changing the route of the torch relay to deviate away from protesters.

The SF Chronicle is doing a pretty good job of covering it.

Olympic officials are going to meet this week to discuss if the relay is really even worth continuing since it’s whole purpose is to promote peace. I went to grab some lunch from Safeway, near my office, and the police were sealing off everywhere like it was some sort of crime scene. I saw some protesters carrying signs but it seemed rather calm compared to what’s going on closer to the ballpark.

Here’s a piece of trivia you might not know: Do you know who started the whole Olympic Torch Relay thing? Adolf Hitler!

In other news, I am going to Guitar Center after work today to see Joe Satriani do a session on guitar playing. He’s going to play some stuff and then talk about his gear and other guitar stuff. I hope that all those who were jealous I met Satch before are now even more jealous. Ha!

Can’t believe it’s April already. It’s really making me realise how little time I have left here in America, and how much I really, really don’t want to go home. As charming as Ireland is, I’d rather leave San Francisco when I decide rather than being forced to leave to go back to university.

In saying that, it’s only April and the rush of tourists booking holidays here has started already. I don’t talk about my job alot, mostly because it’s not very exciting and because I have much more interesting things to talk about besides work (although I reckon my job is probably quite interesting to some people).

The problem with working for a tour company is that it’s a world of opposites. Like when most people get a day off, the tourism industry is at it’s busiest, which means that I can’t look forward to public holidays. For example, my friends get Christmas off because it’s a national holiday so they want have a party or go somewhere - but for our company it’s like a normal day, except our vehicles are full of non-Christian tourists who don’t celebrate the same traditions, and are looking to get away for the day. That boils down to us having to work pretty much every day of the year.

Summer in the city is beautiful. The weather is great and there’s so much to do, but I find myself with things needing done at the office and I end up doing a juggling act between finishing my projects and answering 3 calls at once about tours. I end up staying way later than I’d planned and get home so worn out and feeling that the days are just passing me by. It’s so frustrating when people ask dumb questions and waste your time, or book a stay at the Yosemite Lodge 2 days before without realising it’s sold out practically a year in advance. All this and then the hassles of a regular IT job trying to figure out how javascript works, and just when you think you’ve cracked it - Internet Explorer goes and ruins your day. Sometimes I just wish that Internet Explorer was a myth, and the world used Firefox.

Another reason my industry sucks is that our Yosemite tours start at the unwholesome hour of 6am, and someone has to be there to reassure Mr and Mrs Punctuality that the tour bus is on it’s way. On the opposite end of the scale, it’s lots of fun to impulsively decide to go drink wine all day in Napa and book it late at night last minute - at 10pm the night before. Again, someone (read: me!) has to be there to make that happen for them. I’m actually jealous of regular 9-5ers who at least can leave and have a life after a day at work.

It’s also a nice touch that I get maybe one weekend off every 3 months. That hurts a lot, especially when all your friends are away enjoying themselves at the beach or whatever. Plus, more than half my monthly wages goes on rent. More than half.

I really shouldn’t complain though. I set myself up for it, so I take full responsibility. I just warn others what they may be getting into working for a tour company. And if you are considering going on a tour somewhere, please be kind and think of us poor people that have to deal with your crap. Sorry for the rant.