If you want to know why the Bay Area is so fucked up, look no further than BART stations. During normal services, there are trains every 3-4 minutes between here and downtown San Francisco. Not a few stations away mind you, THE NEXT STOP is Embarcadero Station. If you live here you are SIX MINUTES away from Downtown San Francisco. What is the space used for? Parking. Not housing, not skyscrapers, not even single family homes, parking. This whole area should be gigantic affordable housing projects.
One time I was flying back from Japan to Canada and I stopped in San Fransisco. I had a rather long stop over and I thought it might be fun to go and see the city, so I went to the BART station in the airport. There was a man walking through the station and I asked if he had any advice on how to take the train and he said why do you ask, I said I had a 5 hour stop over and I had hoped to take a quick trip into the city to see some of the sights. He said that coincidentally, he was just on his way to rent a car and go see the sights as he too had a long stop over and had used to live here and wanted to have a drive around for old time sake did I want to come.
It was perfect, he took me to see the Golden Gate bridge and some kind of like military bunker thing on the other side, some of the surfing beaches he had frequented as a teenager, downtown. He asked if I wanted lunch and I said no thank you since I only had Yen (although about 800 USD worth, I just hadn't had a chance to change it over) and he said not to worry and bought me lunch and then took me back to the airport at a convenient time to catch my flight.
Such a nice friendly man. I will also remember his generosity and my day in the Bay area.
Shit, man, if you are ever back, hit me up. I know some cool ass dive bars out in the East Bay since I live out here. I'll be moving to SF soon though, but I'll still take you out
Sounds good. The next big family trip I want to do is to tour the most separatist regions of china; HK, Tibet, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia; to see for myself what all the hoopla is about. so who knows, I might be passing by on the way.