San Francisco: the past in the present...

Students at the department of public relations and communication at the Technological and Educational Institute of the Ionian Islands based in Cefalonia, Greece, are taught on public relations in tourism. When writing their undergraduate dissertations on tourism, they talk about the tourist package and include the whole experience from the moment one prepares and locks his front door until the moment he unlocks it having returned from his holidays. Still, an aspect of the emotional dimension involved in this package lingers and the enthusiastic tourist can cling on to his memories or bought artifacts for days after the holiday has ended.

I am here reflecting on my self and my most recent short visit-students are taught to call it city break- to San Francisco.

My status, that of a tourist, provided me with a variety of opportunities: things to taste, see, experience. In engaging in such tasks, I found myself  observing how the city is presented to tourists: what strategies and means people had employed in order to preserve and promote their "heritage". Here follow some of them, to the extent I could grasp them:

• Within this framework of preservation and promotion, I could see the extent to which locals complied with several rules which forwarded aspects of heritage and, quite often, presented them with obstacles. To be more specific and as I hope to show through my own photographs in the posts to follow, I am here talking about means of transportation which slow drivers down but nobody complains, as I could register.
• Whether moving or standing such strategies and means, better say: channels, are readily available to the senses. You can see and hear and touch, you can see and hear but keep off- limitations to the availability of sensory perception are dictated by safety and health rules. You can see, hear and imagine... There is no end to the combination of senses, only limits in certain cases, as I hope will become evident .
• Space is used in its open as well as in closed forms.  The boundary is not clear, given that small and big buildings exist side by side with open space and the display of objects of art or of the past. Still, this complex of open and closed space  signifies a special place, a transformed space and becomes highly important.

 

I see this as an introduction to what will follow and can guide us to view San Francisco from a fresh angle.