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SF's hottest new tourist attraction might be your office building

Written by
Brittany Martin
Google office, Mountain View
Photograph: Courtesy Robbie Shade/Flickr/CC
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Imagine you’re planning a trip to the Bay Area. There are obviously some big sights to see. You’ll want to stop by the Golden Gate Bridge, see some sequoias… and visit a tech company office? According to the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley corporate campuses are the new tourism hot spots. Hundreds of people each day are trekking to Menlo Park, Mountain View, Cupertino and elsewhere to pose for selfies in front of their favorite online companies' corporate logos, after which they presumably post the photos on the very services they’re posing in front of. 

The Mercury News talked with Stanford professor Fred Turner, who has developed a theory about what might be behind the desire to spend your vacation spying on the offices of major companies.

 "What you’re seeing are people on a pilgrimage," Turner told the paper. "Folks are looking for a physical place behind the kind of dematerialized experience that they have online."

Tech tourism has become enough of a thing that companies are creating attractions for their visitors. Facebook has erected a large "like" thumb sign, which has become a popular place for snapshots. Google has created the Android sculpture garden, where members of the public are invited to stroll among oversized icons of each iteration of the mobile operating system. Nearby, visitors can also stop by a Google gift shop and pick up logo-bedecked lollipops and t-shirts.

Naturally, entrepreneurs have cropped up looking to monetize the tech tourism boom. Tour companies are offering Silicon Valley packages, offering to drive groups around to see company offices from outside (beyond the gift shops and lobbies, unescorted visitors are generally not allowed to explore inside the buildings) and visit other tech-related sites on the Stanford campus and in San Jose, for prices starting around a whopping $550 per group.

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