I think I’ve finally gotten far enough away from LA that I can count on having the best style in the bar. Bay people are on average noticeably less attractive as LA people, but there’s enough that’re attractive enough, and they aren’t nearly as hateable-on-contact.
\nThere’s woo enough here that I’m willing to press on to Portland in hopes that gets better, but it’s not nearly as grungy or liberal as the reputation or even what I remember from a college visit a decade ago. (A decade!)
\nNow it was raining so maybe that’s why there were fewer protesters and crusties out than Santa Cruz, but it still showed up in the way people that were around presented and what I heard them talking about, and the literature and flyers left up in public. I remember on that visit coming across a flyer for a protest schedule for the month that was almost full. One entry was “meet at the BART station and decide what to protest”, that one stuck with me.
\nI’ve seen more relationships, romantic or friendly, between 20somethings and greyhairs than I can remember anywhere. Maybe it’s the the college thing, but I don’t remember seeing anything like that in Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz, Ithaca, or Westwood. I mean I knew people who went to professors’ dinner parties, but they didn’t hit the laundromat together at 3 in the afternoon or play Connect 4 in bars.
\nShit closes down weirdly early. There are a bunch of restaurants that close at 4 or so. Maybe students have brunchable weekdays, but it doesn’t stop there. There are coffeeshops that close at 6, student bars that close on 11 some days, a bar down the street that closes at 7, when I went up to Telegraph at least half the undergrad eateries were closed by 8.
\nI guess this signals a higher-than-normal ratio of labor costs to rent, but given what I hear about Berkeley rents and the unemployment level in adjacent Oakland that’s kind of weird. The People’s Republic has a living wage thingie of almost $15/hr including benefits, but that’s only for city contractors.
\nLots of traffic-calming design. Boulevard medians, traffic circles, non-arterial grid streets are broken up by walling off intersections diagonally into two butt-bumping right turns, which is a new one for me.
\nMaybe that shit’s necessary, because Berkeley has the worst fucking drivers I have ever seen. I saw a car fuck up a right turn! It just stopped at an intersection where the cross street had stop signs and it didn’t, and there was no cross traffic anyway and then just waited for, for, for I have no fucking clue what, maybe until the stars were properly aligned.
\nAnd then within an hour I saw another car do the same fucking thing! And that’s not to mention left turns, which are at least fuckupable in theory, and boy do they put that theory into practice.
\nMaybe it’s a regional thing. I was taking some ridge roads around Tiburon the other day and there was, I shit you not, a public awareness campaign encouraging drivers to stop at red lights.
"}