A San Francisco Trip
This is late in coming, but so be it. I recently went on a lovely, yet strangely difficult trip to San Francisco to meet with Paul Genesse, author of The Golden Cord (you can find the review here and my interview with the author here). So, here’s how it went down: Figuring out how to get to San Francisco without a car is actually a lot more difficult than you might think. You see, there are plenty of ways to get to San Francisco from the actual Bay Area (i.e. places that actually border the same bay as San Francisco). But when you’re coming from the South Bay, across the Santa Cruz Mountains along the coast it’s a whole different experience. There is only one public bus that goes over the mountains and it doesn’t go to San Francisco, but to San Jose. Then you have to get from San Jose to a train or subway that will take you into San Francisco, which is a problem because there is no direct route from San Jose to San Francisco at all, despite it being relatively close to a variety of methods that can get you there. The only way to get directly to San Francisco from Santa Cruz is via Greyhound, which is fine, except that the Greyhound stops in a lot of rather scary places (such as the not-so-nice part of Oakland) and the types of folks who ride the Greyhound from Santa Cruz aren’t exactly “friendly” looking. Regardless, I didn’t want to take one bus from SC, another from SJ to Fremont, and then get on the rather confusing BART system (i.e. SF’s subway) and end up lost in one of the largest cities in the United States. So I decided to take a Greyhound. In comes problem #2. The Greyhound only leaves from SC four times during the day and only comes back four times during the day, each trip being about three hours. Those four times, however, are really crappy if you are wanting to meet someone in San Francisco at around one or two in the afternoon and even more crappy when you don’t want to come home at three in the morning because you have class at 8 AM (or only spend two hours in the big city rather than several). So, I made the decision to take a Greyhound there and do the whole BART/Bus thing and take a cab from downtown to home. Exciting as that may seem, it was actually somewhat terrifying. When I got downtown to climb onto the Greyhound and head out to lovely SF I was bothered by Santa Cruz’s most noticeable and downright irritating of groups: the homeless. I have nothing necessarily against homeless people. I understand that life isn’t easy and sometimes you get a good kick in the butt and you can’t recover. The problem with Santa Cruz isn’t that we have homeless, because most towns/cities have them, but that they all cluster in a part of town that, quite frankly, is meant for tourists and to simply look good for the city. You see, Downtown SC is actually a nice little place. There are an assortment of fascinating stores and restaurants, and it’s built to basically look good. Except for the homeless. Some cities have a lot of pigeons, but Santa Cruz has homeless. They collect on the streets, on the sidewalk, on all the benches where shoppers might want to sit, in corners, in front of doors, in the alleyways, and anywhere else they can get to. And nobody does anything about it. You can’t walk downtown without seeing ten or twenty of them in your immediate vision. It’s sometimes so bad that I don’t even want to go downtown, even though several of my favorite stores are there (Borders and Logos, both fantastic bookstores). Having said all that I can now explain my first disturbing experience of the day. I got off the bus and was heading for the Greyhound station just on the other side of the metro center when this lady came up to me and started asking me for money. As a rule I don’t carry cash on me, except in this instant because I needed it for all the buses and what not that I would have to take. So I calmly told her I don’t have any cash (technically a lie, but I didn’t really have any cash, since the money I had was, in theory, in use). Then she proceeded to ask me if I was going to the Greyhound, to which I said yes, which prompted her to ask me if I could buy her a ticket, which in turn received my answer of “no, I can’t”. That’s mostly the truth. Yes, I could probably have afforded to buy her the ticket, but I’m also not rich and have to make sure that the money I do spend is on what is most important to me. That might sound selfish, but, you know what, I don’t have a lot of money as it is and I’d rather it went to myself or my immediate family or a close friend first, rather than someone I don’t know and who generally kind of scares me. So, having averted the homeless lady I headed for the Greyhound where I was confronted with a peculiar group of people: European surfers (and more specifically German and Slavic surfers). Beyond that there isn’t much to say except that I got my ticket, sat down and began to read. When the bus came I got on and found myself a seat amongst the folks who looked like they very well could have been gangsters. I’m talking the scary types, some of which were carrying things with them as if they were their final possessions before going to prison. So I spent most of the trip huddled in a corner praying someone wouldn’t go postal and starting the place up (or steal the bus, for that matter). After