Having completed our work obligations for the summer, Alaina and I decided to fly west to San Fran for some playtime. The four-day weekend could not have been more action packed and gave me an entirely new appreciation for this amazing city. While the focus of the trip was spending time with our friends, it turned into a major music festival with delicious food complements. Arriving Thursday evening, we were greeted at the airport by our gracious hostess, Alaina’s college roommate Rocky, who drove us to her apartment in The Mission and set us up with a bed for our stay. Drinks followed at Doc’s Clock, a nice dive that would seem equally at home in Brooklyn. Friday morning was a great brunch at Boogaloo’s and a walking tour of the neighborhood. Walking up the steep hills was a workout, but it was punctuated by stops at every other house to check out the plethora of beautiful plant life growing in the yards and on the curbs. The climate is perfect for such a wide variety of species and transforms the streets into a veritable botanic garden, not to mention the wonderful parks the city maintains. Natural beauty abounds.
Friday night began at AT&T Park for a Giants-Phillies baseball game. The new park is great and both teams are playing well. The Phillies recently added last year’s AL CY Young winner Cliff Lee to their rotation and he was dominant in his first NL start, taking a no-hitter into the sixth inning and adding two hits, including a double that just missed clearing the fence by a few feet. It was also an opportunity for me to explain the game to two traveling Brits we had met, familiar with cricket but fascinated by baseball and the common “technologies of body mechanics” that have been translated to their native sport over the past few decades. The nightcap was at a club called Rickshaw Stop for “Hot Tub”, a female Beastie Boys-type group that included the girlfriend of my Midd-buddy Bill. The girls put on a great show and the crowd loved it, pumping away on the dance floor and getting hotter and sweatier as the show cranked on.
Saturday began with a brunch congregation of Middlebury ’00/00.5 at the delectable Universal Cafe including Bill and new parents Rob and Lucy, sporting their 2.5 month old, Leo. The afternoon was spent over Bloody Marys and pitchers at the classic biker beer garden Zeitgeist, art galleries and mexican food, then a fun cumbia/rock show at Makeout Room with Mexican Institute of Sound and Beastie Boys producer Money Mark. Again, the crowd responded to the noise with abundant kinetic energy and the floor was packed and bouncing.
On Sunday, we took a trip out to West Oakland to see Bill’s new digs and dine at a great Soul Food spot called Brown Sugar. For all its ghetto reputation, the area has a great neighborhood vibe and vitality. The afternoon featured house music in Golden Gate Park at a party in a grove hosted by the Dirty Bird record label. Unsurprisingly, the crowd was bumping to the tunes pumped into the surrounding natural beauty. After the music was stopped at 6:30, we waited two hours (in Dirty Trix bar) for a table at the SF hotspot Burma Superstar, which lived up to its reputation and delivered exquisite and exotic tastes from SE Asia. Finally, we ended at Paradise Lounge, where Bill played a great and unique set of his own music (as Vladmir Computin) and the subwoofers blasted vibrations into our bodies.
Monday morning we awoke to the realization that our time was almost up, but we made the most of it, connecting with future husband and wife John and Evans and driving North into Marin County and Stinson Beach, taking in the Pacific and the gorgeous hills cascading into the ocean, then Vietnamese food at Tao Cafe (Oh Pho!) and amazing ice cream at Mitchell’s as the clock ran down on our trip.
After a red-eye home last night, we awoke at 3pm in our Brooklyn bed with sweet memories of the past weekend. It is a great city, made even better by fantastic friends who we rarely get to see. Alaina and I love traveling to exotic locales for perspective on life, but sometimes this kind of trip feeds our soul in more powerful ways. Music, nature, food and friends are some of the most important aspects of my life and the past few days flowed with all in abundance. I feel fortunate to be able to jog across the country and explore a familiar foreign city on the West coast with great people and entertainment. Many thanks to the city of San Francisco and its residents.
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