John Wise

Caroline Engelhardt, four years before we were married on her first trip to America. This photo was taken shortly after landing at the San Francisco International Airport in San Francisco. We picked up a Lincoln Towncar land yacht for some idiotic reason and headed directly for Stockton and Broadway to find parking so we could go to City Lights Bookstore. I had an appointment with the most important location in this city by the bay that played such an important role regarding the poetry and writings of the Beat Generation.

After picking up a few books and a tip of a place to eat, we headed around the corner to have some seriously amazing Chinese food compared to what we knew in Germany. The place was called Brandy Ho’s Hunan Food, and in the years that followed after moving to America, we’d eat there a few more times for the nostalgic value of reliving our first couple of hours in California. After lunch, we explored Chinatown in a jetlagged daze.

We were in America in large part for business as Caroline and I were both working for a white box PC manufacturer in Frankfurt, Germany. With family in California, our trip also took us to points south, but that was after wandering around San Francisco, San Jose and a quick hop down to Monterey, California, where I watched Caroline cry as she gazed upon the Pacific Ocean.

We only spent a couple of weeks over here, and most of it is lost in the blur of time. If we had taken more photos, they are now lost but the overall impressions of this visit to California were impactful and began Caroline’s relationship to America as a place beyond the movies she grew up with.

Edit: This wasn’t part of the original post, but I had to add it as this was our second selfie after taking our first in a window in Munich, Germany, back in 1989.