It’s been one week since I got back from the WWDC in San Francisco and I’m still recovering from the trip. This was my first trip to San Francisco and my second trip to California. In my head I had a picture of sunny, beautiful city where everyone is walking around very blissful and happy. The only thing I knew about SF is that it is really expensive to live there. What I didn’t know was that there is a ton of homeless people out there.
Usually I would see around 1 to 4 homeless people per block and that is a lot more than what you would see in NYC. Now when I say 1 to 4, I mean 1 to 4 homeless people on every block in San Francisco. There wasn’t a block I didn’t walk on that didn’t have homeless people.
Another thing that caught me off guard was the amount of crime that was reported on the news and that I saw. 3 incidents in one week are way more than I have ever seen in a week. By the way, I live under a rock 😉
As for the WWDC, I was very surprised by the keynote announcement that Steve Jobs put on and I was very busy for an entire week, stuffing my brain with as much information as I could get out of the developers conference. The conference had food and drinks and that part was good. They also had “Stump the Experts” and that was very good!
It was hard being out there. I didn’t have a single night of rest. I stayed at the Hotel Metropolis, which from the pictures and from the user reviews looked nice, but the experience was another thing. When I got to the hotel, I was given a key. For me this is different since every hotel I have stayed at uses a card. I didn’t think too much of it until I got to my room. You see, my room was a fire escape room and according to the sign on the wall, “In the unlikely event of a fire, the door to this room will open automatically”. I grinned and laughed a little. Must be tough for couples trying to get it on and a fire alarm goes off…
Well, that first day the door unlocked itself a couple of times… Time to move to another room.
Getting the other room wasn’t bad. As a matter of fact, the staff were really nice to me and I shifted over relatively painlessly. The nice thing about the new room was that it didn’t have wireless connectivity! Hooray! Actually, that didn’t matter too much too me since I was using the internet connectivity at the Mascone Center. So again, I wasn’t bothered too much.
What did bother me was that every night, there was something going on. The first night, there was the screaming homeless lady who when confronted by the cops, decided to continue screaming, but while walking backwards to get away from them. Then there was the second night were a whole group of drunk people couldn’t figure out how to get into their room. The third night, there was the group of people who decided to park in front of the hotel, open their car doors, start blasting music and dance in the street… Hooray! I’m going to skip over the next couple of nights because they are variations on the same thing.
So… no sleep for me. Not cool. Not cool at all.