For those of you expecting wild weekend stories, I’m sorry to disappoint. After a relatively early night, I woke up at 8 am on Saturday to head to a cafe to work on my blog. Something that has really flabbergasted me here is the “line culture”here. Apparently, it’s actually a thing to have to stand in line for everything here and honestly, the coffee or food isn’t even that amazing.
In the afternoon, I called up Mei and Thomas, friends who moved from Eindhoven to San Jose in August last year (2022) and hopped onto the BART towards their place in San Jose, also known as the heart of Silicon Valley, and thus also crazy expensive (think around $4,000 for a 1 bedroom apartment).
San Jose is south of San Francisco and near other cities like Redwood City, Mountain View and Palo Alto, where companies like Google (who apparently just opened an office that looks like an airport), Amazon, Microsoft and NASA are based. That also explains the crazy rent prices. We had some nice Vietnamese food, that really made me feel like I was back in Asia.
the supermarket
Most of my friends’ will probably be shocked but I was feeling the opposite of adventurous and tired from the jetlag so I asked Mei and Thomas if we could stay in to be fresh and fruity the next day for my first visit American supermarket! Although many people had warned me it was going to be expensive, I didn’t expect it to be this expensive.
We went to Wholefoods, which is possibly comparable to the Albert Heijn in the Netherlands but felt a hundred times larger. It’s also one of the more expensive supermarkets compared to Trader Joe’s or Safeway, which you can also tell from the way everything looks perfectly arranged with a multitude of bright colours spread across the aisles. Apparently the only things that have comparable prices to the Netherlands are asparagus, blueberries and (a very large assortment of) craft beers, while bread was $11, and the you still have to go home and put it in the oven yourself!
One thing Americans are definitely good at is marketing. It’s like everything is just waiting for you to buy it, kind of like Temptation Island but then in a supermarket. Everything has been so beautifully packaged and is specifically designed that you can’t help feeling like you can’t live without it. Check out this packaging of salt, who ever thought salt could feel this special?
Reflection on day 2 and 3
This also very nicely links onto a topic that has kind of bothered me about my first two days in San Francisco, namely the capitalism and consumerism that seems to drive the entrepreneurial culture here. My first impression of the Silicon Valley is that most of the entrepreneurs and VCs are centered around money and around selling people products that they don’t need and money.
In coming to San Francisco/the Bay Area, I was really hoping to meet people with inspiring stories, that really want to make an impact, challenge the norm and prove that we can do things differently and know how to make money from it. For some reason, I had this fantasy or notion, that Silicon Valley and SF would be filled with people trying to be the next Steve Jobs in a way that they actually want to help society progress.
Perhaps I wasn’t paying attention, or maybe I should have tried to ask more explicitly about their backstory or maybe I just haven’t met the right people, but if there’s one thing that doesn’t inspire me it’s money. You could call me naive, but a critical question I always ask myself and thought others might too is: if I was going to develop this, does this need to exist, in the sense that is it actually adding value to society or our planet? The second question would then be, can I make money off of this? What really inspires me is people that prove we can do both.