I was lucky that I had a local friend to show me around. The Bay Area is actually not the easiest of places to get around; BART, the train system, does not have a very extensive reach. My friend therefore took me around using the bus system; the family car helped a great deal too. He has a long history of community service in some of the more blighted areas of the Bay Area (actually, the most blighted) and he brought me through some of the neighborhoods where he volunteered, which in his words "had charm"; many places in the Bay Area look bright, pleasant and clean but are really quite nasty. I guess that I wanted to get a window into the social fabric of Bay Area society, and that is what I got from his tour of the region.
Over the course of my conversations with my friend, as well as our journeys through the good, the bad and the ugly of the Bay Area, we analyzed several aspects of the region’s society and culture.
The Bay Area has a very different feel from New York. New York (and the East Coast in general) has a solid, grounded feel, but the Bay Area has something mildly surreal around it, as if it is not quite settled. (I guess the same could be said of California as a whole). It is a real salad bowl; as someone once said, if you picked America up by Maine and gave it a shake, all the bits which are not nailed down would fall to California. As a result, California attracts all nature of people from across the United States and beyond, from hippies to tech-whizzes to professors to management consultants to strange people declaring that the world will end tomorrow. Their culture is not quite rooted in history, or even the present; it is ultimately based on a repudiation of the puritanical, hierarchically-driven East Coast culture, and to a certain extent cultures in other places in the world; almost an “anti-culture”.
Some less charitable people would say that Californian culture is not quite based in “reality”… but I think this is a bit too harsh. The world needs “laboratories” like this, where ideas and cultures mix and match on a grand scale, often yielding shiny new things that are snapped up by the rest of the world, such as the iPhone, iPad, the internet, Silicon Valley, the California sushi roll, Californian wine, Facebook, the organic food movement, Hollywood, and so on and so forth.
Californians therefore like the unlikely agglomeration of cultural influences, often throwing together things which do not quite make sense. They are real cultural vultures; if you don’t have to think about tradition, you don’t have to care too much if what you do makes “cultural sense” or not. Laotian tacos spring to mind. So does Jack London's cabin; the city of Oakland moved his former cabin from the Yukon to California, placing it in a grove of... palm trees. Well, it is California, and the odd mix of cultures and influences is something that can be termed "Californian culture". It's not quite "Middle American" culture; everything is flung together, with no one caring about the origins of their individual elements. Of course, that the Hispanic influence here is very strong. If you go to the right neighborhoods, you can find plenty of taquerias and small Mexican restaurants which serve really excellent food.
That brings me to another aspect of Bay Area culture; its cuisine. I was informed that Bay Area people place a premium on the quality of their food, and I can safely say that Bay Area food beats the East Coast in terms of both variety and quality. The national pastime is searching for good restaurants. It's an obsession that matches Singaporeans' and Malaysians' quest for good food, except that Bay Area people are also on a perpetual search for the best wine.
They really are spoiled for choice. The town of Berkeley, for example, has every cuisine you want (and probably some you don't!) compressed into two streets. I ate really good quality Indonesian food, complete with Ais Cendol, fifteen minutes from the University of California, Berkeley. You can get Thai, Indian, Laotian, Chinese, Mexican... you name it, they have it. Again, New York has all the same food, but they are spread out around the city, whereas Berkeley is really a food-lover's paradise. Again, Californians in the know know where to get the best tacos or ramen, and will brag about venturing into gang-controlled territory in order to sneak a bite of Manuel's special burritos.
Let's also not forget the natural beauty of the Bay Area. My friend took me through the East Bay Regional Parks, which are a set of hiking trails scattered throughout the Oakland-Berkeley hills. The views are stunning, and my friend literally lives five minutes away from one particular park! If you take the effort to get to the parks (and they take quite a lot of effort, often passing through the Bay Area flats) you will be richly rewarded. There are redwoods in the parks, which are not as commercialized as the Muir Woods. It really feels like you are away from it all when you are in the parks. Also, most of the time, the weather is perfect, like an air-conditioned room (however, when it does start raining it rains for days and days and days...)
As a result of the beautiful weather, great food and overall friendly nature of the people, Bay Area people are immensely passionate about their region. They all want to return one day. Apparently, most people who go away to university end up returning to the Bay Area to work; there's some strange addictive quality to the place. I admit that even I am somewhat pulled in by the region, to the extent I want to return, perhaps multiple times. I find that it is a region that is just as multi-layered and interesting as New York City, if you take the time to truly plumb its depths.
This all sounds like a slice of heaven on Earth, but no one really can have it all that good; there must be a flip side, that being that there is something that feels just a little “off” about the area. The Bay Area is ultimately a collection of disparate peoples who are thrown together and forced to live next to one another, whether they like it or not. They don’t really mix and merge; due to the easy availability of land, the rich float to the hills and the poor live in the "flats"; they self-segregate. This causes some very interesting political, economic and racial tensions, as the hills are mostly white and Asian while the flats are populated by Hispanics and African-Americans. A city like Oakland, for example, has some of the highest property values in the hills (as well as some of the most stunning views), which are uncomfortably perched right next to the crime-plagued flats. As a result of the rich and poor living uncomfortably side-by-side, I always detected something slightly unsettling about the Bay Area, lurking right beneath its clean, pleasant and sunny surface. If you're a tourist you wouldn’t really notice it, but if you looked carefully, there are many little things which catch your attention.
For example, in the richer neighborhoods, you see glass crystals mysteriously strewn on the ground. Those are the remnants of some thief smashing a car and running away with its valuables. San Francisco itself has a pleasant enough exterior, what with all the palm trees and abundant sunshine, but look carefully and you notice the homeless and the drug addicts hanging around on the street corners; the city has the highest concentration of homeless people per capita of any major city in the United States. My hostel was in a nice enough part of downtown, but I would not explore the area carelessly; you never know when you end up in the Tenderloin, a rather nasty part of town. The BART stations have announcements warning you to take care in quiet stairwells and instructing you how to guard against carjacking.
The strange thing is that the nasty neighborhoods don't actually look that bad. They are usually equally cheery, clean and sunny, until someone points out that you have taken a wrong turn into gang territory. I recall being taken around the innocuous-sounding region of Fruitvale, Oakland, which looked sunny and cheerful, with no litter on the streets and a newly-built shopping complex. Turns out that you really, really don’t want to go through that neighborhood by night… when talking to other Bay Area people, they sort of looked at us askance when we said that we had a good time in Fruitvale…
Often times, the richer denizens not only do not mix with their poorer neighbors, they actively ignore and deny them. The wealthy neighborhood of Pinole, for example, went as far as to secede from the city of Oakland. Meanwhile, the residents of Rockridge, Oakland, refuse to consider themselves part of Oakland even though they share the same facilities and government. Another observation is the MUNI buses; even though they are all run by the same company, the buses which serve Berkeley are clean and comfortable, while the ones which serve Oakland and Richmond look… like New York buses. This division between the hills and flats was apparent during the Great Firestorm of Oakland in the 1990s, which engulfed the richer Oakland Hills neighborhoods. However, due to poor communication with the fire departments in the flats, disaster relief was immensely slow. This caused a political firestorm (pun intended) and served to highlight the deep divisions which mark society in the Bay Area.
There's so much more I can say, but I'll leave it at that. I guess that the Hotel California verse "You can check out any time, but you can never leave" rings true. The Bay Area is mildly unsettling, surreal and not quite nailed down, but is still strangely addictive. It really does draw you in; after all, given its natural beauty and laid-back attitude, it really is a little slice of heaven on Earth, although you just have to get used to its slightly sinister side. Or maybe it’s the palm trees that do it for me…
And here are a couple of pictures which I think are quite emblematic of the Bay Area...
