In other news, I do have some pictures from a recent road trip to San Francisco that I can post and tell you a little bit about. I traveled with a couple of my friends, one of which has been closer to me lately and the other three were made better friends over the course of the journey. In just three days I learned a lot not only about myself but about other people. San Francisco is a city full of eclectic human beings all proud to have a voice and proud to exclaim it loudly. We left on October 30 with the main goal of seeing The Flaming Lips in concert along with White Denim and Tame Impala on Halloween night. In all honesty, I don't listen to any one of those bands but I was invited spontaneously and reacted as such; I just came for the party.
We were a curious band of weirdos: I was dressed as Lumpy Space Princess from Cartoon Network's Adventure Time, my friend Nicole was dressed as Andy Warhol, her boyfriend Alec as Wayne Coyne, lead singer of The Flaming Lips, Maddy dressed as a creepy Salem witch and our buddy from our trip in Oxford, who came to California for a short visit, was dressed as a taco. We thought we'd look like total idiots but we were in San Francisco, people, and that meant that we certainly fit right in. The concert lasted about 4 hours and was basically just a giant Halloween party, everyone dressed to the nines in whatever they could think of; we were thoroughly impressed. When the concert let out and we were sufficiently mind blown from the amount of showmanship displayed, we were as hungry as you could have guessed and the only thing available for us was a small little Subway across from our hotel. We nommed so hard there was barely any room for breath beneath each incredible chomp. We slept very well that night.
Friday consisted of walking... lots... and lots... of walking. A little over two miles as the taxi driver who drove us back that night calculated. We rode the trolley, shopped a bit in the Fashion District and had a few appetizers at a restaurant on Pier 23, which would be followed up later with a Brazilian meal at a restaurant called Bossa Nova. The highlight for me for the day, one should assume, was visiting the Beat district. We perused City Lights Bookstore, which was built in 1953 and housed many a Beat Generation book. I marveled at Jack Kerouac's Big Sur and On The Road, noting how much I longed to visit and travel as he did. Amongst other things, I decided to purchase Billie Holiday's autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues. I was only able to read the first few pages, but within that short amount I had already discovered that, like the Marilyn Monroe biography I'm reading for my history class, Billie had a troublesome start and what interesting adventures were before her were for me to discover and for me to then take to heart. Later that night we would visit our friend from highschool, Allison, at UC Berkley. She gave us a lovely little tour of the campus and showed us the most ingenious ice cream cookie sandwich place called "Cream." We walked along Frat row, some of us trying to get into the parties there. Little did I know that these parties shut down around midnight and we weren't aloud in after then. We went back for a short while to Allison's apartment and gazed upon Berkley's city lights from her rooftop. Then we took a short trip to Allison's boyfriend's fraternity where he showed us his Australian Huntsman spider and her 200 babies. Yes, it was frightening, but because they were securely caged, I found them fascinatingly disturbing. We finally drove back to SF and plopped into bed relieving ourselves from the day's long toil, preparing ourselves for the 8 hour drive we would be taking the next day back to our little bubble called The OC.
The trip was only a few days but in that time I grew closer to some very interesting people. Although I grew to love them, I realized that the trip itself had drained me spiritually. No matter how beautiful a person can be, if they don't know Jesus, it can bring you down in soulful sense. It's not like they meant to at all, but the lack of fellowship with other Christians and replacing that with things purely of the world can saturate you in a sinful desire and it is that much harder to keep away from it. It's exhausting, really. I realized how grateful I was for my church family and my wonderful brothers and sisters in Christ. I take them for granted.
Nicole, Alec and Adriana Lima
Alec in City Lights Bookstore
Yours Truly
Nicole and Maddy
Maddy is Art // Basement of City Lights
Wandering Bay Side
Our side trip to Sausalito
Nicole being Nicool
Accurate
That GGB
Nicole looking uber intellectual in City Lights' Poet's Chair
Toby in Sausalito
Toby in City Lights
Toby being Toby
“It seemed like a matter of minutes when we began rolling in the foothills before Oakland and suddenly reached a height and saw stretched out ahead of us the fabulous white city of San Francisco on her eleven mystic hills with the blue Pacific and its advancing wall of potato-patch fog beyond, and smoke and goldenness in the late afternoon of time.”
- Jack Kerouac, On The Road
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