We’re back! I haven’t uploaded the photos I took yet and Christian is still doing his. We are sitting here in our kitchen, each on a MacBook, going through emails from the week we were offline.

The second day we were in San Francisco, we woke up to find that one of our CityPasses was gone. We have no idea what happened to it – if it was stolen or just fell out of someone’s pocket. We didn’t want to buy a whole new one, since we’d already been to the De Young museum and ridden the public transport a few days, so we just bought a 7-day Muni pass and paid admission for one of us at the remaining attractions we went to see. I was pretty upset about losing that money at first but then I started to just tell myself that God wanted to give that CityPass to someone who needed it more than us. There are a lot of homeless people in San Francisco. We probably gave away at least $20 to street performers or homeless people.

The coolest thing about San Francisco is how environmentally conscious they are over there. All the Muni buses run on electric power, so do the famous streetcars, and you get free valet parking everywhere (parking is very scarce) if you drive a hybrid. We didn’t have a vehicle – we rode public transportation everywhere and it worked great. They also have recycling bins everywhere, in every public place, and little signs encouraging you to take only what you can use and conserve and recycle.

We saved money by staying at hostels the last 3 nights, and at the first hostel they had a community garden nearby so all the waste from the hostel was either recycled or composted for the garden. There was very little trash. The second hostel didn’t compost, only recycled, but they had low flow toilets and did not use any paper products in the kitchens or bathrooms. That one was a little more difficult, for sanitary reasons, I thought. 🙂

Overall, it was a very fun and interesting trip! I will have photos up on Flickr as soon as I figure all that out. Also some short videos of things at the beaches.