2022년 1월 30일 일요일 – Mountain View 생활 16주차

Arrival

My wife and her brother had arrived here after a hundred days of my arrival. The airport was more crowded than last year. When I had moved here, there was no one sitting on the bench. It seems that people are less scared of COVID-19 ever before. However, it is still a fatal disease since it prevents infected patients suffering from other diseases from visiting doctors.

Anyway, onboarding to the US started. We visited the Korean supermarkets to buy groceries. My wife was pleasant because there were more items than she expected. But she was disappointed the next day after tasting a rice cake soup she made. Now, she knows two facts. The first one is that she can get almost every ingredient in Korea. The second is that they don’t taste as good as in Korea.

Also, she will know that public and private services are much slower and more inconvenient than in Korea. Nevertheless, the weather is charming here. It offsets all the negative aspects. And I can help her to overcome unfamiliar situations.

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Travel

Traveling to San Francisco sounds scary to me. When I saw the crime map, many areas were colored Red. I asked my teammates how the red-colored map is helpful, and they said that it means that you’d better not go there. Therefore, I used a rented car instead of driving my car. Also, I haven’t parked on the street. And whenever we parked, we never had left anything inside the car.

Hopefully, nothing happened to us during this weekend’s journey. Sometimes we saw homeless, but they were sleeping. During the daytime, the city seemed safe. We walked around the popular spots and took pictures.

The good thing was that there were a few people wherever we visited. We haven’t waited in the long line to ride a cable car. Even at the popular brunch cafe, we just waited less than an hour. As I heard from others, the average waiting time was longer than three hours before COVID-19.

We are still worried about the COVID-19 infection. So, we haven’t contacted other people. Also, we always wore a mask. At night, the city changed to a different place. Stores closed at 8 pm or 9 pm. The town was getting dark as time went on. The night view was excellent but looked dangerous too.