March 2016

 So last I wrote here was in December 2015 days before a  solo road trip to San Francisco, and now it's three months after and in a way lots have been developed.

I learned that driving for 8 hours is a long time (which became an additional 3 hours than planned because I did not account for Bay Area morning traffic going northbound from San Jose), and that driving in the dark means I don't see large swaths of farmland and only infinite darkness broken apart by intermittent red tail lights. It's a neat experience. While surviving San Francisco morning traffic and waiting for my room to get ready at the inn I checked a room out in, I walked around a lot. I also Uber'ed a lot, which is a terrifying standard that's very normalized. Part of that normalization also includes Uber rideshare, so sometimes there's the chance of carpooling with silently awkward strangers. 

Walking around San Francisco was fun, and it was never without a whole block of neat cafes and tourists walking about and I walked through the various piers starting from Pier 99 and up north up to the Ghiradelli factory. The hot chocolate there, by the way, was delicious. Met up with a friend, and we spent the evening eating and talking, and that was pretty much worth the trip. Otherwise, tho, whatever romantic ideals I had about SF was a little... not so much shattered, but the romance is kinda gone after driving through it with its slow pedestrians, and that after a whole night of rain, morning full of bright sunlight is not good on hilly roads slick with water that reflects into my eyes when driving out to southbound 101. 

Part of the slight disillusionment also includes the fact that everything there is trendy and expensive, and that when people write about its gentrification, it's really... really...gentrified. Walking through random neighborhoods, which are nice walks by the way, made me realize that there's a lot of the usual city flavor that was lost, namely that it feels like there's a generic flavor to the city and that it feels weirdly safe to walk about alone along the circumference of the city. Not that i expect evil city temptations everywhere, and that i have the self-awareness of rock, but maybe it's just that it's so crowded that everyone really do just keep to themselves.

The drive back southbound was excellent, tho. 

Other things that happened was that I finished my online TEFL program, and now I got my shiny certificate to send to my recruiters in Japan and South Korea, and hope that something is biting in the near future. I think I'm leaning more towards Japan, since I gave all of the required documents for their program and it's possible that all that's left is to wait for when they'll place me in a school. So hopefully I get to go out of the country like all my other fellow postgraduates who blog about this on their facebooks. 

I think what's the most positive thing in 2016, tho, was that I get to patch things up with my best friend and we're talking again. After 6 months of not talking, it's really nice to really talk about why the thing happened that it did and that we're trying to keep in touch while she's in Armenia for the Birthright internship program doing journalism. She tells me that apparently Moscow airport sucks and that Yerevan itself is pretty cool, including that view of Mt. Ararat.