San Francisco, December 2013: How to say goodbye to a city after you’ve started to love it so much? When knowing I was leaving San Francisco soon, I began to wonder how I could best close off this year’s adventure and express my “gratitude for the city” in some sort of positive way.
Walking down the hill from Twin Peaks a few days later, I thought of how quickly I had felt connected to people I had only just met – luckily they became close and technology will offer us a means to stay in touch while being far apart. However, alongside of these friends, I realised that when you live somewhere, your daily life is also “made” by much different things and people when you think about it: your local bar; the homeless guy you run into everyday, your favourite coffeeshop, the atmosphere in a park you spend time in during weekends.
For me too, a set of people I wouldn’t directly call ‘friends’ undeniably influenced my time in San Francisco; be it the lady that offered me a free desk in her office after we met only one time; the guy at my favourite sushi place on Castro Street that’d pull out a chair for my leg as he saw me walk in; the lady I see every few weeks for a massage; my skin therapist; the barista’s in different areas of town who make a perfect soy latte with extra foam; the doorman at Twitter & Runway, and so on.
So I decided to spend fifty dollars on roses and go around town for three days to thank just them. It was lovely.
Then on Saturday the people I can luckily call my friends came to Corbett Avenue for a potluck and bittersweet goodbyes. Great time, great place, great city, great people. Social media will do its work.
So long SF, see you soon!
