Exploring San Francisco, CA

This morning we woke up in a new hotel, a Hilton in the wonderful city of San Francisco! We had an incredible breakfast to energize us for the rest of the day, as it had a busy schedule and many unforgettable experiences to offer. There were so many options for breakfast. We could even make our own waffles, and some of us even made them with Oreos!

After, we went on the bus, and the pop music was beating in the speakers to get us pumped up for our day exploring San Fran.

Our first stop was at Pier 39, where we saw the famous San Francisco sea lions, or according to one of our German students, "the dog mermaids",. The dog mermaids made many funny noises and everyone seemed to have a blast imitating them and watching them play. 

After we walked to the cable car station, where we hopped on and drove into downtown San Francisco. As we all were standing in line, something unexpectied happened....An escape artist, put on a show. He had 2 of us exchange students tie him up in a straight jacket and chain him to a streetlight with an iron chain and a lock. Exactly like the famous escape artist Houdini did in his time, this guy managed to twist his body in all kinds of directions and get free. He got a large applause from all the students, who absolutely loved the magical show.

We then arrived downtown with the cable car, and had free time for exploring downtown, eating and shopping. After we got our very own private tour guides that would introduce us to many of the landmarks of San Francisco. We saw Golden Gate Park, the Golden Gate Bridge, and we saw all the different  neighborhoods of San Francisco. One really colorful interesting neighborhood we saw was the famous Haight-Ashbury street where the hippy movement started in the 60’s. We also had a stop at City Hall, where we could take pictures. Also we made a stop at the famous Young Museum art. After all of these awesome things we went to Chinatown, which is the biggest Chinatown in the US, bigger than the one in New York City! We had time to explore these Chinese streets and after we had a great dinner at a Chinese restaurant, together. The food was very good and it seemed like it came in an unlimited supply. Our bellies full and our bodies exhausted we went back to the Hilton. Some students went to bed, some went to play frisbee outside or fuss ball in the game room.

This day was an amazing day, that was so packed with experiences, that we will remember forever.

Our Italian exchange student, Giovanni Serusi said a nice sentence today, that we thought had to be included in this blog post. He said "This trip was so unique and fun because we are all from different cultures. If we were all from the same culture it would not have been as fun. It was so unique and fun to experience California with exchange students from all over the world. wouldn’t be the same without people from  all over the world” 

Joanna Rosengarten, Germany

Bjarni Rasmussen, Faroe Islands

Giovanni Serusi, Italy