A poster in the Castro read "160 San Francisco homeless died last year. Vote YES on Prop. M." Apart from thinking to myself that there must have been tens of thousands of non-homeless who died in San Francico last year, so what does their statistic prove, it set me on a train of thought.

San Francisco is little changed from the city I left in June. And surely, I'm more or less the same person who arrived in New York three and a haf months ago. Yet on this trip back "home", I'm beginning to feel like a visitor. I feel as if I've started to go through the same process I went through when I left England at the age of twenty one. A process wherein you start unconsciously to change your expectations of your environment.

At first, perhaps, you lament the absence of the comforts of home you'd grown used to. When I left England, the things I missed the most, apart from, obviously, friends and family, were English puddings, watching soccer on the "telly" and reading the Guardian newspaper, that bastion of humanism. They seemed almost irreplaceable. (Don't forget, this was at least half a decade before the Internet). You reject the pale substitutes of your new place, at first. You don't quite know how to behave in restaurants; you trek miles out of the city, as I did, to go to the only familiar name, Pizza Hut.

The first time you head home again, you revel in your puddings and newspapers with the relish of reclaiming old friends. But by the second or third time back home, all of a sudden you find yourself missing those things from your new home you'd adopted only because your more familiar staples were missing. I remember coming back to London in the early nineties, and getting frustrated that I couldn't find twelve-hour anti-congestion pills. And I hated the fact that I was missing a couple of weeks of the New York Times.

Then, by the fourth or fifth trip home, all of a sudden, you're seeing things with new eyes. I remember arriving in Manchester airport one grey Winter early morning, and seeing, for the first time, how depressed the English looked, with their hangdog, slumped shoulders and worried faces as if expecting the imminent end of the world. You've reached the privileged position of seeing your homeland from the combined perspectives of both a native and a visitor. That's what's happening to me on this trip to San Francisco.

A portion of my impressions this trip have been informed by my staying in a hotel. (I'd lucked out by getting Priceline to find me a four-star hotel for a price where my entire four-night stay will cost about the same as one night used to cost during the dot-com boom.) Also, this time, I didn't rent a car, in order to avoid the $40 valet parking charge at the Marriott, where I'm staying. So I've been getting myself around town on MUNI, the city's woeful transit system, with it's shabby underground stations, and it's permanent population of grizzled winos who are either stretched out asleep in the stations, or telling you insistently, on the bus, that they're good friends with John Wayne.

Having gotten used to public transportation again while in New York (I swore off this mode of travel as soon as I was comfortable enough to buy a car, having been raised in a car-free household), I'm not as bothered by it here as I used to be. And I while away the trip observing my fellow passengers, who form a very different cross-section than their Manhattan counterparts. I don't know why it is, but there seem to be almost as many unusual people on San Francisco subway cars as there are eccentrics on the Underground in London. Just this morning, taking the subway back to my hotel from the Embarcadero, after I'd gone running from the Ferry Building through Fisherman's Wharf and back, I noticed a man opposite with his head in his hands. He appeared slim and weather-beaten, but was wearing a formerly dapper buttoned up suit jacket, a nylon shirt, a flamboyant but inexpertely fastened tie, cotton slacks that were a couple of inches too short, and cheap plastic shoes. By his side was an expensive, battered brief case. A button on his lapel read "I respect nobody's art but my own." When he took his head out of his hands, and stood up to exit, I was shocked to see how tall and handsome he was. He had to have been fifty, and looked his years, but he must have been stunning as a younger man, with his beautiful, flowing blond hair. I wondered what had brought him so low. Perhaps he was running for Governor.

Yesterday, the subway was yet more colorful, since it was the Folsom Street Fair, the biggest leather street fair in the World. All day long, there were semi-naked people to be seen, in chaps and harnesses, and other inappropriate garments. As I reached the Castro, for the first time, I began to feel that it looked a bit sad; so many men clinging to the idea of being sexually compelling; here an old man with his shirt open revealing a meager, hollow chest, staggering after too much wine; there a fat kid from the suburbs looking self-conscious in his day-glo spandex underwear.

It's funny. When I meet somebody in New York, and they ask me where I'm from, I struggle with how best to answer that seemingly simple question. Do I say that I'm a Brit based in San Francisco, but living in New York for six months? Or should I just make things simple and say I live in Midtown? I'm not quite sure. And right now I'm not sure that I even know where my home is anymore.