This year I'm exploring San Francisco with my mentor, Imani, a PsyD student at Stanford. San Francisco is the big city closest to home, but I've mostly seen it the way a tourist does. Our goal is for me to know it like a local, as my own city. Every other week we pick a different neighborhood or experience and spend an afternoon there.
Our first outing, on September 6, was to Haight-Ashbury, the neighborhood famous for the 1960s counterculture. There were so many thrift and vintage clothing shops, and we tried on lots of different things. Then we went to Amoeba Music, which is one of my favorite places. I love vinyl, and digging through tens of thousands of records looking for rare treats is amazing. We finished with boba and took in the Haight scene, including the murals of icons from the hippie movement.
On September 26 we walked Valencia Street in the Mission and did a lot of window shopping along the way. Paxton Gate was bizarre, weird, and a bit frightening, full of taxidermy and skeletons, but it’s the kind of store you could only find in San Francisco. The International Children’s Library was inspiring. It had so many secret nooks and crannies to discover.
On October 17 we spent the afternoon in North Beach, San Francisco’s old Italian neighborhood. We started at City Lights Bookstore, the bookstore and publisher at the center of the Beat Generation, and looked at the photos of the Beat poets. Next we went to Caffè Trieste, where I had a cannoli and took in the neighborhood like a local.
After that we walked up Telegraph Hill. We looked for the famous wild parrots but didn’t find them. We did see Coit Tower, and the views of the Financial District were great. We had dinner at Tommaso’s, a traditional North Beach restaurant, and finished at Club Fugazi watching an acrobatics performance.