A Day in San Francisco
A day in San Francisco can be longer if you want to. I recently got to visit San Francisco for the fourth time and had my best visit so far. I spent an entire week there visiting with friends and family and tried to avoid public transportation to the extent possible and relied on my feet to get a better feeling of the hilly San Francisco. Luckily, my recent five weeks in Japan which was almost entirely spent on foot (there is no better and safer country to walk in than Japan) helped me to not get discouraged by the quite steep hills of the city and I promise that you will also get used to it. You will even start liking the hills when you realize that thanks to those hills, there are so many amazing view points in the city, almost one per neighborhood.
I this time also had the benefit of an alternative “guide book” to San Francisco – Meanwhile in San Francisco by a San Francisco born and based illustrator Wendy Macnaughton. It is an illustration book taking you through different neighborhoods in San Francisco and I really wished that there was a similar book for every city that I visit. The book could easily guide you for your own “a day in San Francisco” experience. Having the book Meanwhile in San Francisco as my guide this time really helped me to better appreciate the different cultures and stories that make San Francisco the amazing city it is. How to not love a book when the author takes the muni (public transportation in San Francisco) whole day one day and takes note of how many times passengers said hello or thank you to the driver! On a side note – this is not a sponsored recommendation but comes out of pure admiration just like all the other links and shout-outs in this post (there are no sponsored posts/links on this site). So here is my A Day in San Francisco tips.
Morning in San Francisco: Hike to Tank Hill
Cole Valley turned out to be a great neighborhood to stay in as it is very close to many other great neighborhoods such as Haight Street and it is also so high up that you pass through almost all major neighborhoods during your walk down to the downtown San Francisco, which takes around one hour with no stops. It was nice to start the day by first visiting one of the few cafe shops in the neighbourhood opening as early as 6am, get my caffeine fix and then hike up to the Tank Hill with pretty amazing views of not only the city but the bay area in general and yes also of that red beautiful bridge, Golden Gate. If you want the hill and the bank all to yourself, it is better to get up there before 7am. Most days the sky will be foggy but I really enjoyed the famous San Francisco fog this time, it makes the city look so mysterious and definitely more interesting photographic wise. Once you are back in Cole Street, getting a croissant or a breakfast sandwich at Boulangerie de San Francisco is a good way to take care of your early morning food needs (and watch the young parents rushing to feed their kids before walking/biking/scootering them to school) but I prefer to have my coffee at a more tranquil place – meaning Cole Valley Cafe. It does not necessarily have the best food but it is a very airy space with giant windows overlooking the street with mellow music in the background (in USA, they love to play their music loud even in the mornings so this was a nice exception). If you are looking for somewhere even cozier, Cole Café is also very nice and you can eavesdrop on some heart warming dialogue between the café staff and the locals. Out of all three, Cole Café seemed to have the most local vibe.
Morning to Noon: Green Apple Books and Burma Superstar
If you are fond of your morning coffee and reading, it is probably already 9am and a good time to start your walk to Clement Street to visit Green Apple Books, which opens at 10am. The walk will take you through Golden Gate park and once you reach the area, it will feel like an extension of Chinatown. Many interesting stores to check out (like giant stores carrying used Chinese ceramics and a grocery store with lanterns in it – just walk into one and you will be amazed by the dynamism in there) and dining venues as well. Assuming that you spent more than an hour at Green Apple Books (do not forget to check out the annex especially for travel books), it is now almost lunch time now and you can walk to Burma Superstar in just few minutes. This Asian restaurant is famous with its tea leaf salad but its noodles are also equally tasty. I had the “fiery beef with vegetables” but the other two meals enjoyed by other members of my party looked more inviting – “tea leaf salad” and “nan pia dok” (chicken noodle but a quite fancy looking one).
Afternoon in San Francisco: Beach or a Museum?
Now that the lunch is over, you can either head down to Sutro Baths located right by Ocean Beach (my favorite San Francisco location during this last trip) or go the opposite way and aim for the amazing Museum of Modern Art of San Francisco (SFMOMA in short). Sutro Baths are actually now in ruins so there is no body taking a bath or swimming there so you cannot either (you can read more about its amazing history here – Matthew Roberts has been photographing the ruins since 1990s) but you can see the pools and there is an amazing viewpoint right above it. It always amazes me to come across such wild ocean scenery right in the middle of a major city (also saluting Sydney, Australia). While the view of the beach from high above is quite breathtaking, walking on the beach and having a close look at the body surfers or kite surfers is also amazing and worth your time. On an early morning in Ocean Beach, I also came across people who I think were hunting crabs in the ocean.
If you however skipped the beach entirely and instead chose to head downtown after lunch, even though the Geary Boulevard will take you faster to SFMOMA, I highly recommend that you cut through Golden Gate Park again and aim for Haight Street, which is one of the most interesting streets in San Francisco. And yes – that is the Haight of famous Haight-Ashbury. You will quickly notice that everything looks more colorful and lively on Haight Street, which is also an ideal place to head out for a night out. For that I highly recommend the Club Deluxe – a very casual jazz bar open seven days as week – amazing way to spend a night in San Francisco, so atmospheric and vintage looking! You will also love this space not only for music but if your mood greatly depends on the quality of lighting like me – such an amazing low but vivid lighting. Anyways, it is however still day time and reading is probably a better alternative then drinking. The Booksmith on Haight Street is a great book store if you this time want to check out new books as opposed to used ones (even though I can no longer justify buying new books after having been to amazing used book stores in USA including Powell’s in Portland). They also have an alternative space called the Bindery on the same street with much smaller selection of books but a very nice looking event space hosting many author events and also a bar (but again, is not it too early for that?).
A walk down to SFMOMA from Bruma Superstar will take you around one hour with no stops. So if the walk recommendations here sound a little to ambitious for you, you can always catch one of the buses or trams (need to pay USD 2.75 to ride for 2.5 hours and have the exact change as no change is given by the drivers/conductors). SFMOMA went under a major renovation and expansion work, which was finalized in May 2016 and is now home to a even greater collection than before. The entry fee is quite expensive just like any other major museum in USA – USD 25 per person but the collection is really worth it. In addition to a very strong permanent collection including works from Andy Warhol (well of-course), Man Ray, Edvard Munch, Georgia O’Keeffe, Andreas Gursky, I this time got to see a very interesting photography project by Carolyn Drake titled Wild Pigeon (which is also in the permanent collection and her photography work focusing on Uygur people banned from traveling outside of China touched me deeply) as well as a video production titled “Sublime Seas”. Sublime Seas, three channel video project (amazing cinematography) is a great video work exploring the various forms of cruelty attached to seas (immigrant crisis, slavery and whale industry).
End of a Day in Francisco: Please Eat at the Park – Dolores
Once you are done at SFMOMA and ready to hike up a little, you can take Mission Street and Valencia (one of the hip neighborhoods in San Francisco with nice stores and cool cafés and restaurants) and make your way up to Dolores Park. I have been to Dolores Park at least three times during my visit as it is one of the best places to get a feeling of San Francisco. You can people watch (I really enjoyed spending hours watching the people trying to highline and a nice guy who spent so much time to set it up so anyone could enjoy it while he went on to enjoy his book) , enjoy a book and a picnic (there is a Whole Foods nearby so it is very common to see people with those brown bags carrying their picnic) in the presence of an amazing city view. These are the things which make me very envious of the residents of a city. Something we do not have much here in Istanbul. So while San Francisco is a very expensive city, it is also home to so many completely free venues like Dolores Park, which is open to every one and does not cost a penny. If you did not already take care of your dinner needs in Dolores Park (highly recommended), you may want to check out the nearby Mexican Restaurant for a dinner – Gracias Marde. It is a vegan restaurant and their kale based entrée was amazing. If you are willing to head up or better to say “hike up” to Cole Valley again, Padrecito (update: closed permanently) is a great alternative for Mexican food and you have to try their Padrecito cocktail based on mezcal if you like smoky drinks. Zazie which is within a minute walking distant from Padrecito is a french restaurant with a really cozy back garden. These are just some suggestions among the millions of things San Francisco has to offer and the city is well worth a visit numerous times. I also got to try out one of the electric bikes this time and the experience is worth a separate blog post but let me say that it is an amazing way to enjoy the city, the hills of which make it otherwise very hard to bike around. As my friend who effortlessly kept up with us all on his non-electric bike said – “electric bikes still make you feel like you are riding a bike but as the best biker in the World”.
