Girl and City

Today was a big day. My mom had been dreading this day ever since she saw it on the itinerary. It was BIKE DAY.
Today I planned a full day of biking, starting from 8:00 am (when the bike rental shop opens) until 5:00 pm (when the bike rental shop closes). We were going to cross the Golden Gate Bridge and ride through two quaint seaside towns before returning to San Francisco by ferry. Yes, it was ambitious, but I was assured that there were no steep hills on this route. Ha, what liars.

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UC Berkeley was a half-hour BART ride away. I was so impressed with the organization and simplicity of the SF public transit that I had convinced my mom not to pick up the rental car until Day 4 of our trip. And although the BART/Muni system of San Fran did not disappoint, we did fumble for a good half hour in front of the automated ticket booths. They kept rejecting my mom’s credit card! After finally finding a Real Live Person to talk to, we were told that we can’t use the same credit card to buy tickets within 24 hours. What kind of rubbish rule is that! Anyway, I ended up using my credit card to buy our tickets and away we went.
But all did not go smoothly. When we got to the Berkeley station, I couldn’t exit, because the turnstile thing wouldn’t accept my ticket. Turns out the magnet on my camera case de-magnetized the strip on the ticket, so I had to get a written slip from another Real Live Person. Bah!

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Eight days ago, I arrived in San Francisco, ready to be awed by its beauty and wonder. We rode on cable cars, strolled around Chinatown, and even walked along The Embarcadero at sunset. But I was confused. What made San Francisco so famous? It didn’t seem that special a city to me. The downtown area was composed of a shopping district, a financial district, and a few cultural districts, which is exactly like the downtown area of The City (and I’m sure many other metropolises). Sure, the weather here is nice, but it wasn’t that sunny or warm. To be honest, it was quite chilly, always a little windy, and the heavy fog of morning often wouldn’t lift until past noon. Sure, it was surrounded by ocean on all three sides and had two bridges, but the bridges were about as spectacular as any feat of human engineering.

But as I came to realize, the appeal of San Francisco lies not only in the morning fog that shrouds its mysterious charm, nor in the succulent fauna, everything from leafy palm trees to majestic oaks – no, its charm lies in its singular ability to capture very different environments very close to each other.

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I’ve always dreamed of spontaneous road trips to exciting cities with equally exciting friends. This weekend, my dream was realized. Early Saturday morning, my friends and I piled into SRB‘s car and headed to Montreal.

Montreal, one of the largest French-speaking city outside of France, the city of smoked meat and designer fashion, Canada’s cultural capital, and the birthplace of the Montreal bagel.
For us, it was a city with all this and more. It was a city where you can buy wine and beer from any dépanneur (convenient store), of which there were many. Suddenly, we were no longer constrained by the short hours and sparse locations of the LCBO (the only licensed retailer of alcohol in Ontario) when we felt like filling up with wine instead of food. It was a city where you couldn’t turn right on red lights. It was a city where we were immediately identifiable as aliens because we spoke English¹. It was a city where there was a boulangerie (bakery) on almost every street, and every single one was better than any bakery I’ve ever walked into in The City. It was a city where people were better dressed, better dined, and better wined.

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1. Although most people in Montreal are bilingual, certain parts of the city contain more English-speakers than others. We only encountered one waiter who couldn’t speak English almost at all. Nonetheless, French is the preferred language, and some locals treat Anglophones (especially tourists) differently. [↩]