After doing a small review on Tokyo I thought it would be a nice idea to do a small review on a few more cities I have in mind to travel to. I’ll start with San Francisco which is the most remote of the cities if we don’t consider Tokyo as we already did talked about it before. It’s hard to think of someone who has never heard or seen images of San Francisco. Many of the buildings and emblematic things you can find in the city have been taken to movies. Who has never heard of the golden gate? Or never seen the Alcatraz prison that has appeared on tons of films? It also has the china town, one of the most famous places of the city.
The city of San Francisco is the fourth most populous city in California and the 12th most populous city in the United States, with a 2008 estimated population of 808,977. Its land area is of 46.7 square miles (121 km2) on the northern end of the San Francisco Peninsula, making it the second-most densely populated large city (greater than 200,000 population) in the United States. San Francisco is also the financial, cultural, and transportation center of the larger San Francisco Bay Area, a region of 7.4 million people.
Let’s take a look at the history of San Francisco. As most of you might already know America is a continent recently discovered. In other words there’s not that much data about it and his history as there is in Europe for example. In 1776, the Spanish established a fort at the Golden Gate and a mission named for Francis of Assisi on the site. The California Gold Rush in 1848 propelled the city into a period of rapid growth, increasing the population in one year from 1,000 to 25,000, and thus transforming it into the largest city on the West Coast at the time. After three-quarters of the city was destroyed by the 1906 earthquake and fire, San Francisco was quickly rebuilt, hosting the Panama-Pacific International Exposition nine years later. During World War II, San Francisco was the port of embarkation for service members shipping out to the Pacific Theater. After the war, the confluence of returning servicemen, massive immigration, liberalizing attitudes, and other factors led to the Summer of Love and the gay rights movement, cementing San Francisco as a center of liberal activism in the United States.
Today, San Francisco is a popular international tourist destination, renowned for its chilly summer fog, steep rolling hills, eclectic mix of Victorian and modern architecture and its famous landmarks, including the Golden Gate Bridge, cable cars, and Chinatown. The city is also a principal banking and finance center, and the home of over 30 international financial institutions, helping to make San Francisco eighteenth place in the world’s top producing cities, ninth in the United States, and is fifteenth place in the top twenty Global Financial Centers.
For most of the people San Francisco might not be a city you must visit in your life, but from my point of view is something special and I would love to go there sometime in the future if I decide not to go this time there. It’s a city where you feel like if you were in a film yourself. As I’ve been told, that feeling it’s not the same as the one you can get from New York, where what you see is exactly what you’ve seen thousands of times on films. San Francisco is different; you’ve seen the big picture but not the details of the things. Meanwhile New York is pretty simple and barely has details as most of the buildings are that, just buildings, San Francisco has many things you could stare for hours and still find them interesting.
This is one of my favourite song and his letter:
If you’re going to San Francisco
Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair
If you’re going to San Francisco
You’re gonna meet some gentle people there
For those who come to San Francisco
Summertime will be a love-in there
In the streets of San Francisco
Gentle people with flowers in their hair
All across the nation such a strange vibration
People in motion
There’s a whole generation with a new explanation
People in motion people in motion
For those who come to San Francisco
Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair
If you come to San Francisco
Summertime will be a love-in there
If you come to San Francisco
Summertime will be a love-in there
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