Corentin Derbré

Articles:

USA

2018-03-17 00:00:00 +0800

First Impressions (17 March 2018)

All I knew about SF was from the movies Bulitt, Dirty Harry and Hitchock’s Vertigo. I’m here for the startups scene.

I’m in SF and I’m quite not impressed by the city.

It has nice looking houses. The weather is quite cold during all the year with an average low of 10 ºC and average high of 17 ºC, temperatures that I expected to be higher.

I don’t know why but there aren’t many people in the streets. The few people I see are accompanied by dogs. Also lots of hobos and “cool gangs” are chilling outside.

All that looked theatrical in the GTA games turns out to be true, people randomly talking to you, eggagerated accent, cars…

Overall, I don’t see what this city has. It’s overrated. I’ll see during the rest of my stay.

There is marijuana smell every 20 meter.

It’s Horrible

The Good

The Bad

- 1$ Hamburger - People talk to me in the street (not hobos), that’s really nice

- Cinnamon: why so much cinnamon? - Too many dogs - Women aren’t beautiful (maybe the same for men – didn’t pay attention) - Too expensive (due to tech?) - Either cheap and bad food or overpriced decent food, not even good. Littelally every food item exept one was disapointing and tasted like trash. - Extremely dirty for a 1st world country - Superficial and judgemental people (you have them everywhere, here they just feel like they have to tell it to you) - Black and Asians do the dirty jobs, this is less true in france where it’s the students. - Feeling of danger - Acting according to a script too much (networking, dating), no adventure - Toilets aren’t clean - Heroin on the floor - Homeless people crawling - Tax not on price - Imperial system - Strong presence of religion

My life here is so bad that I am thinking about leaving the US sooner. What did I expect coming here? I was just spending money like a fool.

There is something extremely out of balance in this city, the extremely expansive not so good food and housing, and crazy homeless people every 50 meters. I’m not exaggerating.

Silicon Valley

I went to Silicon Valley. It’s huge, and the interesting people are probably just working. So there’s nothing going on.

I visited Itel’s museum, it was really interesting.

Back in downtown SF, I also visited the Autodesk museum, which was probably the best thing I saw in my stay.

Conclusion

I left sooner than planned because my reasons of being here had expired: I saw how life was there, and I didn’t like it.

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© 2018 Corentin Derbré.