Just Playing Your Part

I was in San Francisco for a few days and I liked it overall. The following really caught my attention though:

• Why does it seem like all store owners in San Fran are Chinese people that don't speak English? Some times I felt like was not in the US. And I am not talking about Chinatown (which apparently is one of the largest in North America). Just regular stores on Market St. for example.
• There is a LOT of homeless people in SF. It is quite scary actually. I was having one of those American pizza slices (from a Chinese store owner of course) when I discovered that I don't have any napkins. So I looked at the pizza and at my drink, the street was busy with people going up and down the street (it was a lil steep), then I looked at the napkin dispenser. It was very close, only about 10ft away. So I get up quickly leaving my food and dart for the napkins. I come back in pretty much less than a second to find a homeless woman just about to get started on my ready to go meal!
• San Fran has a lot of gay people. Though I did notice it on the streets, it wasn't overly obvious that there were more here. Apparently one out of five males in are gay. Nothing against gays of course!
• Every now and then in SF you see an old hippie. Just an old guy with long white/blonde white/brown hair with some sort of a head band and a colourful t-shirt. A few restaurants have a peace or hippie theme to them. I found out that SF is where the hippie movement started in the 1960s.

I felt so tiny in SF. The San Francisco area itself is not that big, about 40 blocks across. But with all the suburbs and surrounding neighborhoods, it's huge. Going from one neighborhood to the other you have to get on a 5 lane highway. I just felt like I'm a grain of sand on a beach. I never feel like that in Cairo.

I am living one random life yet have enough vanity to write about it in a blog. But there are billions of people living their lives like me. People living in any one of those neighborhoods have stories of their own. The gay guy has a story about how he came to find himself that way. He's got opinions. The Chinese store owner has a story about how they came across the ocean to find a job in a foreign country. The old hippie has adventures to tell about I'm sure. And that is just one city, and one instant in time. We are just a drop in the ocean.