Back to Bullets

• The Haight is a very strange place.  It's part really swanky boutiques, part vintage/consignment shops, part homeless old hippies, part wannabe young hippies, part head shops, part cool cafes and bars, part tourist-y bullshit.  It is both grungy and unsettling and totally cool.  When I biked through it with Bobby and even when I drove through it with my parents back in college I remember being like "this place is full of posers trying to soak up some of it's former glory."  But oh, man.  It's my go-to place on the weekends.  The shopping is great (I just promised my first born child for a gorgeous teal winter coat with ruffles), and today in the rain and the dark it was so pretty, not grungy like normal (probably because all the bums were off the street, out of the rain).

This isn't my picture because my camera's been dead since I dropped it in the sand at Ocean Beach.  But I see  this mural all the time.  I also see one that says "Listen to this Wall".

• The store I bought my coat at was one of the trendy/swanky boutiques called Ambiance.  They kept calling out "I need a lady!" when they needed someone to help a customer or grab something in another size.  It was very cute.  They also went out of their way to like help you want to buy something.  They were super hands on with some people and would pick out things that looked like what you picked out, but would look better on you, but with me... who like clearly didn't have anything in mind and just wanted to try on every single coat they had in the shop, they just kind of left me alone and occasionally asked me how the search was going. 

Feeble attempt to take a picture of my BEAUTIFUL new coat.

• I went downtown today to go to Bath and Body Works and Sephora and to check out a pole dance studio.  It's like a totally different city.  It's tall and busy and trendy.  It's like mini-New York.  Very mini.  Like 10 blocks of New York and then there's water and palm trees and the Muni goes above ground and it's San Francisco again.  That's the thing.  That's what gets me.  The Muni trains.  I hate the BART because it's loud and it's awkward with bikes on it.  But at least it's a real rail line.  It's underground and when it's above ground it's got it's own line going at it's own speed, not bothering with traffic, traffic lights.  The Muni on the otherhand is just a glorified bus that sometimes gets to drive in a tunnel.   There is something incredibly comforting about walking down the stairs into a metro station.  People are bustling and busking.  It makes me feel urban and independent and isolated in a good way.  It reminds me of Paris.  I feel like I can get anywhere.  And San Francisco only has that downtown.  It's one of the biggest things I miss.  The bus just isn't the same.

The pole dance studio is like right on the other side of that.  That's the Transamerica Pyramid by the way.  You know like one of the iconic San Francisco landmarks.