Although I do not have time to explore deeply, Valencia Street in the southern part of San Francisco known as the Mission appears to have a lot to offer. A restaurant named Conduit (at 280) has an appealing interior. Jack Hanley Gallery is on this street (at 395). Further down south, an Ethiopian restaurant Cafe Ethiopia at 876. Trendy cafes, boutiques, interior good shops and the like are lined up occasionally.
Balmy Alley in the Mission area of San Francisco (between 24th and 25th Streets) is an open air exhibition space for local mural artists. Below are my favorites:
San Francisco's iconic skyscraper is best looked at through between its neighboring skyscrapers.
The lobby of Hyatt Regent San Francisco is gorgeous, a typical example of modernism architecture during the '50s and '60s: the combination of straight concrete with plants interspersed. Eclipse, a round-shaped huge sculpture by Charles O Perry, matches with the atmosphere really well.
An impressive cafe on Hayes Street (at Laguna Street). They take tea very, very seriously. Try to get a bar counter seat. As if they are serving a glass of cocktail, "tea bartenders" brew a wide variety of tea (from Assam, Darjeeling, Keemum to Japanese and Chinese green tea) in front of you. For each kind of tea, they have a different way of brewing: what tea pot to be used, the degree of temperature of hot water, the amount of tea leaf. For black tea, you need to brew with absolutely boiling water. They exactly do it. They also heat up tea pots and cups by generously using hot water in front of you as the bar counter table is fitted with a long narrow sink covered by a wooden lid with slits. Finally, they don't serve you a tea pot with tea leaf inside. They remove it so tea does not get too strong by the time you have the second and third cups of tea. Splendid. So splendid that I start up a conversation with a bartender (which is very unusual for me).
Tea drinkers are mistreated by way too many cafes around the world. Tea salons like Modern Tea should be more widely available.
It is true that Hayes Street between Laguna and Octavia Streets attracts edged boutiques and cafes alongside a contemporary art gallery and a Japanese sake shop, although furniture stores here do not keep up with the high standard of Stockholm. A short tree-lined boulevard in Octavia Street (between Hayes and Feel Streets) is pleasant on a sunny day.
This is where liberal and hippy San Francisco meets Christianity. From outside the cathedral looks like a concert hall (see the photo below). Once you get inside the building, it's just mind-blowing to look up (see the photo above). I was tempted to believe in God.
A building I happened to encounter in San Francisco (On Yerba Buena Lane, off Market Street between Third and Fourth Streets). Log on to www.thecjm.org for detail.
And Beard Papa, a Japanese cream puff chain store, is located on the same street.
Following the 24 Hours section of Wallpaper* City Guide for San Francisco, I had breakfast at this French cafe in front of the China Town Gate (what an irony). Vanilla French toast with warm berries was beautiful. With a wide variety of international newspapers and magazines on offer (I took FT) and very pleasant waiters and waitresses, you can spend an intelligent but relaxed morning time here.
The Center on Institutions and Governance at UC Berkeley invited me to present my work at their two-day workshop. As UC Berkeley is located near San Francisco, I take this opportunity to explore San Francisco after the workshop was over.
The first visit is Jack Hanley Gallery, recommended by Wallpaper* City Guide. The featured artist is Saskia Leek.
The first look gives me an impression that each picture draws a familiar object like a cat, a bunch of grapes, a plant, etc. The more I look at them, however, the more unfamiliar the pictures become. The sequence of impressions on a piece of contemporary art is usually the other way around. Very unfamiliar at first, but then you realize what it is about (or you never understand what it is about).
Now I head to Golden Gate Park.
Tourists in San Francisco usually do not explore the western part of the city. Therefore I do.
Taking a bus to the west (pay 1.5 dollars in exact amount of cash, and you'll get a paper slip which allows you to take a bus again during the next 90 minutes) takes me to the eastern edge of Golden Gate Park. It is a loooong park. It takes more than two hours to walk from one end to the other. I only managed to walk over the eastern half. I encountered three memorable things.
First, pick-up drum jams on the Hippie Hill. There were about 10 people jamming with various kinds of drums. It sounded like each participant was hitting their drum on their own. As a whole, however, the drums sounded quite interesting. If I were a resident in San Francisco, I might be willing to join them.
Second, De Young Museum. (See the two pictures above.) Some hate it, but I love its building covered in perforated and textured copper, designed by Herzog & de Meuron. The copper cover creates a very surreal impression of the building's appearance. With mist floating around the building, it looks as if it wasn't there. It looks like a mirage although it stands just in front of you. I never saw such a building before.
Finally, Stow Lake. Deep green water with Far Eastern plants like a narcissus made me forget where I was. Again mist floats over the water. The whole scenery looks like the one deep inland in China where a Chinese wizard hides himself from the world.
A caveat of this park is that many driveways crisscross the park, but that's the only thing that reminds you of where you are: car-infested America.
