Wandering Around The Mission

My friend Leann is from Sacramento but currently in school in Seattle for her masters. So when she is down in CA, we try to meetup in Sacramento or somewhere in the Bay Area. It was the Bay Area's turn so we met up at BART and went to San Francisco. She's another music friend from college and my all-around culture buddy and always open to new things. I had made some vague plans, but didn't fill her in except for showing her my cryptic handwritten directions to alleys, parks and places to eat in The Mission District. She gave me a weird look but wasn't phased.

I requested a little detour so I could go downtown and get the best shoes ever. They are shiny bright pink with star cutouts. Leann wasn't convinced of their awesomeness and made fun of me for buying them. We got off at the 16th Street BART station in The Mission and headed to our first stop, Clarion Alley. I still haven't found my bearings in Mission and I'm usually there with someone who lives there or someone who's familiar with the area. If I'm not, I always walk the wrong way before I walk the right way. This was the case that day. But soon enough, we found it. We turned onto Clarion from Mission Street. After wandering up and down the alley a few times and taking pics of our favorites, we turned on Valencia Street to check out the shops and head to Balmy Alley (more murals) and Dolores Park (great views of the city and always very interesting people).

Somewhere along the way, I had really had to go to the bathroom. We walked past an open cafe. It smelled good in there, but I wasn't hungry so I steathily made my way in and out of their bathroom. After I left and was satisfied with my covert bathroom operation, a few minutes later I realized I accidentally left my directions in the bathroom. Bad karma I suppose ;) I felt stupid going back to look for them, so we just decided to keep wandering down Valencia. We stopped at Abandoned Planet, a new and used bookstore and flipped through "Sky Maul", a hilarious spoof of the craptastic Sky Mall catalog. We checked out a few other minorly interesting stores and then we found Buffalo Exchange where I found the best dress ever. I really like Buffalo Exchange and Crossroads Trading Co. They are mostly second hand but they sift through the stuff people bring in and mostly sell stuff that is wearable on a regular basis. So you don't have to look through 100 muu-muus and 1980s prom dresses before you find something you like.

It was getting late in the afternoon and I wanted to find the alley and the park so we tried to rely on my sense of direction. Which isn't always so great. Later when I got home I looked at the map and realized that we were only a few blocks from Dolores Park when we gave up and headed to a cute cafe called Cafe Que Tal. We spent a couple hours there and when we left, it was dark. My plans worked better in the daylight. But it was all good because it was cloudy and misty all day so the park probably wouldn't have been as much fun as it is on a sunny day. So we headed back to Mission Street and had a fantastic Senagalese dinner at Bissap Baobab. After dinner we headed over to Laszlo which is a bar I've been to before and liked, but by then it was 9pm and the place was already pretty packed and loud. We wanted something a bit more mellow. The other divey looking places nearby didn't appeal to us at the moment so we took BART downtown. We walked up to Cantina in Nob Hill. It's the best bar ever.