In the dead of winter, I took the red eye from Boston to San Francisco in late January. The frost corroding on my small plane window strained sounds of wind and ice; I was ready for the California sun on my face.

 

I arrived to find a place where equality conquered and beauty flourished. San Francisco’s passion for culture created a desire for me to jump into the madness, to get a taste of all that the city has to offer.

 

A floating city, seemingly suspended on thin air, San Francisco is at the center to one of the Pacific’s largest natural harbors. With a rich past, including the flood of the Gold Rush, barreling through the 20th century with wealth, military power, progressive culture and high technology, San Francisco has become a cosmopolitan metropolis in today’s world. 

 

Roaming hills made this misshaped metropolis hard to travel by foot, but with the expansion of cable cars, it enabled the city’s grid to spread over it’s steepest hills. This invention made it easy for people to see the magnificent views from atop the sharpest hills overlooking ocean and peaks.   

 

With a reputation as the center of cultural bohemianism, San Francisco once drew in famous writers from Mark Twain to Jack London. In the 1950s San Francisco opened its doors to beat poets and for the Haight-Ashbury hippie counterculture that peaked with the 1967 “Summer of Love.” I traveled to Haight-Ashbury, a vibrant community of diverse individuals that make it a spectacular show to watch. Across the way, hippies, homeless and the all-around strange flood Haight Street. Sun stricken, love sick, it is a place that breed’s culture unlike anything “normal.”

 

It has been a main focus in San Francisco for environmental, labor and women’s rights activism. In the 1980s the city called upon itself to speak out for the challenges of prolonged homelessness and the AIDS epidemic. Its Castro District was a center of the gay rights movement, which is still present and vivacious today. The gay and lesbian communities are embraced here, and it doesn’t matter what you are, or who you are, San Francisco welcomes the weird, the unordinary, the pushed aside. It embraces and never judges. Normal has never been so boring. The gay culture of clubs, hip restaurants and eclectic shops parade the streets. It’s an alluring culture that flaunts its beauty to the rainbow colored rooftops.

 

We drove to wine country, where acres and acres of land transformed us to a place where vineyards stretched for miles, bare and covered with what seemed like a brown blanket; we had come in the off season. There was something breathtaking about being in a place that was drenched in sophistication. For a moment I wanted to live here, pick grapes and drink wine all day. Watch the sun set over the mountains and tell stories of my old life where winter actually exists.    

 

We traveled across the Golden gate bridge famously plastered on every t-shirt and coffee mug in the colliding shops of San Francisco. Leading us up and down winding roads to get into the Red Wood forests, a palace where trees christened themselves kings. A world untouched by our own manipulating hands, the forest speaks loudly, creating magic through its twisting roots that breathe simplicity. Peacefulness away from the bustling hills of San Francisco’s urban chaos, here your lungs gasps to a place lost in time. 

It’s strange how a place can change you, if even for just a moment. A glimpse into what life could be. Such a free and excepting place where people of a new generation, jumps from the hands of all the hard working people that make this city’s blood pump from its veins.