Living in the Sunset District means living in the thick of fog, which means that you can see the air physically and swiftly moving across the hills like it’s racing to get somewhere, and it’s especially nice watching it roll over the bridge near sunset. Running through misty mornings is not unpleasant. The slight cold makes me conscious of my body gradually warming, and my breaths register more clearly. My mind keeps going even as I try to concentrate on these physicalities, but it still helps to move, literally. It is nice to explore the streets of my new home, see the rows of shops and houses and bookstores, and discovering oddities like the pink Catholic church that reminds me of New Mexico and an alternative elementary school where I saw little Asian kids milling about in black T-shirts.
Our place is a ten-minute walk from Golden Gate Park, where it is perfect to run because there is no way you can take the same path each time. There are so many small and large treasures sitting in that park--lots of quiet trails, gardens of varying sizes and types, a baseball field (baseball fields are so pretty). It is quiet on weekday mornings, and the sprinklers make the sidewalks wet. I got a little lost the first time through (because I’m that way, and because it’s larger than New York’s Central Park) and ended up in Haight-Ashbury, a funky neighborhood lined with pot shops and music stores and old Victorian houses.
Haight is also where Raph lives (crazy to see him, five years after our first meeting!), and I’ve been lucky to dine at his place twice. The after-work (even though I haven’t started working yet) get-together-at-an-actual-place-that’s-not-a-dorm felt very I’m-in-my-twenties. Sitting around in an apartment with home-cooked food and wine, with conversation as entertainment, with jobs but not yet careers, with people from different places now with a common city of residence, makes for a good combination of settled and not-settled. Both dinners were very satisfying meals.
So much good food here, it’s the one thing I feel like I can literally endlessly explore. In Haight we had Cuban tapas at a cheery place called Cha Cha Cha. Steph took me and Leo to The Stinking Rose, on Columbus Ave near TransAmerica and City Lights, which is a garlic restaurant serving boiled garlic as appetizers and garlic-laced entrees. We sat in private booths that each had a different mirror and chandelier, and velvety red curtains.
Sarah and I had a fabulous seafood lunch at Pier 1 on the Embarcadero, overlooking the Bay Bridge. Another time she brought John to the city to eat at Tadich Grill, the oldest restaurant in California; it dates back to the Gold Rush. The restaurant was one big room with large engulfing booths tucked on the sides and a big bar in the middle, and we had cheesy-rich casseroles. It’s in the Financial District, and gets quickly crowded with after-work businesspeople, so it felt very grown-up to be there.
Last week I saw Andy for the first time since he graduated last year, with Steph, and went to the famous Burma Super Star and had my first taste of Burmese cuisine. I love how there are super popular hole-in-the-wall places here. Speaking of which, Tanvi and I had lunch at a warehouse-turned-streetfood-Indian-joint in Berkeley. I forget the name of what I had, but it was huge puff of crispy bread that took up half our table. Yum. I went there a second time with Sandeep and friends, where I again ordered a dish I couldn’t finish. Another time Aud and I searched for a Thai place and found one right when we got off the bus. I always knew the city was full of food, but living right here and seeing food on every block still amazes me. I love meals.
And having good people to eat with. It’s been calming and good for me, to have the leisure to see people I’ve seen fairly regularly during college as well as those I haven’t seen in a long time. There are few people I can talk to for long periods of time like I do with Audrey. After not having kept in touch for a couple of years, Tanvi and I had a three and a half hour conversation without pause. True, some of it was catch-up what-are-you-doing but mostly it was thoughts on the here and now, and the recent past, and connection was easy. We talked about how much we feel we’ve changed, but also questioned how much of that is self-awareness. After all, she seemed like the same person I knew in high school—then again, we’ve both changed so maybe we just changed similarly. College, being a communal experience, perhaps brings about similar transitions and feelings for most people. Some things like, how home’s not home, anxieties about growing up, the need to do things before life takes over, misremembered memories, loneliness. I wonder, will there be a time when people diverge so much that they not only move at different paces but in different directions? There are big chunks of time and experience that most everyone goes through: post-college life, marriage, settling, children, middle age, and so on. I suppose people will eventually be at different stages in their lives (some are, even now) but it seems like—it is natural and comforting to think that—there is usually a common base from which we all begin.
The last two weeks, as the rest of the Bay was drenched in heat, San Francisco warmed to gorgeous degrees, and there was plenty of sun here. During this time I saw some of the touristy and not-as-touristy sites that I never sought out before, which makes me feel closer to here. We went to Alcatraz, which was interesting mostly for getting the view of the city that prisoners had there. There was this one tiny window where the gorgeous white skyline appeared like a diorama. The simultaneous feeling of closeness and distance was sad.
After taking the ferry back to the city and looking back to Alcatraz, the island looked a bit different, less formidable, more melancholy.
Sarah and I wandered downtown and decided for no real reason to see the Grace Cathedral. Apparently it’s the largest Gothic structure in the West, which brought back memories of seeing Yale this past spring and made me miss the East Coast. The cathedral has these golden doors that were cast from the same mold as the Gates of Paradise from the Baptistry in Florence (Sarah recognized them as something from Italy, and we learned this detail looking it up afterwards).
There seem to be several Italian architectural imitations in the city. I randomly came across City Hall, which I don’t think I’ve ever seen before and is beautiful, whose dome is modeled after St. Peter’s Basicila in Rome. Anyhow, I liked the building’s golden accents and its sense of length; it spans across a vast space, and a long row of trees and stretch of grass lead up to it.
I ran into it on my way to the Asian Art Museum, which is a wonderful museum. It’s divided into Asian countries and the physical space of the museum is handled really well and delicately. It was easy to sense the change as you transitioned from India to China to to Korea to Japan. The hall of the entrance and some of the rooms inside are beautiful, too, with the kind of tall fat pillars, high ceilings and smooth stone that make you feel like you could be as elegant as the surroundings. I spent the afternoon there by myself, and it was the first time since I came back to California that I appreciated the solitude. Not that I was without thoughts of being not-alone, because I thought about that a lot, as with anything that moves me enough to want to share it, especially with people who would value it.
I also saw the city’s Museum of Modern Art, which has a lovely collection of Matisse. I liked especially a portrait he did of his wife, wearing a hideously beautiful dress, a patchwork of vivid and odd colors—the one where he told people that she had been wearing black when posing for him. Besides loving the colors, I’ve always loved the value modernism places on individual perception, and how emotion gets expressed in the concrete. I still don’t really understand contemporary art, which was a big part of the museum. One of their biggest exhibits also featured Shomei Tomatsu, a Japanese photographer. It was called “Skin of the Nation” and was an enormous collection of war-time and post-war Japan and its people. Tomatsu’s eye is amazingly comprehensive; he captured the rural and urban, Americans and Japanese, prostitutes and socialites. The concept of skin was most poignant in the series of Nagasaki victims. It overwhelms you, thinking about all the elements that comprise a culture and a person.
Overall, though, the SF MoMA doesn’t quite compare to New York’s, which might be my favorite museum of all because I’ve been there three times and had such a different and satisfying experience each time. I still remember the thrill of seeing the huge canvas of Chagall’s I and the Village the last time I went there, the cold winter of junior year.
One of the most special places I’ve been to while on my break before work is Baker Beach, very close to our place (we live a few miles from the ocean), a beautiful beach at the head of Golden Gate. Warm white thick sand, cold water, and an unbelievable view of the entire bridge. We walked across the entire expanse of the beach, to make it to the cove of rocks, whose rugged, slippery qualities felt great on our bare feet as we climbed them. This is also the nude area of the beach, and it’s funny, it was mostly men who went without clothing. (In Greece we’d noticed it was mostly women, never any men). I felt happy standing on those rocks facing a sun that was on the edge of setting but still draping the water with its warmth and shine.
Then there are the places outside of San Francisco that have been great too. A few of us from high school and a couple new friends took a trip to the Takara Sake Museum in Berkeley. We watched a short video on how sake is made, and the different types; glimpsed part of the sake factory; viewed sake-making tools. There is something satisfying about knowing something about what you’re consuming. We sampled six different kinds of sake. First we had classic sho chiku bai, their most popular sake. It was hot (temperature wise), and dry and faintly sweet. Next was Ginjo, which was one of our favorites. It’s made from really well-polished rice (apparently, 50% instead of the normal 30% polished), so it has a delicate texture and flavor. Served cold, it felt nice travelling down your throat and into your stomach, and very crisp. Then we had flavored sake! Out of a choice of plum, lychee, green apple and raspberry, I had lychee (smelled just like the fruit) and apple (tasted like candy). We also had nama sake, which isn’t made by pasteurization like the others but by filterization. It had a very distinct taste (the details of which I can’t remember) and strong smell. Next was nigori creme de sake. Nigori is unfiltered sake, so it was a murky white color instead of the usual clear. It was textury and richer than the others. Finally we had plum koshu which was very very sweet, but had more alcohol than the flavored sake.
Today I went to the Gilroy Garlic Festival with Steph and her mom. I can see where Steph inherits her silliness. It was so funny watching her mom impulsively gravitate to the foods and goodies that caught her fancy, and she was as excited about garlic ice cream as I was. We had garlic pasta, sausages, shrimp, mushrooms, and escargot. We had four different flavors of garlic ice cream: vanilla, pistachio, almond and chocolate. Gilroy is a funny town with lots of farmland, and we enjoyed the dry yellow landscape. We joked about how the dirt roads we had to go through to get parking had just been freshly dug out of the land for the festival, but I think underneath the humor was a wistful appreciation for the simple life of tilling land and producing crops.
I feel welcome here, and not because the Bay Area is my home--that concept of home as a place has been growing increasingly fuzzy for everyone. But because strangers (including the man walking through residential SF with a parakeet on his shoulder) smile back at me, because cars stop for pedestrians (even though they are perceptibly slower here), because a lady offered me money for bus fare (and in Haight, people offered us wine and crack). And mostly because the sun and hills and roads seem to love me back.
Will me and this city be enough to heal and grow over the next year? It’s too soon to actually feel the truth of it yet, but I build and rebuild faith that it will be.
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