This Friday (26 January) I fly out of Sydney for San Francisco. I’ll be attending the Electronic Imaging conference, and this year I’ll be presenting a paper there about my work. (You can see the title at Tuesday 11:50 in the programme under Conferences|Photography, Mobile, and Immersive Imaging).

This will be my tenth trip to San Francisco. Apart from Sydney, I’ve spent more time in San Francisco than anywhere else on Earth. I’ve tramped its streets enough times that large areas of the city seem familiar to me. It’s one of my favourite places to visit.

Last time I was there I was killing time on the day that my flight home left late in the evening, and I happened to see a display of books, and one caught my eye. Cool Gray City of Love, by Gary Kamiya. A few weeks ago, I realised I hadn’t read it yet, and with this trip coming up soon, now was a perfect time. I haven’t finished it yet, but will do so before I fly out, and I’ve learnt a lot from its pages so far.

I realise I knew almost nothing about the history of San Francisco. Oh, I knew about the 1849 gold rush, and the earthquake and fire of 1906, and that Mission Dolores is the oldest standing building in the city, and the former vast extent of the cablecar system, and the Summer of Love, and Harvey Milk, and the 1989 earthquake… but that was about it. I assumed the Spanish had arrived very early in their exploration of the New World and established a settlement, making San Francisco much older than Sydney.

But no, not really. The Spanish only found San Francisco Bay in 1769, less than 6 months before Captain Cook found Botany Bay. And they just left a small military outpost there at the Presidio, and the Mission where priests attempted to convert the natives to Catholicism. The first real settler in San Francisco didn’t arrive until 1835, when Sydney was already 47 years old. It was only the gold rush, beginning in 1848, that suddenly multiplied the settlement from a tiny town of a few hundred people to 50,000 people just ten years later.

I really like reading about a place before I visit it, so I can see it with the eyes of someone who perceives the layers and the stories that are lurking otherwise unnoticed to the casual tourist, or even to the local resident. My next mission is to learn more about the history of Sydney, so I can see my home in this same fascinating light.

My first trip to San Francisco was in 1980. That flight across the Pacific had two stops, in Pago Pago, American Samoa, and Honolulu, Hawaii. My next trip stopped only in Honolulu, but thankfully since then non-stop flights have appeared.

And in June this year, I head back to San Francisco again (for an ISO Standards meeting) for visit number 11…

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