I spent two months last summer in the bay interning at a low-key tech company. I’ve spent most of my time in San Francisco, though I also lived in South SF and Oakland for a few weeks. This was my first time in the States, here’s what I’ve seen.

Visas

I don’t want to talk about it. Suffice it to say that when people complain about US visas, they are probably not exagerating, but actually understating the difficulties. If you want to go there and can afford the luxury of starting the process 6 months in advance, do it. 3-4 is feasible if you’re really on it, and don’t tolerate delays1.

Prices

As a rule of thumb, take UK or German prices and double them. It’s customary to list prices in restaurants netto, and not giving a tip of about 15% is considered unseemly (though figuring out when a tip is or isn’t necessary is apparently a super-complex matter that cannot be easily explained). Here’s what I paid living in San Francisco

Housing $1000 Through a connection, for a room. If you want to be fairly close to the city, I’d budget $1500 or more for a room.
Groceries $80 Per week, and one person
Public transport $30 Per week, commuting often to various places around the bay. Dropped to $5 after I stopped doing that and got a bike.

Public transport

You’ve probably heard that the bay has some of the best public transport in the US. Don’t be fooled. There’s one subway line running through SF and it is, for the most part, parallel to most tram lines. Bus coverage is much better, but getting anywhere takes a long time, especially if you’re moving between different cities in the bay. Service at night is very limited. My quality of life at least doubled after I got a bike.

Busses don’t stop at every stop, you make them stop either by pressing buttons, or pulling cables running across the windows. If you’re waiting at a stop, it’s best to wave at an oncoming bus to make sure it stops, or at least make eye contact.

Bus drivers are usually very friendly, which is a first for me. A few times, a bus actually stopped for me, even though it had already started driving away. This might be both consequence and cause of the unreliable service, or simply an effect of the general bay area friendliness.

Public transport is widely seen as “transport for people who cannot afford a car”, although nobody says that openly. There are often homeless people sleeping in the subway.

It also happened a few times that someone in the wagon was behaving aggressively. Neither the subway trains nor the stations feel safe, especially in the evenings and at night.

I’ve encountered one ticket control on a subway. Bus drivers will often either pretend to not see when people fail to pay for fare, or openly encourage them not to do so.

Cycling

Weird. It’s as if the city spent lots of money to build decent infrastructure on a whim, without actually making sure cyclists would be using it. There’s planty of cycle paths, tho it took me a while until I learned to avoid my body got used to the hills. And by hills I mean 45° inclines and beyond. Definitely possible, and worth it for me personally, but wouldn’t recommend it to someone who’s doesn’t feel comfortable driving on the road.

Cycling is quite popular, but it is not seen as way of getting from A to B, but rather as a relatively posh sport, with many expensive bikes on cycling trails in parks, but much fewer on regular streets than, say, in London.

Public transport and cycling gel surprisingly well. The “Cabletrain” (the medium-distance train running down the eastern coast of the west bay, all the way to Mountainview) has plenty of space for cycles (I’d say at least 100 bikes), and many buses have cycle racks. The subway also has some space for bikes, and public transport usually isn’t too full because everyone knows it’s terrible. Taking a bike on public transport is free.

Homelessnes

Much worse than in the UK, many people are visibly on hard drugs. I saw many (multiple dozend) homeless people probably every day. Unlike the UK, most of them weren’t begging. This made it even harder to stomach, somehow.

Culture

In many ways the US feels like England, but without the social dance of being friendly towards everyone at all cost. Which isn’t really like England at all. People tend to be really open and keen on making friends, even if they’ve just met you. People occasionally even strike up conversation in stores.

I’ve often heard complaints that the East Coast friendliness is fake. I didn’t pick up on that either because I was there for too long, or because my base line was England.

Money

People call the US a materialist culture, and there is some truth to that. The first shock was that everyone discusses wages and expenses somewhat openly. The second, bigger shock was when people I’d known for less than a week offered to borrow me hundreds/thousands of dollars, because I mentioned I was having issues with liquidity2. I appreciated both of those things.

On the other hand, how much you earn and what sorts of things you are able to afford seems to be a big focus for people in a way that I hadn’t encountered before. It wasn’t everyone I interacted with, but “status through wealth” seemed to me more present in the US.

Work

When I started my internship, I got told that the company didn’t care about how many hours I worked as long as I got the job done. Having previously made myself miserable by working 8 hours to the second no matter how much work I was actually getting done, I decided to take their word for it. And they meant it! Some days I’d be chipping away at a task for 9 hours, other days I’d spend 3-4 hours in deep focus writing code, and not do much more for the rest of the day. I don’t think I’d have gotten a lot more done if I had forced myself to sit in front of the PC for 8 hours. And even when I wasn’t technically working, solutions to problems would occur to me while running other errands. This way of working was super-cool, and unthinkable for many a finance place in London.

Despite this, some people work really hard, working long hours and staying online in the evenings and even on weekends. Differences between companies are also large, but working the full 8 hours a day at entry-level at a tech startup seems rare.

Service Niceness

Different countries have different codes of behaviour for the service sector. While in Germany and the UK it’s basically enough to follow basic codes of politeness – greetings, thank-yous, goodbyes – in US there’s an expectation of convincingly genuine niceness. Which makes going to the stores very pleasant, but only in a superficial sort of way. Seeing someone tired from a long shift mustering the effort of putting on a fake smile, is soul crushing, not pleasant.

Also, the expectation that retail workers stand while serving me is ridiculous. It’s strange that a literal monarchy is more relaxed about this sort of thing.

Politics

Some people are very out-there with their views, but most are moderate when you make normal conversation and ask about specific issues. This was surprising to me, since watching international news you sort of get the impression that the US is constantly in a state of civil war. Still, everyone is very careful when discussing political issues, while at the same time making it very clear that they don’t vote republican3.

Funnily enough, most people I spoke with support some sort of US interventionism. I can’t quite put my finger on why I find this bothersome: Every country tries to further its own interests abroad with whatever menas it has available. Maybe it’s less the supporting of intervention that I find irksome, and more the manner in which people will hold very strong opinions about what European contries should do, while at the same time not having a great understanding of the political circumstances of those countries. To be clear, I’m making this statement about random Americans I’ve spoken to and not about actual American foreign politics, which, of course, is great in every way.

Entrepreneurship

Didn’t manage to figure out where those people hang out. If you know, let me know!

Nature

Very varied, even within just the bay, parks, beaches, lots of hiking spots. Pretty.

  1. By which I mean that you should send followup emails to everyone else involved if they don’t reply for a day. This does not include the US embassies, since they never reply to emails or acknowledge receipt of documents :) ↩

  2. I had to wait almost a month until I got my SSN, because I wasn’t showing up on the system and my company couldn’t pay me a salary until that was sorted. I bought dollars for foreign currency, but was complaining to everyone in earshot about transaction fees. ↩

  3. In San Franciso, more than 85% (!) voted democrat in the 2020 election. ↩