After visiting Stanford, we headed off to University of California at Berkeley; otherwise known as Cal. While I didn’t spend as much time on the Berkeley campus as I did at Stanford, I liked the environment and architecture much more. The buildings were larger and grander and had the whole old style feel; even though Berkeley is known for being progressive.

The neighborhood in which the campus is situated was also very vibrant and I’m sure if you lived there you would always have cool places to eat, neat things to see and plenty of non-mainstream places to visit. Between that and the fact that there is sun and nice weather in California, I was left wondering why people would choose Waterloo over Cal.

We grabbed lunch near campus at a place called Smart Alec’s (whose slogan is healthy fast food). I had a burger on whole wheat bread and air backed garlic fries. Can you say not McDonalds??

Saturday was also the day that we spent a lot of time in the car driving around San Francisco. Now this was something we wanted to avoid, so we purposely left all the driving events on one day. One thing I have to say is that driving in San Francisco is horrible.

Like many downtowns, San Francisco is filled with one way roads. Now that would be OK and all except that half the time you couldn’t turn left; and the other half of the time you couldn’t turn at all. So basically you’d better know the one or two intersections that you can turn on and get into the lanes beforehand. Oh yeah, there was also gratuitous honking and finger giving.

Anyways, we had a great location for our hotel, it was smack in the middle of downtown near city hall. The problem was that we drove past it going the opposite direction (didn’t want to jump into traffic) with no ability to turn around, and we finally did turn around we were one street away from the street we wanted to be on with no way of turning to get on that street.

One positive thing I do have to say about the traffic is that they have their traffic lights situated in such a way that when you’re going up or down hill, all the lights in your direction are green. Which is not the way they do it in Seattle so half the time you’re stuck at a red worrying about rolling back when it’s your turn to go.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: bayarea, diary, travelling