July: During my last stay in San Francisco, Sarah and Derek invited me to stay at their house, a nice two storey building in Bernal Heights that they shared with five other adults and a baby.

Bernal Heights is a cozy neighbourhood with small one family houses just south of the Mission District.

 

The front yards were mostly just grass and maybe a couple of flowers, but some houses were a little more imaginative.

 

The hills are not as high here as further north on the San Francisco headland, but they’re still there, giving the neighbourhoods more perspective.

 

Mission street, the same as the one that runs through the Mission District, but still so very different. In Bernal Heights, everything is quiet.

 

St. Mary’s Pub. This hill used to be a convent. Now, what remains of the religious past is a couple of names, the streets forming a bell down the hill, and this pub. I never went there, but even from the outside it looks kind of dim and smokey.

 

And in Glen Park, the closest BART station, you can buy Viking’s giant subs. I wonder what a viking sandwich might contain? A dried fish on hard rye bread?

 

In Bernal Heights, Sarah and Derek taught me to play Settlers of Catan. When I left, I promised them that I would buy a game of my own once I got back home and introduce it to my friends – and then practice and practice until I could call myself a master player. And then, the next time we met, be it in the US or Sweden or somewhere else entirely, I would beat them. They just laughed at my threat.

But, except for putting me through a couple of humiliating losses by the Settlers of Catan board, Sarah and Derek were such generous and kind hosts that I couldn’t have asked for anything more. Just their patience with my chaotic traveler’s schedule and last minute outings amazed me.

But what else could I have expected? They met while studying on Iceland, and have traveled in Europe and Asia together. Couchsurfers, just like me. Travelers stick together, it’s as if we’re a special kind of breed. I just hope that they’ll come to Sweden one day, so that I may return the favour.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Murals, paintings on walls, is something you see a lot in the Mission. Some are part of the business within the house, and others are more grafitti-like. Me, being the street art fan that I am, let my camera go wild.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The largest mural of them all, painted on the entire Women’s Building.

 

 

And lastly, two murals from Haight-Ashbury too:

 

Sarah and Medusa.

 

Abbie and the tree.

The sixth and last stop on my photographical tour of San Francisco: the Mission District. This was the first neighbourhood that we came to, Hanna and me, when we first arrived in San Francisco – and it went straight into our hearts. This is where all the murals are, the odd stores, the rough and the cool. Traditionally, it’s the Mexican neighbourhood, but now you meet everything from Mexicans to hipsters and other oddly dressed people. On the streets of the Mission, you never get bored.

The Mission is centered along two streets: Mission street and Valencia street. These two are fundamentally different, like two different worlds, but still so much the Mission. I’ll start by showing you Mission street:

 

An old theater turned into a parking garage. This is something pretty typical for Mission street – the houses are really beautiful, but pretty run down and rough.

 

Along Mission street, you can find almost anything: money lenders, Chinese restaurants, Mexican karaoke bars, vegetable stores, knock-off clothes shops and liquor stores.

 

In parts, this is street is really dingy, but there’s a charm in that. This stretch of Mission street is not a place where a young girl like myself should be walking alone at night, but in broad daylight I find it fascinating.

And so the much cleaner (and pretty much gentrified) Valencia street:

 

Here, you find all the odd boutiques with herbs, books and maps.

 

The houses are well kept after, unlike the houses of Mission street. Here a taste of the Mission murals.

 

 

Beretta, the bar and restaurant where Eric worked. As it happens, a couple of weeks after I left Eric and some of his collegues from the bar went to New Orleans to take part in a bar competition – and won. So, the bartenders at Beretta know what they’re doing. I tried two coctails there: one with elder flower and one with basil. Both were delicious.

 

Another bar front.

 

The dinosaur to the left is part of a parking lot park – a thing they have in San Francisco. The owner of the beautiful blue townhouse had chosen to remake the parking lot in front of the building into a tiny park. Just one of those wonderful, inspiring things you come across in San Francisco. More parks and less cars!

 

 

The store front to Dog Eared Books, the best bookstore in the Mission.

 

 

Vintage cars and bikes on 19th street.

 

Mission Dolores, on Dolores street. The oldest remaining structure in the earthquake ridden San Francisco. This is what has given the Mission it’s name, a church built in the old Spanish style in 1791 as part of the California chain of missions.

 

The sun going down over Dolores Park.

The fifth stop on my photographical tour of San Francisco: Castro. The gay neighbourhood of the city.

 

The view of the Mission from above.

 

The heart of Castro lies in the intersection of Castro street, Market street and 17th.

 

On a sunny day, you are guaranteed to meet at least two ginger bread sun burned, middle aged nudist men. Like the guy on the left. Completely naked. In Castro, this is nothing out of the ordinary.

 

 

 

From Castro, you can take one of the vintage trolleys that runs all the way along Market street down to the Embarcadero and Fisherman’s Warf.

 

The trolleys were from all over the United States. Bright yellow from Los Angeles. Or this beautifully green from San Diego. Ride and relax. So cool.

The fourth stop on my photographic tour of San Francisco: Haight-Ashbury. This is where the hippie movement started back in the day. The houses are decorated like nothing I’ve ever seen before, giving the area the strange mix of super beautiful and fancy houses and leftover hippies playing guitar on the street corners. There are small mini gardens like small altars, with flowers and pictures of different music legends, like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and the Beatles. The heart of this neighbourhood is at the junction of Haight street and Ashbury street. Along this part of Haight street, you can also find some of the best shopping in San Francisco, second hand stores and small boutiques, something that

One of all those shops on Haight street. This one happens to be a perfect place to find masquerade outfits.

The painted houses on Leland’s street.

Oh, I would love to have a blue lion to guard my door.

Or how about a pair of gargoyles?

The painted ladies of Alamo Square.

Hill on the edge of Haight-Ashbury.

The third stop on my photographic tour of San Francisco: Russian Hill. This is one of all the hills in San Francisco with fancy residential buildings. According to my guidebook, it’s the steepest.

 

 

This is where you find Lombard street, the most winding road in the United States.

 

It’s become one of the big tourist attractions of the city. I find it queer, how tourists flock together, when there are so many other amazing places just around the corner with seemingly no tourists at all.

 

The bouganvillea can grow and thrive in the misty city of San Francisco too.

The second stop of my photographical tour of San Francisco: Chinatown. It seems like every major city in North America has to have a Chinatown, and most of them look exactly the same. Still, it’s kitsch, and who doesn’t love kitsch?

The obligatory gate. Not as pretty as in Victoria, not as big as in Vancouver. But I like the green.

Lovely colours.

Some streets in Chinatown are called after old beat poets and writers, because around the corner lies

City Lights Bookstore. It’s the bookstore and publisher that won an important vicotry for the freedom of press in the United States when the owner Ferlinghetti was put to trial on charges of obscenity for publishing Allen Ginsberg’s influential poem “Howl and Other Poems” (1956), but wasn’t convicted.

 

It was a really nice bookstore.

Now we’ve almost reached the end of my days in San Francisco. So, please let me give you a photographical tour of the city neighbourhoods. First stop: the genereic downtown. The least San Franciscan part of San Francisco.

 

Union Square.

 

Market Street.

 

Market Street.

 

The Apple store.

 

City Hall, the heart of the Civic Center.

 

A Henry Moore statue by City Hall.

July: Of course, I visited the Public Library in San Francisco too. It’s situated in the Civic Center, facing the impressive City Hall, but the library building in itself was nothing special to look at.

 

 

It was a bit better from the inside, but still, nothing compared to Seattle. Not by a long shot.

 

 

But it wasn’t all bad. They had a decent selection of Swedish and Finnish children’s books. I’ve got to give them that.