Pavement Pounding Day

29 April 2016

Today we took a long and winding route through many neighbourhoods into the middle of the city. Our trek took us from the very lovely areas around NoPa where we’re staying, and Hayes Valley with all its trendy shops and cafes (we made sure we started late enough for the shops to open!), into the dismalness of the Tenderloin, the tackiness of Chinatown and the tattiness of North Beach. We ended up back out in another hilly area of cool shops and eateries around Fillmore Street in Pacific Heights.

The Tenderloin was really dire. Just block after block of uninteresting buildings and lots and lots of homeless weirdos. I’m going to stand by the word “weirdo” here because the majority of them were either clearly mentally unwell, out of their heads on drugs and/or alcohol, or suffering serious physical disabilities. It was very odd; most of the homeless in the UK hardly look like they’ve been dining at Claridges, but they’re at least coherent and in one piece. Is it something to do with the healthcare system over here? Anyway, they probably all have sad stories, but to a stranger in a big city they are unnerving when the street is full of them and you. So yeah, weirdos.

Chinatown is absolutely awful. I have never seen such a dismal and endless street of junk-filled shops. At least in most tourist hot-spots the junk looks bright and colourful, even garishly attractive. Most of these shops just look sad, with goods that had been in the window so long they were sun-bleached and dusty. I suspect the real Chinatown lies on the streets parallel and back from the main drag. We just kept walking.

North Beach was our destination – foolishly following the guidebook’s suggestion that this would be a good area for cool shopping. It’s not, trust me. There’s just a bare handful of open shops selling anything interesting, along one slightly tatty looking road that looks like it might attract aging artistic types. Still, it was pleasant enough after Chinatown! And Maureen found a cool hat.

On our way back we took a route through Pacific Heights and found Fillmore Street, which up here has dozens upon dozens of independent shops and eateries. Some of the boutiques were eye-bleachingly expensive, but plenty of others weren’t. We shopped a bit but were already feeling rather flaked after 6+ hours of pounding pavement, so we stopped for some good Japanese food at Izakaya Kou and wandered the rest of the way home.

The moral of this story is: most big cities have a tourist-focused epicenter that sensible locals avoid like the plague, because there are much more interesting and pleasant neighbourhoods further out. I would have loved a day spent around Hayes Valley, Nopa and Pacific Heights, and I would cheerfully never set foot in Chinatown, Union Square or North Beach. Next big city you visit: research in depth and go to the places locals think are cool.

Related Images:

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 22nd, 2016 at 2:52 pm and is filed under USA. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.