Thoughts on California from a brief visit
About a week ago, I came back from a weeklong trip to California with my girlfriend. We got in at night in LA, spent a day at Disneyland in Anaheim, spent a day driving from LA to SF, and then spent 5 days in SF. Although this was far from being my first time in California, it was her first time, so I enjoyed playing the tour guide. Here are some of my thoughts.
Los Angeles
1. It’s impossible to make generalizations about Los Angeles. It’s a sprawling network of disconnected “neighborhoods” (really minicities) connected by endless mega highways. My girlfriend’s friends, recent immigrants to LA who we met up with, told us, “It’s important to think of LA not as a city but as a failed experiment by the car companies”. They told us that all friendships in LA are defined by (and frequently ended by) how far you have to travel to the other person by car.
2. That being said, we visited her friends in Manhattan Beach for dinner, and that seemed nice, albeit a hassle to get to from Anaheim.
Anaheim
1. Anaheim is somewhere between its own city and a suburb of Los Angeles. It’s also where Disneyland is. As far as I can tell, these are the only important facts about Anaheim.
2. Downtown Anaheim is boring and drab. The suburbs of Anaheim, where we were staying (and which were located very close to downtown Anaheim), were pretty and walkable, with a lot of well-maintained gardens and surprisingly good bird-watching. Walkable, that is, until you tried to leave the suburban subdivision, at which point you were assaulted by a 6-lane highway sparsely decorated with crosswalks. We found that out the hard way when we tried to walk to a diner that was supposedly a mile away and took us 45 minutes to get to1. We drove to go anywhere for the rest of our time in Anaheim.
Disneyland
1. Listen, I like Disneyland (and Disney World). I’m not a Disney adult, and I do think there are other places in the world that one can visit on vacation, but I like it. And, for the record, my girlfriend, who expected to hate it, liked it as well. FAQs below:
a. Is it crazy expensive? Yes, it’s $183 per person per day.
b. Is it a prime example of Umberto Eco’s hyperreality, in which every possible cultural touchmark (cowboys, Star Wars, 50s Americana, fairytale fantasy) is turned up to 200 and shoved in your face? Yes, but you just gotta open your mouth, accept what Walt is serving you, and enjoy the sugar rush.
c. Is the food terrible? No, a lot of it is just mediocre and overpriced.
d. What rides are worth going on? First of all, I want to say that there’s a mistaken assumption in that question. Disneyland excels at creating a wonderful experience between the rides, from street performances to cute architectural details to fun little shops. One of my favorite experiences from my recent trip was dancing with my girlfriend to a New Orleans style brass band that was playing outside of a restaurant.
That being said, “Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance” has incredibly good special effects, to the point where my girlfriend thought one of the animatronics was a human actor in a costume. “Indiana Jones” is also pretty fun, but I would say that a ride with limited drops and sharp turns is not the same as a ride with no drops or sharp turns, and you should probably warn your girlfriend before you go on said ride. My bad.
e. What rides are not worth going on? “Small World” is a nightmare consisting of a bunch of puppets singing a cloying song over and over again2. Seriously, it’s awful.
f. How would you describe your fellow Disneyland guests? So American it makes your teeth hurt, especially when they’re not. Let me explain: there is nothing more American than a bunch of German tourists wearing matching Disneyland t-shirts sipping Disneyland’s balkanized take on mint juleps, featuring insane amounts of sugar and zero alcohol. It’s a complete cultural victory.
g. Would you go again? I mean, yes, if I was in the area, but I’ve also been to Disney World multiple times, including just to travel around the Epcot “World Fair” and get progressively more drunk at each country’s food cart, so I can’t pretend to be a disinterested reviewer. I wouldn’t travel to it specifically, though.
The Drive from LA to SF
1. This is a longer drive than you are anticipating. It’s 11 hours if you take the scenic route along the coast, 7ish hours if you take the non scenic route through the middle of California. We did a mix of routes because part of the scenic route was closed off.
2. The scenic route is quite scenic. There are mountains and views of the ocean and surfers.
3. The non scenic route is non scenic. There are endless stretches of highway being baked by the merciless California sun with no wind in sight, and the only friendly faces are the giant cutouts of vineyard farmers that dot the landscape (I don’t know why they’re there either). This is the California of the Grapes of Wrath, and these grapes are angry.
4. The middle of California has a bunch of Republican Mexicans, which is a demographic that is not well-represented in media. They are pro-gun, pro-Trump, pro-Christianity, and anti-immigrant, even though (or maybe because) they are very recent immigrants themselves. From our brief meal in a Republican Mexican diner, I can also say they appear to be aggressively hospitable, and will fill up your cup of coffee for your endless refill whether you want them to or not.
San Francisco
1. Oh, San Francisco. city of contradictions, how I love thee. You are the most extreme city I’ve ever been to. Your people are incredibly kind, generous, and will break into your car if there’s anything in the back seat. Your parks are gorgeous and often full of trash. Your public transportation is safe and functional except for the homeless people who board with large pitbulls who have a possessive attitude towards other people’s crotches. Your sidewalks are eminently walkable as long as one keeps an eye out for poop and needles.
2. We stayed in Downtown San Francisco at the cheapest hotel I could find that also looked to be safe and well-run. I grew to appreciate the “safe and well-run” part, as, right before I got there, a news story broke out about an Australian guy who was in SF on a business trip and was staying at a cheaper, more dangerous motel. Apparently, when he was walking back to his motel at 11 pm one night, he got mugged and left for dead on the sidewalk. He was found with a fractured skull and nothing in his pockets by a passerby, taken to the Chan-Zuckerberg hospital, and not identified for 3 days3.
3. That being said, “safe and well-run” is relative. We had to move rooms because our first room had bloodstains on the wall from someone injecting drugs and then flicking the blood afterwards (don’t ask me how I know what that looks like). Our second room also had those stains, but less noticeably. And, on our final day, we had a tough time checking out of the hotel because the hotel staff were all in a tizzy because a guest of a guest at the hotel kept freaking out at everyone in the hotel and trying to hit them with his phone, which was like an old school brick cell phone. Our checkout process was repeatedly interrupted by the clerk being on the phone with the SFPD and saying, “No, you don’t get it, he will hurt someone if you don’t come here.”
4. Downtown San Francisco may have the world’s most security-guarded up department store, a Ross Dress for Less. There were 6 security guards in the store at all times, and they only allowed a limited number of people in the store at any one time. Shoplifting is a serious issue.
5. Despite all the struggles of doing retail in San Francisco, San Francisco has incredible food and coffee. Seriously. I don’t know why it’s so good but it is. I highly, highly recommend the SPRO chain. To give you an idea of how good it is, their dog menu has Alaskan Salmon and coconut water. Their dog menu!
6. SF also has great thrifting, including many genuine leather jackets and fur coats. Unfortunately, it’s pretty difficult to find an actual good thrifting deal there, as the thrift store people often look up the items online and price them appropriately. Also, beware of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation thrift store. Not that it’s a bad thrift store, but the profits don’t actually go towards AIDS healthcare, but instead towards lobbying against building new buildings in San Francisco. This is what San Francisco is like.
7. San Francisco is temperate year round, compact, is built on a hill overlooking a bay, and, as far as I can tell, had zero rules for architecture when most of it was built. This makes walking exceedingly pleasant, as views abound and there’s always another weird architectural masterpiece around another corner.
8. The only thing that mars the walking experience is the number of people on the sidewalks that are in the worst state you have ever seen, along with the trash they bring with them and the functional humans who profit off their misery. This is especially bad in the Tenderloin neighborhood (which happens to be in the center of SF and difficult to avoid), but is bad everywhere.
Like, in the Tenderloin, you can get a pretty good croissant and coffee, then walk outside to see 5 guys standing on a corner who are obviously drug dealers. The sidewalk across the street has an open air black market with druggies selling 15 bottles of shoplifted laundry detergent next to other druggies smoking meth next to other druggies covered in feces and injecting themselves into clearly septic legs and arms with open, oozing sores. All of this is accented by the worst smell you’ve ever smelled in your life, of human waste baked in the sun. Sprinkled throughout this bazaar of crime, misery, and filth are “City Ambassadors”, who are employed by the city to, um, say hi to the druggies? It’s not clear. At least the city also employs other people to pressure wash the streets each morning so they’re clean-ish, although they rapidly get dirty again.
In fairness to SF, they are supposedly making an effort to clean this up now that the Supreme Court has ruled they can force people off the streets. We’ll see.
9. Oh right, the other thing that mars the walking experience are the insane people on the sidewalk, who form a Venn diagram with the druggies. They will follow you, shout at you, and threaten you, especially if you are a woman. It is unclear what they are getting out of this, but they seem to be having a good time, and the cops don’t seem to care.
10. SF has self-driving rideshares everywhere (Waymos), which work remarkably well and are only about 50% more than an Uber. They drive really well, especially considering that SF has crazy people in the streets, some of whom own cars.
11. In SF, you can take a self-driving car and listen to soft jazz past incredibly messed up, drugged out people and it feels incredibly cyberpunk.
12. The SF social scene is incredibly flat and open in the best way. I emailed multiple people I’ve never met before, including serious people running serious bio startups, and asked them to meet with me and my girlfriend for lunch to discuss what science is like outside of academia, as my girlfriend is a postdoc considering her next moves. And they did! Just to be nice! That’s awesome.
The contradiction with Boston is pretty stark, too. I have been in Boston close to 10 years and I have still not broken into the Boston bio or tech scene in any meaningful way. I rarely get invited to industry parties or events. In SF, I literally got invited to two bio-adjacent parties the random week I showed up.
13. SF is blessed with so much natural and manmade beauty it’s obscene. The architecture is amazing; the shops are adorable; the parks are incredible. I mean, at one point, we were hiking by the Golden Gate Bridge, looked across a hill of flowers into the Bay, and saw a whale breach. This was like 5 minutes from a pretty central bus stop. That’s insane.
14. I can’t wait to go back.
The diner was called the “Black Bear Diner”. We thought it was a cute neighborhood diner, until I looked at the menu (which was cutely done up to look like a newspaper) and realized they had over 100 locations. Despite this, the food was pretty good by diner standards. This is where we got introduced to a surprisingly common California custom of paying your bill at the cash register (instead of the waiter taking your card), which I quite like.
Also, one thing that I thought was really funny was the newspaper/menu claiming the founders “just wanted a place where their friends could hang out and were surprised to find others liked it too”, and then seeing that they expanded to 5 locations in as many years after founding. “Aw shucks family dining” meets “aggressively tapping private market financing for debt fueled growth”.
Although I had a truly great moment on the ride. The point of Small World is each group of puppets is supposed to represent a different region. In the India region, some of the puppets were dancing and isolating their heads from their bodies. My girlfriend said, “I always find that isolation really impressive,” and I said, “You mean like this?” and did it for her, as that was a trick I learned in my breakdancing days. I have brought this exchange up to her like 5 times since then.
Once this story went viral, the SF Police Department complicated the story by claiming the guy wasn’t mugged and his identification wasn’t stolen, but I don’t believe them as it doesn’t make sense how he would have had a fractured skull or gone missing for 3 days otherwise. Plus, I assume SFPD is generally incompetent, judging by the state of the city, so I’d have a hard time trusting them about anything.
Great write up on SF. Despite being a pretty right-wing individual in most respects, I'm NorCal for life, and the weirdness is kind of what I love the most. To me, it feels like California is alive in ways that other places aren't, even the worst parts somehow, and other places are drab or like they're trying too hard.
Black Bear is pretty polarizing. About half of my family, for instance, hates it, and the other half loves it. I'm in the second camp, but I will admit that the quality can vary a lot from location to location, or even from visit to visit somehow. I eat there most often when I'm at Mt. Shasta, where my family vacations most years. That's where Black Bear is originally from, and honestly the quality varies just as much there as anywhere. The consistently best Black Bear I've ever been to was in Long Beach. The worst was in Tracy.
When I was little, my family would go to Disneyland every year, and while I still have very fond memories (my favorite 'ride' back then was the monorail, which I think still smokes most of the park), it's no longer high on my list of favorite places. That said, the Incredicoaster (regardless of its kind of forced and tacky branding; I have no idea why they made it Incredibles-themed, and vastly preferred it aesthetically when it was just California Screamin') is a pretty top-tier roller coaster, not that I'm any kind of expert. Though I did grow up in Santa Cruz, which has some shockingly legit coasters at the Boardwalk.
Actually, most of California Adventure is super cool, and I highly recommend the monstrously expensive hotel (which I stayed at only once, the year it opened, but is still my favorite hotel experience of all time).
Great read ... We really don't deserve the Mexicans, they're the kindest most generous people you can ever meet. You really want to get invited to one of their parties ... which isn't hard. You'll get invited to a birthday party for a cousin of someone you've just met. Bring a nice gender neutral gift, some pack of soda and go. Their parties are huge potlucks and you'll get to enjoy real Mexican food.