Places

If you get into a cab in Silicon Valley and ask to be taken to any hotel in Mountain View, the driver seems pretty likely to ask if you’re involved with Google in some way.

I don’t think I like Palo Alto all that much. I mean, it’s all pretty, but it doesn’t seem real to me. I like San Francisco a lot more. I found a very cute bookshop, where I got a copy of “Thief’s Journal” by Jean Genet, but when I got to the cash register I was surprised to be charged nearly twenty dollars for a used book.

My experience may be tinged by spending nearly an hour today trying to find taxis, and by one taxi getting pretty badly lost, to the point that I had to call the hotel and get directions and write them on a piece of paper; the driver was then unable to read my directions without reading glasses, which he kept slipping on and off as we lurched down Castro Ave. Did I mention that the transmission was slipping?