Weekend Update: North Beach

If February was the longest month ever (and it was), March and April were the shortest.  This is gonna be the first in a series of post covering my backlogged adventures from the past two months.

I had a dance class down in Jackson Square, which I guess is part of North Beach, so I took out my trusty guidebook to explore the neighborhood for the day.  North Beach: Italians live there, right?

Before I even left my neighborhood (before I even got to the busstop even), I found this:

A destroyed VHS of "A Goofy Movie"  as my neighbors, my tumblr followers, and my roommates probably all know, one of my biggest guilty pleasures of all time is blasting the Powerline Hip-Hop Ballad "Eye to Eye" from the soundtrack.  In fifth grade, my best friend Jessica and I used to dance around to this and the Power Rangers sound track ad nauseum.

When I got to North Beach the weather was AWESOME it was warm and sunny and I walked around pretending I cared about the Beat Poets who used to hang out there.

This for example is a very famous bookstore full of pictures of Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg.  Not that that means very much to me.  But they did have a whole lot of Vonnegut, which I decided would be my next literary exploration.

And Vesuvio is a bar that Jack Kerouac liked to hang out in.  The alley in front of it is named after him now.  Again, that didn't mean too much to me, I found On the Road very hard to read.

So San Francisco is funny in that the neighborhoods are very distinct and very close.  One minute you are walking down the main street of the very Italian North Beach, and a block over is the heart of Chinatown.  At one point the roads actually converge and this Chinese Instrumental Music group was playing on the corner.

They were underneath this building.  I think that's a mural of jazz musician Benny Goodman, the epitome of Chinese culture, as I'm sure you know.

Everyone kept walking around with gelato.  So I did to.

Later that night I met a friend in Lower Pac Heights for a night of drinking, which I hadn't indulged in for a very long time.  When I woke up in the morning I remembered why:  I had a hangover, had lost my keys (by leaving them in the pocket of my sweater), was chastised by my drinking buddy for flirting with a kid my own age, and had a series of texts trying to explain away the "goodnight kiss" he tried to steal.  A couple days later I had a beer on my doorstep and ended up angry and circuitous.  Needless to say I'm on another sober kick.

The next day I drove to Santa Cruz for an audition (I did not hear back). I did get some sunshine and bathing suit time, however.  It wasn't enough.  I miss heat.

 Santa Cruz is like Virginia Beach: dirty and desperate.  Trying to be this cool beach town, but somehow missing the mark.