welcome to my san francisco travel guide!

After almost three years of living in the city, I think I know where the good stuff is. SF is a small city because it's confined on both sides by the ocean, so it's fairly easy to move around and see everything there is to see in a short time. While this is a very touristy place because of some overrated landmarks, I dare to say San Francisco is a city to visit for its food. Visit yelp.com or download its app to find all the good stuff to eat, because it's EVERYWHERE! (also applies for bars and clubs).

SF is full of tech people. If you want to rely on technology to plan your trip, it'll be as accurate as it can be. If you enter an address on Google Maps, it'll tell you where to go by MUNI or BART. Don't expect transport to be clean, on time or creepy people-free. You can get passes depending on how long you'll be there; some routes are 24hrs. The transport is a bit tricky: BART is blue, and you can only ride it with blue tickets you buy at machines outside their stations (for example, SFO or OAK airports). Their machines have these ridiculous buttons where you have to subtract or add value in multiples of 1 dollar or 5 cents (USD), why? nobody knows.

MUNI is grey with red and their machines are red (and also smarter, since they just give you change without pressing anything weird); you can get tickets on board, they're $2.25 USD and come with a 4hr transfer, which means you can go up and down several times with the same ticket within the time marked on the ticket. If you have a BART ticket you CANNOT ride MUNI, and vice versa. The easiest way to get rid of this conundrum is to get a Clipper card, which you load with cash and works for all transport in the Bay Area (including the Caltrain, Oakland & San Jose). You can get it at most Walgreens.

If you're vegan, hipster, legitimately allergic to something, or just want to be extra picky with what you eat, this is your city. My list of places to eat would be long, and it depends a lot on how much money you want to spend, but my SF favorites are (in no particular order): Whole Cakes, Lush Gelato, David's Tea (actually a Canadian franchise), Cordon Bleu (Vietnamese), Lime Tree (Indonesian), Pluto's (salads & the BEST beef sandwich you'll ever have), Helmand Palace (Afghan), Gracias Madre (Vegetarian Mexican), Sheba Piano Lounge (Ethiopian... & jazz!) & Saha (Expensive, yes, but if you must spend your money on something worthy THIS-IS-IT!... I still dream about it).

This isn't a food guide, so I'll tell you some nice places to check out while you're moving from one restaurant to the other.

Japanese tea garden

Inside the Golden Gate Park, close to the Botanical Garden (also worth seeing) & the CalAcademy, this nice, tiny garden has zen gardens, a Buddha sculpture, a bridge that looks out of Hobbiton, pagodas, and Japanese flora. You can drink expensive tea inside and get in for FREE Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays if you enter before 10 a.m., just don't bring your own food nor eat outside the designated bench area because they get pretty angry about it.

If you're looking for a quiet place to sit down, relax, read a book or enjoy a meal, go to the Botanical Garden instead, across the street. This place is small and mostly busy with a lot of people that will be staring, expecting you to move so they can snap a bokehlicious cherry tree. 

​California Academy of sciences

This is, again, inside the Golden Gate Park, close to the DeYoung Museum, the Japanese tea garden, and the botanical garden [It's a huge park, 20% bigger than Central Park in NY, in fact]. The CalAcademy has a planetarium, an aquarium, a T-Rex (unfortunately, not alive), an earthquake simulator, a mini rainforest, a garden on the roof, and a lot of information on science, life on Earth, evolution, etc.

It isn't cheap, BUT they have a special night for people 21+ from 6 to 10 pm, where you can basically see everything you can see in the morning, for less than half the price (plus, you can drink and eat inside!) To go to the NightLife, you need a ticket. Make sure you get (free) tickets for the Planetarium when you arrive, because there's limited space.

Occasionally there are days where the CalAcademy is free for everyone, but make sure you check the website for those days, because they're not often. 

​​Japantown

Japantown, not to be confused with Chinatown, has some nice origami sculptures, street signs in Japanese, a nice mall where you can get good noodles and, depending on the season, massive amounts of people (like that time there was a ramen festival and 50,000 people showed up, which was completely unexpected and made it very clear that the foodie rage is HIGH in San Francisco). Otherwise, it is a calm area to chill, enjoy some mochi, and rock out a purple wig and a sailor girl outfit, regardless of your gender.

Useless fact: There's a Pikachu at the arcade inside the mall with whom I have many, MANY pictures. It usually changes attires according to the season.

​​​the castro

This street and neighborhood is known as the gay district. If you're there in days outside Pride Week, this area is nothing special. If you think everything will be full of rainbows, you might leave disappointed. It has just one crosswalk with rainbows, which is nice enough for a picture.

If you go out at night, beware of pickpockets. You will even get a card saying that when you enter a bar because it is THAT common. Beware also of naked people (if that bothers you). Nudity IS legal in SF, and the Castro is usually an area where people like to exercise that right.

If you can, to enjoy the best thing out there in the Castro, go to a Sing-along at the Castro Theatre. Check the schedule and dress up! There are prizes for people with the best character costumes. To get here you can take Muni's line F, which is the fanciest line of vintage trams from all over the world. 

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​Conservatory of flowers

This lovely place for people who are into flowers is just fabulous, and would make any Queen of Hearts jealous because her garden only has roses (and it's not far from there). If you're not into flowers, it's just a warm greenhouse with cool tropical flowers and huge gardens outside. It's also inside the Golden Gate Park and you can get there by bus (5, 7, 21 & 71) but you have to walk a little because nothing stops right there.

It's closed on Mondays and it's FREE the first Tuesday of every month. Otherwise, prices and opening times vary, as well as the special exhibitions, so check the website before you go.

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​This row of famous houses

Legend says Whoopi Goldberg used to own one of them, but she had Tracy Chapman over too much, and neighbors complained about guitars, and someone having a fast car, so she had to leave the place. They're in Alamo Square. They're called the Painted Ladies.

You can get there by bus and have a picnic if it's sunny. You can also wonder why you walk up the hill so much to take pictures of houses. They're close to the Haight-Ashbury, which is the hippie neighborhood, so you might enjoy walking around the area, if you like the smell of urine and weed.

Chinatown

If you go downtown and visit Union Square [where you can take the (overrated) cable car to get to the (VERY underrated, always free) Cable Car Museum], you can easily walk to Chinatown.

This area is much bigger than Japantown and has several alleys and markets. Street signs are in Chinese, and you will find some nicely decorated doors at the entrance in Grant Avenue & Bush Street.

Sometimes you can see old people playing Mahjong at Portsmouth Square, some street musicians with ancient Chinese instruments, and a lot of vegetables you've never seen before (unless you're Asian, that is).

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​Oh... Yeah... That bridge

If you go there one day after my birthday you'll get to see some fireworks because May 27th is the day the bridge was finished.

Bus 28 leaves you right in front of the Golden Gate Bridge gift store, which has nice, expensive products. From there, the bridge is just some meters away.

If you walk on it for about 5 minutes, you've basically seen it all. The first half is a repetition of the second half. If you are, however, walking to hatch some PokemonGo eggs, go for it. The bridge is 2737m long. If you're running the SF marathon, you'll have to go back and forth anyway.

You can drive, walk or bike through it. The most impressive part is that people have to climb it often to paint it against salt corrosion, and that it was build with few machinery for its time. Other than that, everyone (and I mean EVERYONE) agrees the Bay Bridge is much prettier.​

pier 39

This pier is another tourist trap. It's full of stores and souvenirs. At the end of the pier, to the left, there are some platforms where sea lions like to hang out and bark, bark, bark.

To get here you can either walk from the end of Market Street, to check out the Ferry Building (a market with expensive hipster food) and the Exploratorium (a nice interactive science museum), or take Muni line F right after you visited Castro. It'll leave you right in front.

If you want to visit Alcatraz, the island prison with famous inmates like Al Capone, you have to take the boats close from here, on pier 33. Plan to go there for a whole day because there's a lot to see