and the home of the brave, part deux

San Francisco

A view of the Bay bridge as it sinks into darkness.

San Francisco is my favorite American city; I have come here many times. This is the technology capital of the world, this is the center of anti-conformism in America, and this was the place where dreams of fortune came true for a selected few gold rush hopefuls.

This is the only American city I know enough to say I don't know anything about it; this is the place I've been denied access for more than 10 years as an ocean of Indian contractors were grabbing the scarcely allocated visas in a frenzy. I know full well that in America is the place where luck is second to hard work. What made it especially unnerving to play this losing game fairly turns to be the source of a new approach that instead leads me back to Europe. The high road.
Playing by the normal rules always means losing to the one who designed them: I'm now defining my own game. Maybe someday will I incidentally win this old one too. How much work it is to find out what you really want is not exactly what you thought it was! It is, in fact, the work of a lifetime. Only somewhere during this trip have I found the peace to accept what I've known for much longer. In the end, the excitement is in what you do.

I have been experimenting quite a lot here. With cooking for instance. A Frenchman goes to America to learn cooking; which is pretty normal when you understand there is much more to American food than McDonald's. America is a blend of cultures, and of course it shows in its culinary tradition.

Oops, I did it again

In the US, you're in the influence of zone of Canadian French and that means you see some interesting French translations.

That's bilingual marketing I can believe in.

It is widely misunderstood in the rest of the world that the US really is a multilingual country. Even though languages are kept within community boundaries. There is a rich cultural diversity that can still not be found anywhere else in the world.

Lake Tahoe

I spent New Year's Eve in Lake Tahoe, which is at the border between California and Nevada. It's very nice in the summer as you have a lake surrounded by mountains. Think of the Swiss Alps with bears roaming around. 

This picture is here to portray me as a risk-taker.

It was really cold and yet thanks to the snow I could have a renewed vision of these wonderful landscapes. 

Cold

Tahoe is a curious place. Here are a few fun facts:

• The lake is so cold, even in summer, that if you sink in you will never float back up.
• It's so deep that you could flood the whole surface of California under 15 inches of the lake's waters.
• It's bordered by the Donner Pass, where the Donner Party made American popular culture's most famous barbecue in the 1840s.

Colder

The weather on the first day of 2013 was just fantastic, a very good year indeed. Unfortunately, this concludes my American trip for this year.