san francisco

This city actually sleeps, and you can walk down Van Ness at 10 P.M on a Thursday with your best friends like you are the only people in the world. Breathe. The night air is cold but not in a bad way, and it rarely rains or snows so there’s not too much to complain about.

Standing atop the Salesforce Tower made my heart swell with love for this city. The Bay Bridge from the 61st floor seemed like a miniature model, and without seeing all the cars traffic looked almost peaceful. The Golden Gate was half-shrouded, as ever, but seeing Karl’s full body from above was comforting. This whole time, Karl had been a kind blanket over SF.

I went into the city with my family on July 4th to see the supposed generational fireworks. You could only really see the bottom semi-circle of each firework from under the clouds covering the Golden Gate, and an unfortunate but not unexpected San Francisco experience. The traffic getting out was the craziest I’ve ever seen: a crowd of over 250,000 and no cell signal, hundreds of people at each bus stop (which, even if you managed to get on, weren’t moving anywhere) and confused Waymos in the intersections made it a transportation disaster all around. My family and I walked 1.5 miles before finding manual Baywheels bikes to ride back to the BART station. We were lucky to get on the train, packed shoulder to shoulder. The show was 15 minutes long, ended at 9:45, and we didn’t get home till 1 AM. Still, it was heartwarming to see people from all over the bay come out leisurely for the occasion.

This city is where fortune cookies were invented. The Victorian houses each expressing a different personality and grace. (The yellow Painted Lady always reminds me of the grandfather clock’s wife in Beauty and the Beast). The first magnolia tree to bloom in the U.S. was here. Every resident lives within a 10-minute walk from a park! You can see for miles from Twin Peaks, Crissy Fields, and the 62nd floor of Salesforce tower is absurd.

I love Golden Gate Park. It has the beautiful de Young Museum and California Academy of Sciences, those trees with funny bulbuses, the Conservatory of Flowers, a pagoda from our sister city Taiwan, Lovely, sprawling open fields. Life is vast when I’m inside. In contrast, NYC’s Central Park occasionally makes me feel like a zoo animal walking around with all the tours and run groups and horses and churro carts. As a whole, San Francisco isn’t as crowded as New York or LA.

The AI billboards getting off the Bay Bridge, in every BART station, on the BART trains. The advertisement of this restaurant, CHALOS, near my work—“pip install chalos.” I would wager that, within FiDi (where I work), there is an AI ad visible no matter where you stand or look. God, even the sky isn’t safe. I was appreciating a rare clear blue sky once and was greeted by a banner plane advertising to “Stop Hiring Humans.” I once read that SF billboards are where to look to know the next big thing (cloud, crypto, apps), and I don’t disagree. I just wished I didn’t have a constant reminder of it.