Golden Gate Lark

Just like San Francisco every morning, I'm waiting for the fog to lift from my head. It's thick and heavy and I think because it's the first time in a while since I sat down and didn't have to think about a million things at once. As I write this, I am sitting at my friend's house in Mountain View, Silicon Valley. But before I bring you up to speed on that, let me summarise the last couple of days...

On Monday, Leah and I decided to set off to Haight & Ashbury where the hippy wave happened during the Summer of Love. We thought it would be a lovely dry day like the one previous so we thought nothing of putting flip flops on and leaving our umbrellas back at the dorm. Boy were we wrong. Firstly, we waited for the bus that would take us to San Fran's mini Camden like neighbourhood and got incredibly confused about whether it ran or not (for some reason Monday is 'let's just close' day for most things) and then we got cursed out by a crackhead once we actually got on the bus, fun times.

We knew it the minute we arrived in Haight; there were peace signs and Bob Marley art everywhere. It's like a small, quiet Camden. We browsed a bit but once you've seen one hippy shop, you've seen them all. They usually have incense, weed paraphanalia and lots of tie-dye. Although, I love me a buddha statue no matter where I am and there were plenty of those.

The whole way down, Leah and I talked about the meaning of life, pretty much (as you do). We discussed theories, swapped strange stories and got on our soap boxes about denial and ignorance. We find it very easy to make each other laugh so we giggled and chatted away and barely paused for a breath.

Next on the agenda was Golden Gate Park...we wanted to find the Japanese Tea Garden. It was not the best weather for a jaunt in the park and it took us ages to work out our damp and blurry map.

An hour later, with wet and muddy feet, drenched hair and completely out of puff, we found it. Thank the stars Leah is a tea addict just like me and finding it quickly became our main mission...


And we found the most amazing tea in the Japanese Tea Garden, obviously (would have been seriously peeved if the tea garden didn't have tea). And there were delicious snacks there too, I had green tea and white chocolate cookies - yum! So once we had dried off and refuelled, although pointless because we were about to get wet again, we strolled through this beauty of a garden.


It was certainly worth the epic journey there and even on a rainy day, I still think my pictures capture its prettiness but on a clear sunny day it'd be stunning. I shall post more when I can see straight...


We didn't get back to our dorm until about six or seven in the evening and we were absolutely famished by this point. Cami, our twenty-year old French roommate wanted to go eat in Chinatown - an excellent idea. So the three of us went out into the Chinatown nightlife. Funny how together, we represented the three major cosmopolitan cities of the world: London, New York and Paris. No wonder, we got along so well; we were just as crass and as sarcastic as each other.

Stayed tuned for part two of the San Francisco ramble...