While we were visiting Laura and Arend in San Francisco, Laura had to go to Atlanta to present at a conference (we are so proud of her!) While Laura was away, Arend looked after us very well, making great suggestions of things to do, with lots of local tips on what to see and how to avoid pitfalls.
Yesterday, Arend had to go to Mountain View (on the way to San Jose), so offered to show us how to use Caltrain, a rail system across California. We are already quite confident with the Muni, the light rail system of San Francisco. These trains only have one or two carriages (called cars here) but come very frequently. In the downtown area they are underground, but in most other places their rails are in the middle of the streets, like trams, and they follow the normal road traffic lights.
Anyway, the Caltrains are a different system. They are very big and important. The one we took was two-storeyed, and the one we came home on was three-storeyed (we sat up the top.) They are very comfortable, modern and clean – almost luxurious – with not a whisper of graffiti to be seen. In fact, I’ve seen very little graffiti in San Francisco at all, although Laura and Arend had been protectively sheltering us from certain areas.
Once we were comfortably installed on the train, Arend asked us what we’d like to do, and suggested a trip to Stanford University. With his laptop (with internet from his phone) he showed us pictures of interesting parts of the university so we’d recognise them, and directions for how to get there. We hopped off the train at Palo Alto, a few stops before Arend. Palo Alto is a flourishing (and wealthy) centre of Silicon Valley. Apple and Hewlett Packard (and probably several other companies) started here, and it’s a centre for venture capital – a system of investing in ideas, as far as I can work out.
So off the train we hopped, ready for our visit to Stanford University.
Caltrain at Palo Alto station.
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