Here in San Diego, the weather is excellent, the beaches some of the finest, and at least for the moment, the dollar is comparatively weak (though strengthening): All good reasons for foreign visitors to descend upon the city this summer.

To get an idea of just how many, the Department of Commerce and Office of Travel and Tourism Industries have a few numbers. In 2007, more than 645,000 international visitors passed through San Diego; the annual total — including both United States and non–United States residents — is around 32 million. Last year, 117,000 of the international visitors were from the United Kingdom, 49,000 from Germany, 88,300 from Japan, and 43,240 from Australia and New Zealand. The 2008 numbers have not yet been crunched.

According to D.K. Shifflet & Associates LTD, says the San Diego Convention and Visitors Bureau’s San Diego County Travel and Tourism Forecast for 2008, San Diego is a top-five United States travel destination. Real Simple magazine’s editor, Kris Connell, named it the best family-friendly destination last year, and Fodor’s (of travel-guide fame) bills it on its website as having “an exploding culinary scene and big-city nightlife, with a side of beach bum mixed in.”

Matthias, who is 23 and traveling from London by way of Austria, has enjoyed San Diego more than many of the other destinations he has been during his trip, especially Los Angeles. He sips from a small cup of coffee at Java Jones, a café in the East Village a few blocks from the Lucky D’s hostel where he is staying.

Lucky D’s, which, unlike Hostelling International, allows alcohol on its premises, looks not unlike a college dorm. Doors, painted off-white, are individually numbered; handmade magazine-collage art hangs on the wall, and patrons traipse the carpeted hallways in board shorts and flip-flops, chattering with one another.

At Java Jones, things are a bit quieter.

“I think [San Diego has] got a lot of charm,” he says. “San Francisco’s also nice, but I don’t know, for some reason I just like San Diego better. Las Vegas was just a very different place. It’s all about gambling and money and girls and everything. Here, it’s more beautiful, in my opinion. I love the sea, so this is a city by the sea; that’s also very appealing to me. I really like San Diego.”

Compared to Los Angeles, some international travelers prefer San Diego.

“I expected more [from Los Angeles], actually,” says Bapsi, a soft-spoken 27-year-old from Vienna, Austria, as she sits outside on the Ocean Beach International Hostel’s back patio during some travel downtime.

Bapsi and her friend Katherine, who has just started work at the hostel “doing the beds and toilets,” in addition to staying there, are the only two sitting in the cozy enclosure, which is made from a skeleton frame of tubing and waterproof tarps. The hostel’s rates range from $17 to $24 a night.

“[I expected] more glamour [in Los Angeles],” Bapsi elaborates. “[It was] dirty, actually. I didn’t expect it.”

Katherine, who is 26 and from Germany, weighs in as well.

“Between L.A. and San Diego, I think San Diego is a real city,” she explains. “In L.A., you go to Santa Monica and that’s a little city, and then you go to Venice Beach and it’s quite different, and Hollywood is another story. And here I think there’s a real city. It’s much nicer; it’s just cleaner compared to the other…like Hollywood, downtown L.A., that’s just…”

She makes a noise of disgust.

Ayala, who is 26 and visiting from Israel, liked Los Angeles but found that the hype it inspires is just that — hype.

“I’ve been to L.A. four years ago, and I have to say I expected much of L.A. and I think San Diego is nicer,” she says, taking a breather from sightseeing at the San Diego International Visitor Information Center in downtown.

The visitors’ center, which is just across the street from the USS Midway, is bustling in the early afternoon. Light pours in through the windows as several staff members and volunteers assist the gathering of out-of-towners who have come to purchase tickets and receive destination advice.

Ayala is in San Diego for a weekend trip with her friend Natalia, who is 21 and from Brazil. The two of them are staying at the Comfort Inn on Harbor Drive, paying $250 for two of their three nights and $84 for their final day in San Diego. Both are pharmacy students studying abroad in Yuma, Arizona.

Ayala continues.

“In L.A. you expect it to be, I don’t know, Hollywood and amazing and the beach and all, but it was.…”

She trails off.

“I guess because they make such a big deal out of it in movies and movie shows then you just expect more,” she continues. “It’s really nice, I liked L.A.… I guess I expected more, and San Diego is more beautiful than L.A.”

Some, no matter their impressions of Los Angeles, enjoyed themselves. Jennifer, who is 22 and from Limerick, Ireland, ended up making lemonade out of lemons when she and her friend ended up in a sub-par hostel in a run-down part of Los Angeles.

“We had to go up about a million steps to get into the dorm, and it was tiny,” she says from her seat in the dining area of Hostelling International’s Point Loma location. “It was maybe 10 feet by 15, I don’t know how many feet, but it was really small. There were six bunk beds in it, no air conditioning, nothing. When I went into the shower, it was kind of grimy, [and] we pretty much had to wear flip-flops the whole time because we couldn’t do anything else.”

Hostelling International Point Loma looks not unlike someone’s very large house. The outside is painted a cheery cherry red, and indoors, round tables sit adjacent to an airy, open kitchen where guests can cook and store their food. The dorm-style and private rooms, which range in price from $17 to $69 depending, are brightly colored and full of light, with beds dressed in patterned sheets.

Despite the less than desirable condition of the Los Angeles hostel, Jennifer, who relates her story sunburned and smiling, reports that she had an excellent time.

“It was a dive of a place, but we had so much fun,” she says, laughing. “Because it was so small and everyone was so shocked by the dirtiness that we all kind of…We all went out on the back patio, and we got on really well, so we made a few friends up there. We met two girls from Dublin who were working there, and they decided to quit their jobs and come traveling with us.”

All in all, she finds San Diego more relaxed than Los Angeles.

“I don’t think people are as pretentious as they were up in L.A.,” she says. “I’m not so happy that all the bars and clubs close at two. Like, literally, two o’clock, you’re gone. They take your drinks off you, and you’re pushed out the door. It’s the same around here. I was in New York two summers ago, on Long Island, and you’d go out and it was great. At home the clubs close at half two or three.”

She pauses.

“After New York [I went] to Miami, and things only really started getting going at four,” she says. “And then, [I got the] shock of my life because I thought, L.A., it would be crazier over here and people would be going out the whole time, but it so wasn’t what I expected.”

Matthias had some high hopes for Los Angeles as well.

“I was so looking forward to L.A., and it was a bit disappointing,” he says. “The city center does not have a lot of charm. For example, if you go to London, it’s there. I think it’s got a strong flavor to it. In L.A. I didn’t get it. It’s so spread out. That’s what makes it very difficult.”

Matthias reached Los Angeles from the Grand Canyon via Greyhound bus. He has traveled throughout America exclusively via Greyhound and explains that his trip — which includes many national parks — is costing “hundreds and hundreds of dollars.”

For many travelers, buses — Greyhound specifically — have been the choice of transportation for reaching destinations within America, at least for those visiting the West Coast. Some find it cheaper, others easier, and for more than a few, it becomes the source of interesting encounters with fellow passengers.

“Greyhound is an interesting experience,” says Peter, over a plate of pancakes at the Hostelling International hostel downtown, where he is staying.

The walls of the hostel’s dining area are colorfully painted in purples and blues, and Peter sits on a bench at one of two large tables that make up the center of the room. To the left is the kitchen, where travelers cook their own pancakes over a hot griddle; to the right is a lounge space, complete with couches and armchairs, a haven for laptop users catching up on email during their stay. Beds range from $19 to $82, depending on the room.

“On the way to Las Vegas I met this quote-unquote ‘millionaire,’ but it was all a bit dubious because she’s on the Greyhound,” Peter continues, brushing a lock of sandy hair from his face. “I [also] met some guy who’d been touring Iraq and had come home. [It was] kind of interesting to get his perspective.”

Peter, who is 20 and clad in a Franz Ferdinand band T-shirt, hails from Somerset, England, and is part of an exchange program between Cambridge University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, where he is spending a year studying chemical engineering. He and a friend he met at the college drove halfway across the country together, parting in Dallas, Texas; since then, Peter has been busing solo. He and his friend are set to meet in Los Angeles.

Ian, Gillian, Sinead, Elaine, Jen, and Scarlett, all from Dublin, Ireland, are also traveling by Greyhound as a group.

“Each one of us knows at least one of the others,” Ian, 21, explains.

They sit at one of the patio picnic tables out back at the OB International Hostel, a hubbub of activity in the early evening. Christmas lights twinkle along the upper perimeter of the room, and the smell of marinara sauce is in the air. Those in the group who are of age drink Wyder’s ciders, the others making do with soft drinks, and wait for a dinner of pasta and salad to be ready.

“The Greyhound bus from L.A. to here was crazy,” says Gillian, who is 20. “The bus was all right, but the people were crazy. We met a prisoner, an ex-con.”

“And a very angry father and daughter,” Ian adds.

“And a man in a hospital mask,” chimes in Scarlett, who is 21.

The prices for a Greyhound ride vary. From Los Angeles to San Diego it averages out to about $35 a person one way, according to the Greyhound ticket booking website; from Las Vegas to San Diego it’s just under $60. From San Francisco, another popular destination, it’s just under $74. Nonrefundable tickets are slightly less and with discounts can be even more inexpensive.

Matthias, at Java Jones, breaks it down.

“Well, from San Francisco to Yosemite was 60-something dollars,” he says. “And the shuttles in between are also expensive because the Greyhound never goes to the [exact] location. So then I had to take the shuttle.”

Over his coffee, Matthias explains how he is planning on staying in San Diego for the entire month of July, after which a friend of his will join him in his travels.

“I need to live as cheap as possible,” he says. “I won’t have as much spending money to travel with [my friend], and I wanted to kill the time, which is one month, and I wanted to have a warm place. San Francisco was just not warm enough, and I thought maybe I can get some kind of job, like helping out in the hostel, to cut the expenses, so I needed to be in a city.”

So far, he has spent much of his time walking around the city, as he is planning to do after his stint at the coffee shop, mp3 player in hand.

He’s covered a lot of ground this way, he says.

“I have been to the Maritime Museum, [and] I have been to the USS Midway,” he says. “Tomorrow, I’m going to go to the Zoo with a few friends. I’ve been walking around a lot. Just the harbor, city center.”

Jennifer, though she has not seen as much as Matthias, is also enjoying her stay in San Diego. Though she’s only been here two days, she’s gotten to see some of the sights.

“[I] went to the beach, went out drinking last night,” she says. “We [know] a few people [here], so we went to their house and had a bonfire on the beach until the police came. They were just driving around anyway, but my friend was up there talking to them, and they said, ‘Look, we’re going off in half an hour so just stop everything for half an hour.’ They were really nice. They were just making sure no one was drinking or smoking on the beach. So you had to knock back your drink really quickly and shove it in the bin before they saw you.”

After her beach experience, she’s planning on seeing what the city has to offer, along with her traveling companions.

“We’re probably going to do one of those tours around, just see San Diego, bits and pieces,” she says. “And our friend from college is living up on Pacific Beach, so we’re going to go visit them for a few days. They’re here on the J-1 visa. [A J-1 visa allows aliens to stay in the country for a period of two years as “exchange visitors,” provided they have a sponsor, such as a family they are working for, a private employer they are working with, or a university they are studying at.] So there’s five of them and they’re working in ice cream parlors, and there’s one working in retail, just bits and pieces [to] keep them going for the summer.”

Though often staying only for a few days, many visitors try to pack as much as possible into their trips to San Diego. Popular destinations are the standard tourist fare — SeaWorld, Coronado Island, Old Town, and the like — and are largely enjoyable for travelers.

Ayala liked SeaWorld in particular.

“Going to SeaWorld was an amazing experience,” she says. “I’ve never been to something like that because we don’t have big tanks with fish; we just have dolphins in Eliat, which is in the southernmost point in Israel, but not killer whales and not that stuff. That’s cool.”

Katherine and Craig, 29 and 30, respectively, are also planning on keeping busy. They are visiting from Manchester, England. They chose to dine out in the Gaslamp on their first night and decided on taking a harbor cruise for their second. For their third day, they are going to the zoo and the beach. They are staying at the 500 West Hotel for $100 a night.

The two of them, like Katherine from Germany, are doing an around-the-world trip. Craig, a plumber, sold his house to finance the trip. So far, they have been to India, Thailand, Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand, and Fiji.

For their trip to San Diego, Katherine and Craig used a Rough Guide travel book, which, Katherine laments, was not particularly useful.

“It doesn’t tell you a lot about San Diego, but it just tells you the nickname is San D’Ego because everybody’s got a chip on their shoulder [and] thinks a lot of themselves,” she says, waiting in line at the International Visitor Information Center. “But we haven’t really seen that.”

Others have used guidebooks as well. Matthias prefers a series published by Lonely Planet, and the Dublin crowd uses one they cannot remember the name of, while others prefer to search on websites like Google and the official page of the San Diego Convention and Visitors Bureau.

Some, like Joe, who is an Englishman traveling from Austria, scoff at many of the travel publications available. Lonely Planet (which is owned by the British Broadcasting Corporation) in particular, which has a website complete with travel blogs and feature articles, is quite popular among travelers, but this does not sway him. “I make a point of not reading Lonely Planet,” Joe says. “[It] is just a load of rubbish. Lonely Planet is the anesthetization of travel. They have useless maps that are immediately out of date. Who needs a book that lists the price of a meal? It changes every year. It’s a load of guff, carrying around a [book of] prices for restaurants.”

Joe, who teaches math in Austria and describes himself as being “twenty-plenty,” came to San Diego on a recommendation from a few friends he made in Madrid who happened to go to San Diego State University.

“I thought it was the sort of place you could find big fish that jump out of the water and play with dolphins or something,” he says, tongue-in-cheek, of San Diego. “Erotic swims with orcas and stuff like that.”

He flew with Zoom Airlines, which has been making nonstop trips to San Diego from London as of June of this year (the first flight was on the 20th). He paid, he claims, “too much” and would have flown into Los Angeles if not for the direct flight.

“[The airline] is okay,” he says, “but it’s a pretty crap aircraft. It’s all in Spanish, ‘salida’ this, etc., so I think they must have bought it from Liberia.”

At the moment, Zoom flies both Boeing 757s and 767s; the average age of each aircraft, according to airfleets.com, is just shy of 15 years. A one-way ticket — at economy price, booking a month in advance — costs anywhere from 23 to 218 pounds ($46 to $436.50, according to Yahoo! Finance’s currency converter), depending on the time of departure.

Current airfares, many say, are much cheaper than they would be if the American dollar were not currently so weak.

The group traveling from Dublin paid 750 euros (which, at the time of this writing, is equal to $1193) for a round-trip ticket on British Airways.

Bapsi flew from Vienna to Chicago with Austrian Air, and from Chicago to San Diego with American Airlines, and says she paid around $1200 for both flights, which is roughly 1900 euros.

Jennifer took Continental Airlines from Shannon, Ireland, to Los Angeles for 970 euros — $1537, round-trip.

Other things are less expensive for travelers here than they are in their home countries as well; perhaps most notable is the cost of gas.

“[Gas is] about a pound a liter [in England], which is about $7 or $8 a gallon,” Peter says. “But it’s been [raised] about 95 pence or a pound, whereas here it’s doubled or something. I don’t really know too much about it, but it’s significantly cheaper for me here than in England.”

He’s not far off; gas, at the time of this writing, averages $9.02 a gallon in the U.K., whereas here it’s only $4.34, according to the United States Energy Information Administration website.

It’s not just gas; othclothing, for instance, which several travelers noted, costs far less.

“When we went shopping, we couldn’t get over how cheap all the clothes are,” says Jennifer, who confesses she is buying a lot of dresses and shoes here in America. “It’s just the fact that our euro is so strong. And the drink is so cheap here. Not when you go out in the clubs, that’s kind of expensive, [depending] on what bars you go to, but when you’re [having] a few drinks at home before you go out, it’s very cheap.”

Others agree.

“It’s so much cheaper here,” Gillian exclaims.

“And it’s easier to spend your money,” Ian adds, laughing.

Brand names tend to be less money in America than in many travelers’ home countries. Natalia points out that many American products retail for far less and names a few brands that are of particular interest to her.

“If you see Nike, which is really popular in Brazil, it’s much, much cheaper here,” she says. “And of course iPods, Apple stuff, [is] much cheaper.”

Brazilians, according to Reuters, have paid the most for iPods in the past; in 2007, a four-gigabyte Nano ran around $370, while, at that time, they went for $150 in the United States.

Comparative expenses aside, all the visitors report enjoying San Diego, no matter what stage of their trip they are in.

“[People are] more open and tolerant; they are just more outgoing,” says Katherine from Germany. “I think people are more allowed to be crazy. Like, they can do their own thing, they can just walk around like whatever they want to be. Not like back home. Everybody’s looking at you if you have a crazy hat or…I don’t know how to explain. I think it is like that. Maybe it’s because I grew up in a small town.”

Ian agrees.

“In Ireland, you have general people, but over here, you don’t know what it’s going to be,” he says. “You can be crazy over here if you want.”

Victoria, 26, finds San Diegans to be among the more sincere American people she’s met in her considerable travels. From Edinborough, Scotland, she has explored the American East Coast and is currently in the middle of a year of travel. “A lot of the people in the places I’ve been to, they’ve got a kind of fake sincerity, like ‘Hi, how are you?’ and you go to answer and they’re already over there and they can’t give a toss,” she says. “Here, people are actually interested in what you have to say and what you’re saying.”

Victoria considers San Diego a place where she could eventually settle down. “You find that there are a lot of places [that] you get a feeling about,” she says. “A sense of them, like whether you could live there or not…. I think I could live here quite happily.”

Matthias, too, is having a good time. His only disappointment, he says, has been with the number of transients he has seen, though he says San Diego has fewer than other places he has been.

“San Francisco was terrible,” he says. “And I’m just not used to being asked for money all the time, [and] I feel bad refusing it. In Europe, this doesn’t happen. There will be a homeless person in the street with a hat there, but they will rarely ever bother you. They will have a sign there, ‘Please help,’ but they won’t come up to you and ask you, where here sometimes you’re in a restaurant, they will come into the restaurant and ask you, ‘Sir, can you buy me something to eat?’ or ‘Can I have some money?’ Here they bother you.”

But he genuinely likes San Diego and does not mind at all staying for the month he will be here in this country in what he described earlier as “a city by the sea.”

Xinyi, who is 18 and traveling from China with her mother, likes the proximity of the ocean as well.

“It’s great, it’s really great. I love the city by the sea,” she says.

So far, she and her mother have attended a Beatles tribute concert, seen Seaport Village, and visited the Children’s Museum.

Xinyi, like Victoria, has also had good luck meeting locals — they recommended she eat at the Tin Fish restaurant, which she and her mother plan on doing — and she has a favorable view of Americans in general.

“In America people are quite friendly,” she says, having stopped in at the visitors’ center. “Like just now, we got the map at the station, people come and ask us, ‘Do you need help? Where do you want to go?’ In China, people won’t just do that. It’s not that people in China aren’t friendly, but they will not come and help unless you ask them. They would think it was weird to go up and [offer] help.”

She pauses.

“It’s sweet here,” she says.