Paco´s Life: Madrid

California Dreaming: San Francisco II

24 December 2006 7:26 PM | In California, Nightlife, Travel |

When it got darker I started to feel weird about been there, walking alone on Christmas night, no family, no friends… So I went back to the hostel hoping to find more people in the same situation. Surprisingly the living room was pretty crowded, many people sitting there and watching Spiderman on TV, everybody seemed to be as lonely as I was. Funny situation, people looking around, like about to start a conversation: “eh, how are you doing?.. happy Christmas..:” At this point there was a guy who took a pack of cards and asked for players. Great, the ice was officially broken. A few of us got to a table and started to introduce ourselves, the game iniciator happened to be a guy from Stockholm who spoke fluent Spanish since he had lived in South America. The second one… a welsh guy, cool another coincidence, I spent 2 years living there. The rest of the people in the table were a couple of British guys and, of course, a representative of this country of travelers called Germany. For a while we also had a taiwanesse girl playing. And with these people the night happened to be very funny, is very easy to get well with this kind of characters, same profile, globetrotters and constant travelers who had been almost everywhere. People used to socialize, even more when a few bottles of wine are available. At a certain point, what was unavoidable happened, we moved to card drinking games. Quite a few ones were known in the table… Result: laughts and drinks until 3 am and a great Christmas night

Next morning I woke up with the taste of the crappy Spanish wine in my mouth but ready to walk around San Francisco typical neibourghoods. There aren’t actually too many monuments to see in this place, is more about feeling the atmosphere. Which must be great and very special as long as you don’t try it on Christmas day! Who the fuck is hanging around in the street this day? Obviously just the homeless and the stupid Spanish tourist. So I went through the gay neibourghood (The Castro). Yeah, another gay neibourghood here, is not that I am specially interested on that, is just that, for some reason, they are always recommended as a place for visiting in the guides. Who knows why… After that, I went to the Spanish area (The Mission), nothing special to talk about here. I ended my tour, after a few streets with plenty of posh houses, in the famous crossing between the Haigh and the Ashbury streets. Here, my friends, is where the hippie fashion was started. Here is where, in 1967, the Summer of Love was started, thousands and thousands of young people went to the street to smoke plenty of joints and have sex. Now there are just a few shops for buying t-shirts with the peace sign on them but… ops Christmas day, they are closed…

The Mission

The Castro

Haigh & Ashbury

So I went back to the hostel after my long and not too fortunate walk. At least a good plan was waiting for me there: a Christmas dinner had been organized for the sake of the family-less travelers. So we got together again, the same people from the previous night, with our pack or cards and two new members: another German girl and an American fella. When the dinner was over we took over a table and started the game marathon. I decided it was time for some serious drinking and got a bottle of rum (and ice cubes of course). Same deal dudes, hours and hours of card drink games and a very important drunkenness. I woke up next day without remembering when I went to hit the bed. A very important part of that night is actually missing in my memory. The most sadly thing is that my planned trip to Alcatraz fucked up. I had only time for running to the airport an take my plane back to my dear Stockholm. To make things even worse, Lufthansa suckers had the electronic system of my seat row offline so I had to spend 10 hours just waking around the plane, no sleeping, no TV, no reading, no nothing. A hell of trip. Just add 4 hours walking around Frankfurt, waiting for the next plane and you get a fucked up guy finally arriving to Stockholm. In any case, it was nice to get there and meet Henning, a german friend I knew in Cardiff who had been staying in my place a few days while visiting the city with his girlfriend. Very friendly people both of them but I was very very tired and had to hit the bed pretty soon. I did it, though, with a big smile due to the great end which San Francisco meant to an incredible trip.