The american way of living
It’s only a few hours after setting foot on Belgian ground, when i’m starting this post. The past week was eye opening, diving into the american culture was a complete new experience that i recommend to everyone.
A couple of students (80) left for San Francisco to get in touch with the american way of living. It was a journey that was organized by our University College of West-Flanders. During this visit we visited several companies in the Silicon Valley like… Adobe, Sun Microsystems, HP, APPLE, CISCO, EA Games,etc… Other days we visited Yosemite National Park, Stanford University and San Francisco itself. Yosemite was mind blowing. It was icy and dangerous, but beautifull and worth it. San Francisco was very specteculair. It combines culture, development and tourism.Our stay was situated in Downtown San Francisco on Mason Street, a part that is not for away from Union Square and Market Street, the shopping centre of San Francisco. You can tell that this part of the city clearly depends on tourism. Another part of San Francisco is China Town. This part of San Francisco brings forward the cultural difference that runs the streets.
Our visit to Adobe was more then satisfieing. After signing our NDA, we got a peak on adobe’s future and present. And i can tell you that it’s very promising..! Companies like HP and APPLE were rather boring… HP looked like an old company, smelled old, it just wasn’t nice. Apple was very new and big, but eventhough we were under nda, they couldn’t tell us anything. Every question we asked was thrown a side with the answer: “I’m sorry, but we are not at liberty to discuss that.”
CISCO, Sun Microsystems and EA Games were nice. CISCO gave us a tour in their Cable center. Sun Microsystems gave us some background info on their products and a few demos in their demo lab. EA Games gave us a tour around campus. Absolutely stunning… they have their own gym, hair dresser, massage, etc… People working at EA Games can practically live there.
