San Francisco doesn’t charm you right away. It doesn’t seek your sympathy. It doesn’t try to be anything other than what it is.
It can be cold. It can be dirty. Sometimes, it even feels unfriendly. But it’s in that rawness — in the scratches, in the cracks and broken edges — that its soul is found.
This is a city of outsiders. Of people who never fit the mold and never wanted to.
A city wrapped in fog, with clanging vintage cable cars, impossibly steep streets, and a spirit of freedom that outlived even the hippie dreams.
A city of heavy wine and heavier thoughts.
Cigarette smoke. Chinatown steaks. Uneven sidewalks. Restless nights.
And then you walk past the corner of Mission and 16th. You smell marijuana. You see tents lining the pavement. You might feel sadness. Or confusion. Maybe even disgust.
But if you pause for a moment and look a little closer — you’ll notice something else.
People sitting together, grilling on the sidewalk, laughing, someone playing harmonica like nobody’s watching.
Some of them — though they have nothing — seem… calm. Maybe even happy
And that’s where San Francisco teaches you something essential: we’re not all that different from each other.
This is not a postcard.
This is not the red bridge.
This is a city you cannot walk through without reflection.
Oscar Wilde once wrote:
“It is an odd thing, but everyone who disappears is said to be seen in San Francisco. It must be a delightful city and possess all the attractions of the next world.”
This is a city of the lost and the found.
A city you won’t understand from a guidebook cover.
You have to get lost in it. Endure it. Listen to it.
Frank Lloyd Wright said it’s “San Francisco is the only city I can think of that can survive all the things you people are doing to it and still look beautiful.”
And he was right.
Because San Francisco doesn’t want you to admire it.
It wants you to understand it.
“It is an odd thing, but everyone who disappears is said to be seen in San Francisco. It must be a delightful city and possess all the attractions of the next world.”
