Welcome back to my small, little and more-diary-than-something-else-like blog. It has been two and a half years since my last entry and I’m back again in North America. Join me when I reminisce about the first few days of my extended stay in Redwood City.
Traveling to Redwood City
Before one can enjoy an extended stay abroad, one must always travel first. My journey started with a four hour delay because of reasons unbeknownst to me. At least they offered a voucher that I could use to buy me something to drink and eat at the airport (they were required by law to do so).
Not considering the delay, the whole flight went over very smoothly. Virtually no queue at the security check in ZRH and watching one movie after the other during the flight with a pleasant acoustic experience thanks to my noice-cancelling headphones. Even immigration at SFO had no queue and went by so fast that the longest wait I had was waiting for my suitcase.
Thankfully, I had someone that picked me up at the airport. He himself had to wait for over 2 hours to enter the USA, thus I had to wait a few minutes for him to arrive because he didn’t think I would go past immigration as fast as I did.
Redwood City Home
I’ll live the next three months in a nice and spacious house with up to three flatmates. They will change over time as the team working with me from Redwood City (RWC) continuously changes. The pictures below will give you an impression of how the house looks from the inside. The outside of the house will be presented in the future (so stayed tuned to updates to this blog!).
Every bedroom has its own bathroom. We even have some workplaces set up so you could work from home if you cannot work from the office (fire, no internet, etc.) or if you feel like you want to work from home. The house has only one floor, so you don’t have to climb any stairs while navigating around the house.
A nice little details is the “freedom” key (as can be seen in the pictures below). It’s hard to have a more American key for your house.
Office
The office is a 5-8 minute (depends if you catch a green wave or not) bicycle ride from the house. It is very spacious with much room for our intended growth. Similar to our office in Zürich we have to big screens that display the current state of our hosts around the world and how well our support is performing. I have forgotten to take a picture of the toilets (who takes pictures of toilets anyways?) so I can not show it to you, but the toilets are huge. Not the toilet itself where you sit on – they are normal American size – but the room. Even if you keep the high value of accessibility here in America in mind they are still large.
One concern that I had turned out to be unjustified: The temperature inside the office is not too cold. You can comfortable work in a T-shirt =) I really enjoy working from this office.
Muir Woods
Just three days in, we went on a first excursion. Every temporary resident that did not have to work on Saturday (unfortunately, one unlucky guy had to) hopped in a car and we drove northwards. Shortly after starting our journey we stopped and enjoyed an extended breakfast to fill up our power reserves!
With a full belly we continued towards San Francisco, over the Golden Gate Bridge to the Muir Woods. We parked our cars at the side of a road and followed our “guide”. It was planned to make a 3-4 hour tour that would take us to some tall Redwood trees, up a hill, then down that hill on the other side where we would end up at a beach and finally back to our car.
Unfortunately, the trail we wanted to take was blocked after a little bit more than half an hour in on our hike. The detour we took cost us around 1.5 hours in time. After around two hours we reached a point where we should have been after 45 mins. We decided to take it easy, slow down our pace and stroll beneath the Redwood trees before heading back directly to our cars and drive to the beach. Nobody in our group had the strong desire to walk an additional 3 hours =)
I slept like a baby that night. Still a little bit jet-lagged and quite exhausted from our hike.
That’s all for now. I’m a little bit behind my schedule to create new content so you can expect an update soonish, as I was not able to write about everything I wanted to. I have plenty of stuff to write left, I just have to find the time and motivation to write it down =)
