3 Days in the Bay Area

For the long Presidents' Day weekend, I took a short 3-day trip back to a place I hadn't been since stretch chokers were a thing and I was only just beginning to outgrow Limited Too: the San Francisco Bay Area.

The Way In

I flew in just as the sun was setting and there was a lovely gradated golden light retreating over layered mountains along the way. The light became colder as the sun dipped lower, and cotton candy pinks and blues emerged. Roads leading out of SF have now redefined my expectations re: what constitutes a beautiful highway.

Stanford University

It was full-on night by the time I had a chance to stroll the paths of Stanford University, but I prefer to see a new place in the dark first. There's a magical appeal to it. Seeing things in the dark, time slows down and things fade out, and all you're left with are vast expanses of darkness and your own assumptions and approximations. Come morning, you get to compare the detail of daytime against the dreamlike world you saw the night before and marvel at the difference.

Palo Alto

Speaking of the magical, there is a wondrous place called Sushirrito in downtown Palo Alto that serves mash-ups of sushi and burritos -- essentially scaled-up versions of sushi rolls, additionally punched up with soy mayo, unexpected vegetables (mine contained corn), and other sauces. If giving this place a whirl, one would do best to arrive before the doors open at 11 am. Any later and you'll have to brave the one-hour line snaking out its door.

And I am, predictably, nothing if not a macaron fiend. My friend and I stopped by Chantal Guillon downtown for a box of sugary almond-based darlings and faced our fears of the uncanny as we sat opposite their wall of disembodied plaster hands. (Gotta get me one of those for my apartment.) I am a sucker for anything fragrantly rose flavored, and Chantal Guillon makes a lovely, subtle and nuanced rendition of the rose macaron.

Palo Alto is certainly specific, and by specific I mean it is stylish in a way that is very deliberate and processed and very upper-middle-class. Its main avenues are dotted with names like Restoration Hardware and West Elm, and one wonders what funds the town's expensive tastes until you realize -- oh, tech money. Of course.

San Francisco

SF -- lively, diverse and full of history -- is the Bay Area's crowning glory, but the marks of heavy gentrification figure everywhere. The Mission San Francisco de Asís sits nestled among hipster coffee joints and a sprawling shopping district featuring everything from secondhand clothing for as low as $1 a piece to designer dresses worth hundreds.

With so many self-consciously and deliberately quirky coffee places within a stone's throw from each other, it's hard to imagine anyone having a "usual" or a particular place they connect with and keep returning to. Do these hipster coffee bars have turf wars? Do beanied baristas have loyal devotees? Which cafes are frequented by locals, if any, and why? Just a few of the questions that high cafe density makes me ask.

But I can't talk. I love it all: I love the pretense, the strained manipulation of aesthetic, the lack of self-consciousness and the pride in creating another kind of Very Specific Space.

That said, can we take a minute to laugh, please? Can we do that -- just laugh a little at how contrived and useless some of these hipster offerings are, even if they are also a tiny bit cute. After a while one does grow frustrated at the notion of "patterned circle scarves," "curiosities," "edited clothes collections," "global textiles," and "eclectic, up-market home design" (all phrases sampled from actual business summaries on Valencia Street).

Flowers for sale in the Castro District.

The beautiful consumables of San Francisco do come at an ugly price: the destruction of established communities to make way for trendy stores, cute cafes, and quirky bars. Forced eviction and skyrocketing prices are massive problems here, and it is in large part thanks to Silicon Valley industries. A bit of tech can be helpful, as it can make life more convenient…but whose lives? The politics of technology -- who gets to use it, who profits from it, who sees their livelihood destroyed because of it -- is fraught and complex and skews in favor of the secure and comfortable and phenomenally rich.

I think we often become too easily impressed with companies like Facebook and Apple for making, say, a slimmer phone or a faster browser experience. But I think we would do well to save our amazement for a day when Silicon Valley tech giants finally take a good, hard look at their less-than-rosy impact upon anyone who isn't an exec, investor, or engineer, and care enough about that impact to implement changes…if that day ever comes. Still waiting.