Living in San Francisco for Real

It's nice to now have a job (and an income). I've moved from Excelsior (the outer reaches of San Francisco) to a place in Lower Haight. We've got a smaller room in a tiny two-bedroom apartment in a more dangerous neighborhood with a dog, a girl, her newborn baby and her mom and for that I'm paying substantially more in rent. The room Sarah and I had in Excelsior was 1100/month and this one is 1400. My apartment building is on top of a light rail stop, which, because it's loud and draws crazies, keeps housing prices... within reach. Of course, my commute takes half the time and I live right in the middle of a lot of SF's most famous neighborhoods.

I live a block off of Market Street (the source of the neighborhood's seedyness) and on the edge of the Castro District, so there're HIV medication billboards in my metro station (actually, one that explained why Uncle Jacques and a handful of middle aged men I see walking on the street look so skinny), couples of every gender combination holding hands (m-f couples being only marginally more common than m-m), crazy homeless people out my window yelling at nobody in particular and/or panhandling. Also, smoking pot in broad daylight, while walking down the street, while eating on a cafe patio, whatever, is normal and completely unremarkable (public smoking is maybe 4:1 tobacco:pot and attended with equally mild scorn). I saw a guy leaning over to light up a bowl as he walked down the street, in fact, with nary the raised eyebrow among passerbys.

A block or two the other direction from my house, closer to Haight Street proper, the Victorian paint jobs get really nice and people wear NorthFace and drive Priuses, Audis and multi-thousand-dollar bicycles, which I find a little obnoxious, though it does provide a nice counterbalance to Market Street.

People here tend to be smart and interesting, as pointed out by my flatmate Mary (the mother, who's from Kansas-via-Vegas). Unfortunately there's also a distinctly Northern Californian niceness here that has a passive aggressive side to it. Ask for directions, and you will have no trouble getting help. In spite of that sometimes-extreme niceness, because of the Chinese cultural influence people are more likely to push their way past you without a "pardon me". That bothers Mary, but not me. This is generally true of all San Franciscans but old Chinese ladies, of course, are the worst and will bowl you over at the drop of a hat with about twice as much force as their tiny 80lb frames should seem to be capable of.

Sarah and I, with our five figure incomes, can now afford to try out local restaurants. Restaurants here, it turns out, aren't any more expensive than anywhere else. They aren't necessarily any better, either, but the incredible selection means that with some skill and research you can do pretty well for your typical restaurant price.

Classically "cheap food" is not actually cheap in San Francisco. Burritos, burgers etc, are always a couple bucks more here than elsewhere, both starting around $8 (though the burgers are worth it). Food trucks, known elsewhere in California for providing ridiculously cheap and delicious tacos, are their own bizarre art form here. Sarah and I went to an "Off the Grid", which is the weekly SF food truck festival, held in a remote parking lot. Japanese, American gourmet, Filipino, Indian, Malaysian, Yucatan, you-name-it cuisine has representation and all errs towards imaginative fusion. Good luck finding lunch for under $9, but it will be fascinating and delicious.

There *is* cheap food in San Francisco, just in unexpected or elsewhere-obscure genres and select neighborhoods. In Excelsior, which has a big Salvadorean population, there was an awesome Salvadorean bakery on the way to the bus stop that was super cheap (breakfast for $1.50!). Dim Sum and Chinese bakery are similarly super cheap and super delicious, where they can be found, which is pretty much anywhere in the city not riddled with nice Victorian paint jobs and multi-thousand-dollar bicycles. Oh, also, Vietnamese is perennially under-priced (also lunch diners in nontouristy China town). Don't look for a ton of meat, but an entree in a decent-looking Vietnamese restaurant may run you $7 and an excellent meal for two with tip $20.

The extreme niceness, the crazy people panhandling and the extreme affluence/environmental consciousnes may irritate me, but somewhere in living here is also the soul of what makes California great. A lot of it is people not caring what other people do or what other people think of them (even the niceness is not out of social obligation, but some bizzare internal compulsion).

It's kind of surreal to visit the suburbs now, with all their trimmed grass, cleanliness and trees. It comes across as shocking that there should ever be more than a hand's breadth between buildings.