After getting up at 4:45 a.m. Eastern and catching a 7:30 flight, our little team from the GX Foundry made it all the way out to SFO, arriving a little before 10:00 a.m. Pacific to a gorgeous day in the Bay Area. (Thankfully it was a nonstop flight.)
We join the real Code for America Summit conference, or #CfASummit if you prefer the hashtag, on Tuesday afternoon. We wanted to arrive early so we could settle in and not run into any flight complications that could cause us to miss a full third of the conference.
Here are some photos from “Day 0” just for fun.
Looking back at SFO from the BART terminal on a sunny day with some fog on the horizon. The flight was about 5 hours in a straight shot from Columbus to San Francisco.Since our hotel in Oakland is directly on top of a BART line, it was the fastest and cheapest way to make our way from airport to our destination. I love a good public transit system, and while the Bay Area has its challenges, it’s still one of the better-connected cities in this country, at least. In this shot you can see Eric descending the stairs and Sarah and Kristen already on the platform. It was a quick 45 minutes to reach the hotel.Being the Memorial Day holiday, and being a downtown location, the hotel was basically empty, so an early check-in was easy. And the weather was perfection.We walked to lunch and I noticed the bilingual street signs. Everyone knows San Francisco has a vibrant Chinatown section. I didn’t realize Oakland had followed suit.Of course we had to get a West Coast lunch after our long trip and 3-hour time shift, so we found a local Japanese grill joint near the hotel and had fun playing chef. Kristen (out of frame to the left), Sarah, Eric and I tried ALL the meats.Monday afternoon Sarah—a long-time Art Institute of Chicago employee and an expert in museum management—played impromptu tour guide in a visit to SFMOMA. That included a giant wall of album art in their “ART OF NOISE” exhibition, which included an original iPod and other electronics, concert posters, and more.SFMOMA also had a fun Scandinavian piece at the top of their atrium that allowed sunlight to play through a few thousand glass panes so you could walk through it. (It should have been sponsored by Windex.)Here’s another view of the walk-through glass installation from the lobby. The dark smudge on the bridge is a person, about 7 large art museum floors up.And here’s a detail view from down below. And yes, you could see down through the floor when walking through.Finally, I took a little walk after dinner and enjoyed some of the classic architecture in downtown Oakland. There’s not a ton of it—Oakland has really grown in the last 40 years, so most of the buildings are new. Still, nice to see some classics still around, and often very well-maintained.
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