Hugh Masekela in the Stern Grove

It was strange to see Hugh Masekela for the first time in San Francisco ... I've never had the opportunity in South Africa, where he is so well known. Today he played in a free day time concert in Stern Grove, which is an open air amphitheater in a deep bowl of trees in the western part of San Francisco. It's a beautiful setting, and there was a huge turn out despite cool and drizzly weather - lots of families with children, a large number of African-Americans, young people and old people - a very mixed crowd, and good people-watching.

Hugh Masekela is almost 70, but he's a powerful musician and performer who brought the crowd dancing to their feet. He also made an impassioned plea for people not to become indifferent about what is happening Dafur. I was surprised he didn't mention the situation in Zimbabwe, which is in our backyard.

Rock Climbing in Yosemite

In New York I've had a difficult time finding a decent climbing gym which is affordable to a student. In San Francisco, I've been back at climbing with a vengeance, at a great gym around the corner from where I live. But the ultimate goal of the climbing sessions was always to get outdoors and go going climbing in Yosemite.

Yosemite is world-famous for its scenery but also, among climbers, for the awesome rock climbing opportunities there. In fact, the American route ranking system was developed in Yosemite. The central Yosemite valley is hot (and crowded!) at this time of year, so a better alternative is the higher Tuolumne Valley, just to the North.


I went to Yosemite with Nikhil, a fellow intern at Google. He is from Delhi and is doing a PhD in computer vision at the University of California San Diego. He is working within Google's image search project. We met on the hike to Sykes Hot Springs last month, and found we had a lot in common - interest in photography, the outdoors, travel, and computers.

We did a crack-climbing course with the Yosemite Mountaineering School on Saturday, learning skills like finger, fist and foot jamming (which is sometimes just as painful as it sounds!) In addition to the crack climbing, at the end of the day we did some climbing on faces which had no cracks - or anything else, for that matter. You get hand and foot holds on tiny ledges, about 1mm wide, which form when plates of rock erode off. It makes you feel like a human fly.



The campsite at Tuolumne is huge (300+ campsites) and surprisingly poorly equipped. It has no electricity, no hot water, no showers and no real place to wash dishes. It was also full to capacity. We were lucky enough to get a camping site for the first night, but on Saturday we ended up squatting on the campsite of a dutch girl, her American friend and an Italian couple - which resulted in some great conversation.

On Sunday, Nihil and I did an 18 km hike along the Yosemite Creek which leads to the place where the creek drops hundreds of meters into the valley. As we reached this spot, I closed my eyes and Nihil lead me to the edge of the cliff. When I opened my eyes, this was the view I got:



It was a awe-inspiring moment ...

Mark McNally in San Francisco

Mark, old computer-science-student-in-arms from Wits, came to San Francisco this weekend for an interview with Google. He lives in Chicago with his wife Ina and their child. It was great to see him, and visit some of the the things in San Fransisco together that I'd missed out on. This was in one of the historic trams which travel parts of the network here.

Shake, Rattle and Shake

Early Friday morning an earthquake measuring 4.2 on the Richter scale shook the Bay Area, and shook me out of sleep. Suddenly I was aware that I was in the ground floor of a less than solid looking wooden building which was juddering a little around me, not the kind of sensation you want at 4 o'clock on a dark morning.

It passed with narry a broken window in the city. The big one is still to come.

Marinless in Marin

For more than 10 years now, I've been the proud owner of a Marin Bear Valley mountain bike. It was the first expensive thing that I bought when I graduated and I've had it on a lot of trips - in Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, Iceland and New York.

I never knew what the name meant before coming to California. But today I went on a bike tour of the Marin Headlands, just north of the Golden Gate, and beautiful mountain bike territory. And the bike? In storage in New York. I made the decision not to bring it here because of the hassle. You might say I am kicking myself about this decision now, but that would be wrong: I am riding around on the bicycle equivalent of an old white Datsun over a lot of the hills and trails that I should have had the Marin on. And that hurts a lot more than kicking!


The headlands offer winding road going up and crazy brake singeing drops down to the shore again and then huff huff huff back up to postcard views of the Golden Gate Bridge. Its not the first time I've been on the bridge, but this time I took the opportunity to take some photos.

Night Kayaking

My flatmate Laurie works part time at a sea kayaking outfit in Sausalito, just north of the Golden Gate bridge. For anyone who knows Cape Town, this is the equivalent of Hout Bay. I went along on a night kayaking trip on the bay with her and her friend Sarah and a group of paying customers. They didn't go far, and at first I thought it would be rather lame, but then the sun went down, all the lights on the bridges came on and the stars came out - its was a dark night and both Jupiter and Venus were brilliant in a starry sky. Then Sarah discovered the sky wasn't the only thing that was all sparkly - the water was filled with bioluminescence, which you could see clearly when you moved your hand fast through the water, like tiny agitated sparks.

Sarah and Laurie and I went for a beer afterwards in Sausalito, and then Lauries got a ride back and I didn't - not that I minded, in fact, because after a tequilla to keep me warm I had the surreal experience of riding back over the Golden Gate Bridge at midnight in the mist.

Bike to Work Day

Googlers have their share of eccentric habits. One group which lives in San Francisco regularly bicycles the 60 odd kilometers to work once or more per week. On Friday, having my own share of eccentric habits, I joined them with Laurie and Cathie. The ride took about 3.5 hours, and was less strenuous but less pretty than I expected - I was hoping the route would take us along the San Francisco Bay, but we were mostly inland. The breakfast at Google, which is amazing anyway, did taste even more amazing at the end of a 60km bike ride, though.

Point Reyes National Seashore

Another fabulous contact with California's natural beauty was a day trip to a place with the unlikely name of the Point Reyes National Seashore, north-west of San Francisco in Marin County. This was a second concact with Highway 1 which hugged the cost to the park, almost as beautiful as in the Big Sur. We hiked for about three hours through fragrant grasslands above steep cliffs, hawks hovering constantly overhead, past herds of Tule Elk, which have been brought back from the verge of extinction (at the end of the 19th century, there were just 10 animals left).

Of Redwoods, Hot Springs and Hiking Dogs

Last week I was thinking about how fast my time in California is coming to an end, and how I needed to take advantage of the remaining weekends - and then a trip to the Big Sur fell from nowhere into my lap. Or rather, beneath my hiking boots, because it ended up being a hike up to the hot springs of Sykes.














The Big Sur is a stretch of beautiful coast and forest about 200 km South West of San Francisco, where the legendary Highway 1 hugs the coast in a series of curves and bridges and mist comes curling up from the water. Its really beautiful, a bit like the Garden Route in South Africa. There are a couple of state parks there and a lot of intact nature in and around them.


I went with a group of other interns from Google, which meant there were people from all over the world: Eugene and Mary, immigrants from Belrussia, Jia from Beijing, Tim from Canada, Mangesh and Nikhil from India, Mario from Mexico and Grant, our token American. Its your standard Google mix (or your standard postgrad mix at the universities here, which amounts to pretty much the same thing). The group was very mixed in hiking experience too, but there ended up being no problems.




We hiked for 16 km along a steep gorge, dotted with giant redwood trees and bisected with mountain streams, camping at Sykes in a campsite which was as beautiful as it was rudimentary: spread out along a babbling river, just a couple of drop toilets (in full view of some of the tents, nogal) and the hot springs: a series of pools just above the river water where you could ease blistered feet and sore shoulders in hot water, slumber for an hour and then jump into the clear river to cool down.

(Photo: Nikhil Rasiwasia)

America is a dog nation, Google is a dog company (lots of people bring dogs to work) and this was a dog hike: lots of people had brought their dogs with them, and some of the dogs were sporting dog paniers carrying their own food into the hike.


(Photo: Jia Deng)

The redwood trees seem to go up forever, huge tranks of gnarled bark giving a cathedral-like affect of vaults and detailed domes of foliage.

Pride Weekend

The first weekend in July in San Francisco was the Gay Pride weekend, which is a huge party here. Parts of the city become street festivals, and on Sunday the parade along Market Street in the heart of the city is the highlight. I burnt the candle at both ends, going out late at night but getting up at 5:30 am to help out with the Google float, which was a take on Star Trek featuring George Takei a.k.a. Mr Sulu from the original Star Trek TV series. It was a huge amount of fun. After the parade I met up with a group of friends in the Civic Gardens and drank flavoured vodka to the antics of the awesome SFCheer cheerleader troupe - how's that for a gay combination - and the weekend wound up dancing Salsa at El Rio, one of my favourite bars here in the Mission.

Bevey of Teachers

I am living in San Franciscco's Mission district, in a wooden house (many of the houses here are made of wood) which has a small back garden.

My flatmates are all teachers. Stefanie and Alicia both work in middle schools in San Francisco. Stefanie's school is in West Oakland, which is one of the worst neighbourhoods in the Bay Area.
Her students are in the age group of 13-14. The stories she told in the evening after I came home from a comfy day in the office were startling: students threatening the principle, others accused of rape or involved in drug dealing. She has a hard job, but an inspirational positivism about her work, and the ability to do it with a passion. Despite this, and being voted the teacher with the best sense of humour in the school, four of her car windows were smashed on the last day of term. And that still didn't get her down.












Both Stefanie and Alicia are away at the moment, enjoying the summer break (Stefanie is in Costa Rica). Laurie and Kathie are friends of theirs who have came to San Francisco after working for years on Santa Catalina Island close to Los Angeles in an outdoors center there. Both are passionate cyclists and love the outdoors, and like Stefanie and Alicia before them, they are a lot of fun to live with. They are starting a teaching program in San Francisco at the end of July. The photo above left is of Jacob (Laurie's boyfriend), Kathie and Laurie (and a bottle of tequila); on the right is Kathie at Point Reyes.

More Money than Taste, More Taste then Money

My New York neighbour (couple of times removed), Pierre, dropped by last weekend; part of his tour of the US. He's heading back to Paris to start work there.

It was a lot of fun to hang out with Pierre, and it was also reason to carry on my San Francisco tradition of alcoholic weekends by going with him, Stefanie and her friend Colette to the wine region north of San Francisco - the Napa and Sonoma valleys. San Francisco reminds me in many ways of Cape Town, so I went to the wine region expecting Stellenbosch and Paarl - and I got both more and less than I expected. The Napa Valley has a lot of wine, but it has a lot more too: more Harley-Davidsons, more ultra-chic villages, more expensive restaurants. Wow. We ended up in Clos Pegase at the end of the valley. This is a "temple to wine" designed by "renowned Princeton architect Michael Graves"; its got sculptures by Henry Moore and Jean Dubuffet. And man, its ugly. The art is all over the place, some of it is really kitsch, the building is an oversized, hulking edifice which radiates discomfort. But the wine was good.

It was also good in the Sonoma Valley, where they let you buy a bottle of wine and bring your own picnic. Sonoma is a lot more relaxed than Napa, and has a homey feeling about it. We spent more time there, ending up the day in the giant square in Sonoma town, where the short-lived Californian Bear Flag Republic was declared in 1846 when it was wrenched from Mexico's power. On this Sunday afternoon, war and power struggles seemed very distant, and the townspeople were dancing to a bluegrass band with a washboard-strumming singer in the square.

Mission Street Carnival

Its only a sample of two, but my weekends in San Francisco are always colourful. This time around, it was the Mission Street Carnival, a South-American style street parade with lots of feathers and glitter and swinging skirts. It would have been a lot of fun anyway, but it was made into crazy fun because I went with my new room-mate-to-be Stefanie and a bunch of her friends, after kicking the day off with a champagne-and-mojito breakfast. They are 24 hour party people, and really friendly to boot.





















I went out into Mountain View for the first time on Tuesday for an 'offsite' event from Google. Its a bland stretch of suburbia out there - I am very very glad to be in San Francisco!

The Bay to Breakers

What better way to get to know San Francisco than dress up as a shrubbery and run 12km with thousands of other people in fancy dress from the Bay to the Pacific Breakers? That's what I did at 8 o'clock this morning. The race was a lot of fun, some people went over the top in their costumes and some went under the top and didn't wear anything at all. Does that sound sexy? I guess it could be, but imagine running behind jiggling masses of sweaty cellulite ... now try and forget the image! There were also teams of people who had kegs of beer on wheels and were drinking like frat boys while running in public in the early morning (probably double illegal in America)






















Just before the start of the race, the crowd erupted in a spontaneous display of tortilla throwing. I have no idea why this tradition started, but thousands of them were suddenly whirling through the air.

And just after the start, the raucous crowd was greeted by three Christian protesters, having their say about the race. Here is my favourite banner, warning how the race caused judgment:

The Berkeley Time Warp

I'd heard about it before, but was surprised all the same. When you catch the BART subway across the bay to Berkeley, all the 30-somethings white men with matted dreadlocks get out the train at the Berkley stop, and you set your watch back to the 1960's. People really are protesting by living in trees, railing against US politics outside the gate and selling tie-died T-shirts (Made in India) on Telegraph Avenue. Its an anachronism, but its also cool.

I went there to hook up with Sandy, my neighbour in New York, who was at her sister's graduation. We had a cup of coffee at International House Berkeley, which we walked past by accident. IHouse Berkeley is a mixture of Mexican villa on the outside and faux medieval hall on the inside. Not only that, but it also offered my very first view of the Golden Gate bridge. Sandy and I had a good time, walked around the campus, visited the t-rex (California seems to have lots of these) and a conversation which was strangely deeper than anything we've ever had in New York. Maybe things were like that in the 60's too.

A Flat Heirarchy

Today, a mail from Eric Schmidt landed in my mailbox. Later, Google hosted its weekly Thank God its Friday meeting, where most of the company gets together, all the Nooglers have to wear a nerdy cap-with-propeller and either one of Larry Page or Sergey Brin is present. This Friday I was lucky: both were there, and Sergey had just gotten married, so the Nooglers stood up together and pelted him with rice. How often do you get to do that to a multi-billionaire?

This meeting was for me an indication of how special the atmosphere at Google really is: it was totally informal, witty, and there is an open mike so anyone with a question can get up and put it directly to the CEO's. And there were lots of trivial ones, along the lines of 'can we reserve a free bicycle?' and joking ones, like 'are we going to license Linux from Microsoft?

Google uses all its own products (GMail, Google Applications) internally. The logo: a dog bowl with all the logos inside.

My 3rd Day as a Noogler

I am going to find it difficult to go back into a normal job (or into a normal life) again. I am getting so used to just picking up anything I want (smoothie, juice, coffee, french toast, delicious gourmet food made from organic ingredients, whatever) and walking away with it, that I'm going to get into shop-lifting trouble later.

At Google it feels like the Internet bubble never burst.

People ride around on the kind of bikes that would make a 12-year old girl's heart beat faster or electric yellow scooters (they are all free too).

At Google, they use the space above the urinals to remind you about good code testing practices. They call the project TOTT 'Test on The Toilet'.

Today Nandini (my co-new-noogler) and I helped carry wastepaper buckets full of sand downstairs, clearing the beach out and giving us space for desks. Pity - I kind of liked the beach.

First Day at Google

How could today have been anything but interesting? Google, whose mission it is to store the worlds information and make it accessible, had given me the wrong departure point for the shuttle to get to their office so I missed the one I needed, but ended up hooking up with David (also from Columbia, we'd met already in New York), having a coffee at the new stop (the Muddy Cafe: I'm going to be there a lot) and then catching the next shuttle. Which turned out to be a cross between a bus and a limo, black inside and out with leather seats and filled with people tapping at laptops.

The Google 'campus' was a little less amazing than I'd imagined in some ways, and a lot cooler in others. Its a collection of buildings, many of them rented out from SGI who occupied them before. The dull necessary bureaucracy (photos, passwords, proof of alien employability etc.) took hours, was the main stuff of the day. The most interesting experience was, (fess up), the food. In abundance, everywhere, all free. I had Indian dal for lunch and chinese stir-fried tofu for dinner. Dinner at work? Makes sense at Google. One cafe there specialized in food which is only grown within 150km of Google.

Its not only the food which is international. I am working with people from Zambia, India, Pakistan, America and Argentina. The last organized event of the day was a great speech, 'Life of an Engineer' by Googler John Cox who combines tech savvy with wit and eloquence (its a rare rare mix).

Lots of Google is eccentric. A giant t-rex skeleton in the courtyard feasts off flamingos dressed up in sombreros. In the lobby a replica of Spaceship One hangs from the roof. People put weirdly cool stuff in their cubicles. My team just one second prize in an office decoration contest (theme: Japan) and I fell victim to the winning team, who had converted the space where I was supposed to be working into ... a beach. Its true: a pile of sand and sea shells and and old sofa where my desk will someday be. This is going to be a lot of fun.

In-Flight Entertainment

I am in San Francisco. After a hectic day's packing and three hour's sleep last night none of this seems real. But my first impressions of the city are: its beautiful, nothing like New York, cold, something like Cape Town. I'll try and qualify this another time. I am staying in the Mission District, which is the latino quarter (I've eaten tacos for lunch and a burrito for dinner) in a shared house with two other guys. The house is full of kitch art and lights because Rob, one of the two, is an artist.

Tomorrow is my first day at Google.



The flight over here was a beautiful, shifting kaleidescope of landscapes from the air: desert with green crop circles in Utah, farmlands in California's Central Valley, the snowy Rocky Mountains and Sierra Nevada. The five hour flight was a reminder how vast this country is.

Torture by Washing Machine

This weekend all those winter evenings practicing in a kayak in a pool paid off ... after a fashion. I went with the Columbia kayak group to the Deerfield River in western Massachusetts for weekend of white water kayaking. There were three other students (two beginners like me, and one intermediate), and four instructors: Andy, Jane, Adelaine and Luke, the 'kayaking kiwi'. Although New York is in full blossom, upstate its cool and wintry still, with the odd patch of ice, and the water wasn't too warm. It took me about 5 minutes to discover this: my very first attempt to 'eddy in' (move from the main current to the side of the river) had me flipped and flailing, as the reality of the difference between a swimming pool and an engorged, fast-flowing river hit me like a very large amount of very cold water in the face. Repeatedly.

The first day we practiced the basics: eddying in, peeling out (leaving the sides of the river for the central part) and ferrying (crossing perpendicular to the current). We got out the river at around 5pm - it never felt so good to be dry. The night was spent in an old wooden hotel in the small village of Claremont. Almost all of the buildings you see in the countryside here are in fact made of wood, and it gives it an odd feeling of impermanent settlements. I really enjoyed the company of the group: mixed ages, mostly American but all of them very interesting people.



Sunday was also spent on the river, culminating on the Zoar rapids which is a class III (read: huge roaring walls of water smashing against lots of jet black rocks). The rapid was kind to me and I made it through still facing forward and the right way up ...