One of the best ways to meet the locals is on public transportation. A friend of mine makes a point to always ride public transit when he travels, even if only once during his trip. He says you get a much better exposure to the local people by doing this.
I have started doing this and never regretted it. Granted, there are some circumstances when you do not want to be stuck on public transit, but the opportunity to be among the local people is one of the things I love about travel. During a trip to San Francisco, we purchased a three-day Muni Passport. This gives you unlimited rides on any of the Muni system transport: cable cars, buses and streetcars.
The cable cars bring out the kid in me. I remember riding the cable car when I was about six and the brakeman let me ride right up by the grip handle. The clang of the bell takes me right back to childhood. Needless to say, riding the cable cars, and riding them a lot, was high on my list for this visit to SF. Since cable car fare is $6 each way, $29 for the three-day passport was a bargain.
The passport also provided an easy way to get where we wanted to go in the city. We were renting a place where Chinatown meets Little Italy, which meant we were walking distance from a lot of the tourist attractions. Despite its hills, San Francisco is a very walkable city. Still, when time, temperature or energy levels made us want to not walk, the Muni was an easy way to get where we wanted to go and it gave us a way to meet new people. For example, we met a very nice lady on our way to the conservatory of flowers and spent part of the afternoon with her.
While riding, we saw restaurants to try, galleries to visit, shops to return to, and reflected on how much we miss when preoccupied with the act of self-transportation. By and large, the Muni system is well run, reasonably clean and safe, and a convenient way to move about San Francisco. Having said that, sometimes you do have a travel experience classified more as “adventure” than “enjoyment.” Our bus trip to the BART station on our last morning was one of these.
I am a proponent of flying early, because I think early flights are less likely to get delayed. This meant in the early hours of a Wednesday morning, we were boarding a bus to get ourselves and our luggage to the BART station to travel to the airport.
During our visit, as we walked around the city, we saw a large number of people digging through streetside recycle bins, looking for redeemable cans and bottles. It seemed that every single on of these people was elderly and Chinese. In saying this, I am not trying to stereotype. Remember, we were staying on the edge of Chinatown. Lots of the people we saw were Chinese: Shopkeepers, cops, bus drivers… it’s an ethnic community. However, as we walked through San Francisco, exploring and adventuring, there seemed to always be an elderly Chinese person picking out bottles and cans somewhere nearby.
We frequently saw the same people late at night and again in the morning when we headed out for coffee. On this last, very early, morning, we arrived at the bus stop and found a collection of these industrious recyclers. Each of them had a huge bag of recycling. These bags were easily the size of 55-gallon drums. One fellow had two giant bags, and a pole over his shoulder balancing the two bags while he walked.
When the bus stopped, the driver, also Chinese, limited how many of the recyclers could get on the bus at that stop. And at the next stop. And the next. After about five stops, the bus was absolutely crammed with recycling. At every stop after that, our driver started calling out, “No more recycling! No more recycling!” If you have ever been to a recycling center, you know the peculiar pungency unwashed soda cans produce en masse. It was a few days before my nose forgot the experience of that particular bus ride.
Nonetheless, this adventure was as much bemusing as it was stinky, and became one of my San Francisco stories. The Muni Passport was an excellent part of our trip to San Francisco.
La Vida Local 