A Perspective in San Francisco
San Francisco offers a distinctive contrast to Los Angeles. While now a major center for all things tech – both Apple and Google have headquarters about 40 miles south of the city – San Francisco has maintained a progressive, countercultural feel, a reflection of its onetime status as the center of the hippie culture of the 1960s.
“We were fortunate enough to be able to hop on a flight around the city of San Francisco, CA at night. As we approached the city, we were given permission to fly over the SFO airport as well, which was wonderful.”
To travel around this compact metropolis – as opposed to sprawling L.A., San Francisco is a tidy 47 square miles – is to stumble across iconic destinations at every turn. Enter the city from the north and you will cross the iconic Golden Gate Bridge, with the scent of pine trees wafting along beside you head over to Haight-Ashbury, where the hippies held sway and where tie-dye shops, funky cafés, and Victorian homes painted in garishly bright colors still offer a taste of the offbeat, take a highly circuitous drive down the steep slope of Lombardi Street, perhaps the twistiest toad in all of America, grab a delicious lunch in the city's busting Chinatown, and for dinner, head over to the Mission District – the Mexican food at La Taqueria is particularly highly rated.
Now let's hop on a helicopter, and enjoy this impressive aerial images of this video, which is a wonderful, unforgettable journey you can experience, too. San Francisco offers you hundreds of tours and amazing things to do. It's just a matter of picking the activities that fit better into your style of traveler, and enjoy it to the fullest.
Golden Gate Bridge
The Golden Gate is a strait on the west coast of North America that connects San Francisco Bay to the Pacific Ocean. It is defined by the headlands of the San Francisco Peninsula and the Marin Peninsula, and, since 1937, has been spanned by the Golden Gate Bridge.
Haight-Ashbury
A stroll down Haight Street today will undoubtedly evoke a certain 1960s nostalgia. Live guitar music still warbles from street corners, tie-dyed t-shirts are hawked by the handful, the smell of pot permanently wafts, colorful peace signs adorn windows of businesses like the Red Victorian Bed & Breakfast — institutions better suited to an earlier time.
Lombardi Street
Lombard Street is an east–west street in San Francisco, California that is famous for a steep, one-block section with eight hairpin turns. Stretching from The Presidio east to The Embarcadero (with a gap on Telegraph Hill), most of the street's western segment is a major thoroughfare designated as part of U.S. Route 101. The famous one-block section, claimed as "the most crooked street in the world", is located along the eastern segment in the Russian Hill neighborhood. The street was named after Lombard Street in Philadelphia by San Francisco surveyor Jasper O'Farrell.
Chinatown
The first Chinese immigrants arrived in San Francisco in the 1850s. Many came to escape China’s uncertain economic conditions, attracted by the Gold Rush and later by the opportunity to work on the Transcontinental Railroad.
Prompted by the prevailing xenophobia of the time, the San Francisco City Government decided to demarcate a specific zone where these new immigrants were allowed to own and inherit property. Thus was born San Francisco’s Chinatown, the oldest Chinese community in North America.
Mission District
The Mission District, also commonly called "The Mission", is a neighborhood in San Francisco, California, United States, originally known as "the Mission lands" meaning the lands belonging to the sixth Alta California mission, Mission San Francisco de Assis.
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