A Day in Hippie Town (without Jake)
Posted on May 23, 2008
Filed Under Collegelife '08, People, West Coast | 2 Comments
Alexander, Erik, Isak, Wilhelm, Joanna, Frida, and Tommy on Haight Street. | A Day in Hippie Town (without Jake) from Olesund
The Haight is a hippie street, that’s for sure. It is actually the neighborhood that was the center for the hippie movement in San Francisco during the 60s’ and probably still is today. The street is probably around a mile long and a large amount of stores are crammed into the houses lined up along side the road. Smoke shops (mostly pot pipe shops), robot shops, comic book shops, restaurants, cafés, thrift stores (for Swedes: Second Hand stores), New Age shops, fancy clothing stores and whatever weird kinds of stores you can imagine. We spent the whole day here walking around enjoying the picturesque and somewhat weird atmosphere. There were some homeless people who were sitting on the street, but most of them were young and had actually chosen to hang around there, why I know not. However, we did meet one really nice guy who was cooking breakfast for other homeless people in a park some blocks away. So we helped out by buying some egg and potatoes; rather that than giving our change to guys that actually said they’d use it to buy weed.
Amoeba, a gigantic record store was the first thing we saw. It is kind of legendary in these parts of the US. They have a lot of CD’s and they have big sections that are between one and five dollars. Isak walked out from the store with 6 CD’ of which he only knew two, but the other four had sweet covers and looked good. He actually bought a Bob Hund CD (for Americans: a Swedish band, the name means: Bob Dog. Difficult one, huh?) for the humble price of one dollar.
After lunch, where Frida had a sour inedible salad, we met up with the other Swedes and Nina and walked around for a few more hours. Just before we got on the bus we took some sweet portrait pictures in front of a graffiti wall. We felt pretty cool when we were posing in front of Erik’s big professional camera.
When we got back, Britta and Nina took us to In & Out Burger, a famous California burger place, where they only had two kinds of burgers: Hamburger and Cheeseburger, but you could actually make them double. Sometimes simplicity is nice, the burgers were very tasty. We are pretty good at judging the taste of a burger after living in the land of the burgers for almost five months. When the burgers were finished we went to a local ice cream shop called Mitchell’s. Joanna was boring and Frida was crazy. Joanna bought the two most boring flavours apart from vanilla; strawberry and chocolate and Frida bought some kind of foul potato ice cream called Purple Yam. Before going back home to watch a movie we went up to two hills called Twin Peaks to take a look at San Fran by night.
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you dont understand… in n out isn’t just tasty. its the best meal in the world. enough said. i get to california tomorrow. theres no telling how many burgers i’m going to have in two weeks.
EWWW purple yam..that’s britta’s favorite..hahaa