"if you're going to san francisco"

We spent the weekend up in San Francisco at our friend Mike's. We've been wanting to move up there for some time now, so we're trying to figure out which neighborhood we want to live in. Well, actually we know what neighborhood we'd like to live in- the Richmond. It's in the west part of the city, above Golden Gate Park and next to the ocean. The only problem is that it's far from the train station, where I'll mostly likely be commuting from.

The baby bullet train is around 40 or 45 minutes to Mountain View, which is pretty close to the time I spend now on my drive from the south. Too bad most of the tech companies are in the south bay- it would be much easier to just find a job up there. But since I've started taking a class here and there, I think the commute on the train would be ideal for doing homework and reading. The area around the train station has been developed over the last couple of years, so all the apartments around there are new "luxury" places with insanely high rates- even for the bay area. We could find something comparable to what we pay now in the "suburbs" of the Sunset and Richmond districts though. Ohh, the dilemma.

We had a lot of fun this weekend- Mike took us to an Italian place in his neighborhood (North Beach) where we had the most amazing calzone, with prosciutto, fresh ricotta and mozzarella. Here's the view from Mike's apartment:





On the way back from Mike's we drove around looking at different neighborhoods. The nice thing about San Francisco is that you can't get too lost, since you either run into the ocean or the bay before going too far. We're starting to know our way around the city.