Tour de Sunset

San Francisco can seem more like a constellation of neighborhoods, rather than a big city like London or Singapore. Wander down a street in Chinatown, filled with asian iconography, and by the end you can be transported to North Beach with its Italianate decoration and european cuisine.

The Sunset district - just south of golden gate park, from UCSF to the ocean - can feel like a suburb, far away from the glass-clad boxes in the busy downtown, where bankers march to the beat of ticking clocks.

Today I went on a short bike ride to revisit some of my favourite places.

The Japanese Tea gardens near the 9th Avenue entrance to Golden Gate park is a peaceful retreat from the city, along with being the oldest public Japanese garden in the United States.

The Dutch Windmill was built in 1903 to pump water from underground wells that had been dug. Previous to this, large amounts of water were piped in at great expense to transform the barren sand dunes of the 1870s into productive farms. While electric pumps developed a decade later did make the Windmill obsolete, the city has always considered it a bit of a tourist attraction, being the world’s largest mill.

The Pacific Ocean makes the western edge of the Sunset District, and here we can see the view north towards the Richmond District and the Marin Headlands beyond that. While the water is too cold for most people to want to swim in without a wet suit, it does make a very pleasant weekend spot to relax, BBQ, or exercise.

Cycling back home to the inner sunset and the 9th Avenue shops we can find the Arizmendi Bakery. Cousin to the famous CheeseBoard in Berkeley, excellent breads and baked goods are available; the flat bread pizza is especially good after a nice ride through the park.

In the next post, I will show a few other local shops you can find in the Sunset.