Forgot those flowers for my hair...

Day 13- San Francisco

Our plans for San Francisco had a wrench thrown in them when we had bus trouble for a couple of hours the night before (all is well now, no worries) but we arrived in the city several hours behind schedule and therefore were unable to complete the service project we had planned. As soon as we arrived in the city, we hopped on the public transportation system, the Bart, and traveled to the Castro district, which is one of the largest (if not the largest) gay and lesbian districts in the country. Before we made it to the Castro though, we got off the Bart in the Mission district, which was supposedly a pretty rough part of town. It was so interesting that just by walking a couple of blocks, we saw the buildings turn from rundown to painted with beautiful urban murals to finally, the trendy colorful little houses of the Castro district that were stacked practically on top of one another. The people turned from homeless to urban chic in a matter of 8 or 9 blocks.

I thought for the most part San Francisco was a really beautiful city compared to L.A. I had a delicious lunch at a place called Café Mystique, which served some type of African cuisine and then we traveled on the Bart to North Beach. We walked through the financial district with its giant skyscrapers, then onto the famous City Lights, where the Beats read their poetry. City Lights is still this quaint little bookstore that was hard to leave once you realized what important literary history was made there.

We then visited the Beat Museum, which was a great relatively new museum with a very thorough exhibit about the history and works of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsburg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and others involved in the Beat Movement. It was very cool to learn about this movement that has shaped this city’s reputation, and gave me a new perspective on a city known for being relatively “green,” gay-friendly and liberal. We walked around Chinatown for a while, which was interesting because, as I learned in a children’s book about San Francisco while in City Lights, San Francisco’s Chinatown is the largest Chinese community outside of Asia.

We met up with Rashina’s brother, Roshan, who is a graduate student at UC Berkeley and he kindly showed a group of us around Berkeley’s campus, which was beautiful. After the campus tour, we ate dinner at a trendy little vegetarian-friendly organic place that fit right in among all the political graffiti and trendy college record shops surrounding campus. From our day in San Francisco, I definitely felt like it was a place I would love to visit again, that it was a place where you could find your niche and meet friendly people and that it was definitely more my speed than busy L.A.