We Visit San Francisco: Seeing the Town

We took one more trip over our semester break, which seems like a very long time ago now, mostly because the world is in such a constant state of crisis that it’s hard to keep track anymore except that when you actually look at a calendar you realize that it was more than recent and this makes you question your grip on events, or at least it does for me. Your mileage may vary. But the bottom line is that not long after we came back from visiting family in Tennessee we left to visit family in San Francisco.

It's good to have people to visit.

Kim’s brother Geoff and his husband Dave have lived in San Francisco for a while now and it had been far too long since we were last out there. Kim, Oliver, Lauren and Fran were there in 2018, but I hadn’t visited since 2014. So we decided that yes we’ve been doing a lot of traveling of late but one more trip wouldn’t be too excessive (or if it were that wouldn’t be so bad) and off we went

In fairness, it must be said that Oliver thought it would be excessive and since he and Dustin had gotten back from the UK maybe 72 hours before we left for Tennessee he did have a point, so he stayed home and took care of the bunnies and our remaining cat. We ended up taking Kim’s mom with us instead, and it worked out just fine for everyone.

We had a grand time.

We flew out of Chicago on an airline that somehow made it cheaper to have checked luggage than carry-ons, which is a nifty bit of accounting when you get down to it. They also wanted to charge us to pick our seats. We’re all adults, though, so we didn’t feel any great need to make sure we would be in specific locations so we left it to the luck of the draw. I ended up sitting in the middle seat between a couple of people who did their best to pretend I wasn’t there, as is proper on airplanes, and I read my book and tried to keep to my assigned space. This gets harder to do every time I get on an airplane as my assigned space keeps getting narrower even as I get wider, but so it goes.

Dave picked us up at the airport and we headed back to their house in the Mission District. The Mission is about as San Francisco as it gets while still mostly speaking English. Not entirely, as that would be rather drab and unrepresentative, but mostly. We hung out at their house for a while and then he took me and Lauren to a pharmacy to pick up a prescription that we’d had transferred for the duration of the trip since we had forgotten the actual meds at home.

Pharmacies are pharmacies the world over and nothing happens quickly when you’re in any of them so eventually Dave drove back home while Lauren and I occupied ourselves by exploring the bodega across the street and the drink stand on the opposite corner. By the time we got the meds it had mostly stopped raining and we walked back to the house, taking in the city as we went.

San Francisco is a great city to do that. There’s a lot there. It is a cacophony of languages and little shops, flooded with people and interesting things to see. It has an odd reputation these days but it remains a place I enjoy, especially when you have people to share it with.

We did a lot while we were there.

For example, Kim, Lauren, Grandma, Dave and I went to Chinatown because you have to go to Chinatown when you’re in San Francisco. It’s the law. These days it’s a lot easier to get to than it used to be because there’s a brand new subway station right there, and it really is lovely if you like that sort of thing. You should always use public transportation in cities since that’s how you get to know a place. Being isolated in an Uber Bubble doesn’t teach you anything.

Chinatown is a riot of colors and foods and sounds, and like most of San Francisco it sits on a 45 degree angle. San Francisco is a triumph of urban planning over geography, and I’m not sure who it was who decided to put a grid system of streets on top of that much vertical topography but I would like some of whatever they were drinking at the time just to see the new wavelengths of light that apparently become visible when you do that. We walked around the area for quite a while, taking it all in and making random stops at all sorts of establishments, though in the end we opted not to wait to see the fortune cookies being made at the factory because there was too long of a line and we know what they look like in the end.

Eventually you get hungry, though, and if you are in Chinatown you are very much in luck for that sort of thing as you are surrounded by amazing food just there for the sampling. Lauren did a bit of searching for a dim sum restaurant and chose one that looked promising – a little storefront place that had a good selection of foods and a server who actually laughed when I asked for a fork. What can I say? I’d probably starve if I had to use chopsticks as more than just decoration, and that would be bad PR for the place. They did provide a fork eventually. I guess they’re used to people like me. It was really good food.

Just around the corner from Chinatown is City Lights Bookstore, and no visit to San Francisco is complete without a trip there. It was the center of the Beat Movement in the 1950s and the entire upper floor is still devoted to poetry, with Alan Ginsberg’s works prominently displayed. I tended to stay on the ground floor and the basement, where the fiction and non-fiction sections were, and in the end we came away with a respectable stash of things to carry halfway across the country in our baggage. As one does.

Outside the store there is an entire alley dedicated to the arts, though not all of them are as high-minded as you’d think.

Another day we decided to try a different part of San Francisco and went to Japantown, which I’d never been to before. We went by bus rather than subway but it was still an entertaining ride out there. San Francisco, Dave told me on an earlier visit, is “a city of firm opinions, loudly expressed,” and there is a certain value to that, yes there is.

The first place we visited in Japantown was Daiso, which is kind of a Japanese version of the old Woolworth’s 5&10. You can get everything there, and we did our best. I mostly bought snacks, which I spent the next several days slowly working my way through. I’ve still got some of the lemon candies, in fact, though likely not for long.

By this time we were hungry for lunch so we went to a sushi place across the street which, fortunately for me, also served things that were not sushi. The key thing about this place was that most of the food came via a little tram that ran along tracks embedded in the wall and this was just the most excellent thing EVER. You ordered your food from a little computer screen at your table, and eventually the Sushi Tram whisked its way over with your lunch. I’m sure we ordered more than we had planned just to have it come out on the little tram, and I’m equally sure that they knew this would happen when they installed it.

Not all of the food came by tram, though. My lunch was delivered by a bright yellow robot that probably also does double duty as a sweeper after hours, but it was adorable in its way and the food was good.

We stopped at a Japanese bookstore after that and then a few other shops, but my favorite was the Japanese grocery that was on the way back to the bus stop. It’s fascinating to me to see the sorts of foods that other people consider unremarkable, and there were plenty of interesting things there.

After the bus ride back to the Mission Kim, Lauren and I decided to visit some of the local thrift shops, which was an adventure. There was also a bakery with good donuts nearby and a bodega selling various snacks and yes we basically ate our way across San Francisco and this is what we consider a good time, thank you.

Another example of that fact was the dinner we had the night before. Grandma decided that she wanted to take Kim and Geoff out for their birthdays and we were not about to say no to that even if their birthdays were actually in November – the Moveable Feast Tradition is a fine thing, after all – so we walked over to a Peruvian restaurant a few blocks from Dave and Geoff’s house. It was very good, and afterward we wandered down the street to discover a nearby Mitchell’s Ice Cream outlet. Apparently this is the ice cream to get in San Francisco, and the deeply sociable guy behind the counter was determined that we should truly appreciate it. He let us try the various flavors and when we chose the ones we wanted he’d ask us which one should go on top so it would melt down and blend with the other, which is something we’d never considered. 10/10. No notes. It was wonderful.