Today we were able to go into San Jose for a tour! As we were walking around, parts of it reminded me a lot of Pittsburgh. Both are cities that have parts that don’t feel like a city at all. Pittsburgh has so many neighborhoods and parks that sometimes when I am walking around I forget I’m in a city. Similarly, San Jose also has a lot of parks so there are places where it was easy to forget how big of a city I was in. In a lot of these parks there were coffee plants. This was very interesting to see how much of an influence coffee has on the country, even in places you wouldn’t expect it such as in San Jose. Both Pittsburgh and San Jose have big bus systems. However, the bus system in San Jose isn’t used as much as it is in Pittsburgh because it is not an efficient way to travel. 

San Jose is different from Pittsburgh in ways too. It has more big buildings than Pittsburgh does. It also feels a bit more like a city because of how many people there are there compared to Pittsburgh. San Jose has the true “hustle and bustle” that a lot of big cities have such as NYC. San Jose also seems to have a lot more traffic than Pittsburgh. Because of their inefficient bus and train systems, a lot of people drive to work which causes a lot of traffic in the small roads. 

It is very interesting to me that in a city this big and busy, there aren’t really specific addresses used. I can imagine this causes a lot of problems for people trying to find places in such a large city. I myself found it hard to find places in the city. This may make some businesses lose customers that would have gone to their store if they could find it, but this could also bring people into new businesses that they would not have gone to otherwise.