Monday, March 11, 2013

Guest Post by Quest Student Bryton


Bryton is an exchange student with Quest International from Zimbabwe. He is attending high school in upstate New York and he visited the Quest staff in San Francisco during a school holiday. This is the blog post he wrote about his experience...


Studying in America as an exchange student is a dream come true filled with many expectations fulfilled and a lot of cultural experiences to learn from. However, there are a lot of things we may find weird when compared to our own cultures, which also makes the stay very interesting and even very funny at times.

I would describe America as a huge melting pot where every race has become present in the neighborhoods in various ways. What I really admire about it is the people’s right to express how they feel about the Government or about themselves, which is uncommon in most countries.

I found various things very interesting as I took a tour in San Francisco. The Golden Gate Bridge; basically this bridge exists as a pathway which connects Marin County and San Francisco. It’s named after the strait it covers, ‘The Golden Gate.’ Some of the interesting facts about this bridge is that, generally this bridge looks red in color and actually it is painted in orange. One of the devastating facts is that many suicidal deaths have occurred at that bridge leading to very few survivors, it is estimated that approximately 1500 deaths have occurred at this bridge.

Homelessness in San Francisco is one of the things that the city is well known for, because of its climate and temperature many people migrate from other states to live or sleep in the streets or beaches. Homelessness has become common in San Francisco, which has resulted in too much drug dealing and abuse of drugs such as marijuana.

One of the strangest things in San Francisco is their freedom to express harmony, peace and love. These people refer to themselves as Hippies, engraved from a movement during the 1960’s. This has resulted in people walking naked as a way to freely express themselves and associating themselves with naturalism. There is an annual race called Bay to Breakers, which is the only race in which one can run with or without clothes and the winner gets $100,000.

San Francisco is one of the only cities which provides an open hand to many gay people compared with other states or towns, hence it has a very large population of gay people. There are many fascinating things we can find in San Francisco, which we may find very absurd, for example a law which requires dog owners to pick up their dog’s poop in the park. And a law which enforces people to cross within a crosswalk/zebra crossing, it’s considered an offence to cross outside of that zone and it is punishable with a fine of $75. Not picking up dog poop is punishable with a fine of $160.

Being an exchange student has allowed me to see the other spectrum of life, how it feels to be an American citizen and how life goes on a day to day basis here.