A Trip to San Francisco's North Beach, and Re-Living My Hippie Days

---

San Francisco has some of the most unique neighborhoods in the world, and the city has given birth to some of the most dramatic cultural changes in America's history – most notably, the Beats and the Hippies. The city's North Beach still has the Beat vibe, with the most famous bookstore of the beatnik era – City Lights, which was founded by Beat icon Lawrence Ferlinghetti – still standing. Haight-Ashbury, my old neighborhood, still has the hippie look and feel, and I know a few holdouts who have lived there since the '60s and still hang on to whatever small amount of authenticity that remains, stubbornly refusing to accept the 21^stcentury.

I haven't been back in several years, but the opportunity now presents itself, as my son, who still lives in San Francisco, has recently become engaged to a nice Italian girl – and I, as father of the groom, am now planning a grand wedding rehearsal dinner. The natural choice for centering my trip would be North Beach – also sometimes known as "Little Italy."

Unfortunate timing puts the wedding at about the same time as the Oracle OpenWorld 2018 conference, possibly one of the largest tech conferences of the year, and as a result, hotel prices have doubled and tripled, and even six months out, some hotels are already fully booked. We decided on the SW Hotel on Broadway, a clean-looking three-star place which was more affordable than similar hotels downtown, and had the advantage of being right in the center of every place we wanted to go: City Lights Bookstore, The Beat Museum, countless coffee houses, and not that far away from Il Fornaio , the Italian restaurant I booked for the rehearsal dinner. Close to Chinatown on one end, and the Fisherman's Wharf area on the other, it wouldn't take too long to get to anywhere we wanted to go.

Chinatown is definitely on our agenda. We currently live in the Midwest, and although there are plenty of Chinese restaurants, they tend to be a little inauthentic, and having actually spent several years living in Asia, I am longing for the real thing. Dim sum in particular is what I'm after – wonderful little dumplings filled with a variety of delights on small plates, served with hot jasmine tea. Here in my Midwestern Indiana hometown, you can't find it. The focus is more on volume. All-you-can-eat buffets with huge platters of mediocre food tend to be the destination of choice, and when the attendant brings out the crab legs (usually re-heated from frozen and always a little soggy), they disappear within two minutes, as there is always someone waiting to stack their plate as high as possible with half the platter in one go.

I admit to going to those buffets a couple times a month – sometimes, a huge plate of mediocre food is just what I want. But when I travel, I go local. I avoid the cheap destinations, fast food, and big "casual dining" chains that make up the main strip here by the shopping mall – row after row of cookie-cutter restaurants which look the same in whatever city you find yourself. No, in San Francisco, I will not be going to Applebees.

Everybody knows what to see in San Francisco, so I won't wax poetic about gazing at the sea lions on Fisherman's Wharf, strolling through Golden Gate Park or walking down Lombard Street. Destination articles about San Francisco have been done far too many times already, and although a quick web search will turn up thousands of "top ten things to do in San Francisco" articles, they all cover the same ten things. You may even find "top ten hidden things to do in San Francisco" articles, but those too, cover the same things which are not quite so hidden any more. No, San Francisco isn't really a place you go to for looking at tourist sites, although there are tourist sites in abundance. You go there to experience the city. There is an indescribable vibe, a feeling one gets when walking down the streets. It's not like any other American city. The look is very European, the feeling is distinctly Californian, and to the Midwesterner, it's almost other-worldly.

I'm going to eat my dim sum and it will feel like I'm in Hong Kong. I'll enjoy sitting at a table outside a coffee house in North Beach drinking espresso, and it will feel like I'm in Rome. I'll walk down Haight Street and for reasons I won't explain here, it will feel like I'm in Amsterdam. There are places in San Francisco where time has stopped, there are places there where time is nonexistent. There are lists of things to see. Ignore them. Just experience it.

---