Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Swap, Meet
“
Free trade
is a contradiction of terms.” So goes a mantra of the
Really Really
Free Market
(www.reallyreallyfree.org),
which meets once a month in Dolores
Park. Consider it a freegan fantasia—bring useful items, food, or skills and use
them to share or trade for other people's useful items or services. It's that sim-
ple. Meet days have a breezy, hippy energy, with folks playing music, sitting in
the sun, and generally being neighborly, although the wares tend heavily toward
clothing. It's not the kind of event that you have to bring something to in order
to feel part of things. It's as much about making friends as it is about making
trades. The market is held on the last Saturday of each month; consult its web-
site to find the hours.
Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy
(Building 201, Fort Mason;
%
415/
561-3000; www.parksconservancy.org)
is a group that supports the major National
Parks Service-maintained sights around town: Alcatraz, Fort Point, Golden Gate
National Recreation Area, Muir Woods, and Presidio. Locals love their parks, and
they're outdoorsy sorts, so several times a week, there's a program planned across
the city. Sometimes it's volunteering to garden somewhere like Crissy Field or on
Alcatraz, sometimes it's more for pleasure, such as a free afternoon of off-pier
crabbing at Fort Point. It also puts together arresting arts exhibition, such as a
recent display of optical-illusion art by Chris Hardman at the Presidio's Officers
Club. Check the online calendar or pick up a
Park Adventures
booklet at any of
the visitor centers of the above parks.
A STROLL THROUGH JAPANTOWN
San Francisco's Chinatown is famous. Everybody who visits town ends up dipping
his toes, at least for a few minutes, in the shops of Grant Avenue and Stockton
Street. Most tourists aren't told, though, that over the past generation, many
Chinese residents have pulled up stakes and moved their homes to western dis-
tricts of the city, Richmond and Sunset. Many of the Chinese people you'll see in
so-called Chinatown are, in fact, visitors themselves, which is why the buses are
so crowded in this part of town.
There's another enclave of Asian culture, though, plenty close to the central
sights of town, that many tourists don't know about, despite the fact that it's right
under their noses and all but served up on a platter. It's
Japantown
(www.sfjapan
town.org),
which for most of the 20th century has been a hub for Japanese life,
food, and culture. A visit here is a lot less frenetic than one to Chinatown. What's
more, there are only two other Japantowns of note in America: in Los Angeles and
in nearby San Jose.
Although the city has hosted a Japanese population since around 1860, it wasn't
until the 1906 quake, when many of them were forced from their homes by
fire, that so many of them settled in this part of town, known as the Western
Addition. By 1968, the city has cleared a 5-acre, 3-square-block parcel of land
