Gorgeous view of the city in this park/permanent festival! Any beautiful day of the week you will find so many picnickers, hula hoopers, cute dogs, gay boys in their skivvies, ganja cookie salespeople, crazy weirdos and can collectors, it feels like a neighborhood concert is going on! My kind of place, for sure.
One day when I was walking around in the hills behind my house, I happened upon this bizarre street. It was as though someone had taken postmodernism and tried to make it into a block of houses. Each one has its own internally complete theme, involving strange colors and sculptural elements attached to the outside walls (gold eggs, wisps of wrought iron). This led me on subsequent walks to name them: the Corbusier House, the Barn, the Preschool Blocks house, the House of Wicca… and so on.
This hole-in-the wall noodle shop reminds me a lot of Taipei, an unassuming place that pleasantly surprises the taste buds. San Francisco has endless amounts of amazing food, but this place stands out because of it's size, taste, and prices. There are only about 9 seats in the place but if it's packed, it's worth the wait. While you wait for your noodles or curry, they'll chop open a fresh coconut so you can hydrate yourself before downing a bowl of pure, salty goodness.
Located near to the Alamo square's Painted Ladies is this wonderful gothic "stick" Italian villa with a long weirde history. Built by a Candy Baron in 1889, it's housed variously; a Russian Czarist nightclub, Jazz musicians, Satanists, a Manson family member, and one of the first 60's Hippy communes -Calliope. Creepy as hell enshrouded in fog after dark.
You have a lot of hills to choose from in San Francisco but in my opinion the best (and most varied) views are from Bernal Hill. Bonus: from my kitchen table I can watch tiny blobs moving around on this hill-- slow blobs are people, fast blobs are dogs.