San Francisco [antikvár]

Golden Gate Bridge. THE MISTRESS OF THEM ALL San Francisco is one of the most beautiful cities in the world. Of the great bay cities — Hong Kong, Sidney, Manila, Singapore, New York, Rio, Naples — it's maybe the most beautiful of all. A mild climate, cosmopolitan people from all over the world and an incredibly gorgeous setting distance it from even its closest rivals. It's America's Pacific capital. Art, wonderful architecture, music of every sort — opera, pop, symphonic, rock — fantastic food, some of the best local wines in the world, old-style banking and modern electronics, big film-makers and small post-production studios, record companies, chic clothing manufacturers, the American West and the Pacific East — San Francisco is a crossroads of many things and many diverse people happily living side by side, feeling no compulsion to change the others or to be changed by them. San Francisco is on the northern end of a peninsula which has, to the west, the Pacific Ocean, to the north, the straits into San Francisco Bay called the Golden Gate and, to the east, San Francisco Bay. The city is about seven miles long and seven miles wide, some 49 square miles, which may be compared to the roughly 46 square miles of Manhattan. It's the central hub of a vast area which includes, northwards, the Pacific coast, Seattle, Vancouver, and Alaska. To the east are Salt Lake City, Denver, Omaha, and Kansas City. To the south, Los Angeles, San Diego, Baja California and Mexico. To the west many spokes reach out into the Pacific: to Sidney and Auckland, Singapore, Manila, Hanoi, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tokyo, as well as to the islands of Hawaii. In San Francisco all these spokes and all these influences come together. And, of course, San Francisco is the hub of a much smaller wheel, made up of California and the Bay Area. Not that California, the richest American state, with some twenty-five million people, roughly twice the land area of Great Britam, stunning scenery everywhere, and an economy among the world's top ten, is exactly a small hub. . . San Francisco itself has a population of some 800,000 people. But the Bay Area is enormous —