San Francisco
Decompression
We arrived with Xavier on a Sunday afternoon, just in time to join Valérie, a friend from Barcelona, at the main stage of the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival, in the middle of the Golden Gate Park. After 3 months in the middle of United States, it was quite a change to dive into a crowd of hipsters and hippies.
For one week, I was lucky to stay at the wonderful Studio G, with Valérie, Lauren, Sue, Jef, Amy, Melisa, Kaleena, Derrick... Studio G and H are located in a massive warehouse next to Mission. For the past ten years or so, they have been arranged and re-arranged as two big communities of house mates.
After a busy week in San Francisco, it was time already for Xavier to take off for Los Angeles then Hawaii. We had spent almost three amazing weeks on the road together, and I hope we will soon meet again, somewhere in South America maybe...
During the second week, my old friend Guillaume came all the way from Paris to visit the city and me. After more than six months traveling, it was great to chill, laugh, and chat with my good old friend. We went out to check out record stores, cycling around town, and chilling out in cafés. Just as if we had slipped into the shoes of some locals San Franciscan.
One of the first thing I did when I arrived in San Francisco was to look for a second hand bicycle on Craigslist. In hardly more than a day I found the vehicle I needed. And when Guillaume arrived, we looked again and found a cheap and useful bike for him too.
The day after Guillaume landed, Valérie took us to Decompression. Just one month after Burning Man, the famous festival that takes place at the end of the summer in the middle of Nevada's desert, the same crowd gathers one more time for a chilling and joyful Sunday afternoon, in the middle of downtown San Francisco.