San Francisco is the most walkable city in the country and it's also known for its unique neighborhoods. I was very interested in walking and exploring the city and I feel like we did a good amount of that.

Our hotel was in the middle of Union Square, which isn't a neighborhood in the residential sense, but was a very interesting part of town. It was very dense and busy and reminded me a lot of Manhattan. There were tons of major stores and diverse people and small restaurants and art galleries and big advertisements. It was pretty neat. Another interesting neighborhood was Chinatown, which wasn't too far away. We walked along the touristy part, which had a lot of intricate accessories as well as some trinkety junk for sale. Then we walked around the more authentic part, which was really busy and had interesting foods on display.

We walked through the Haight, which is famous for some stuff that happened a long time before I was born. To me it just seemed like another vibrant neighborhood. There were a lot of independent stores and restaurants. We spent some time in Amoeba Records as well as in a very small bookstore with way too many books.

Another neat area we walked through was the Mission District. There were some unique stores there, such as the weird pirate store we went into, which wasn't a party store, it was very serious about pirates and had pirate clothes, sea salt, and some books. There was a tub of sand in the middle and there was also a barrel of lard for some reason. There were drawers along the side of the store that had different things. One of them had hair in it. I'm not really sure why.

There was another weird store nearby, which was definitely creepier. It had bins of different kind of animal claws for sale, like badger claws. It also had rodent remains wrapped in foil. I'm not sure why you would buy either of those or how the store obtains those in the first place. It was a strange but very interesting place.

Near our friend's apartment along Clement was a diverse area, which had some things similar to Chinatown but also had a lot of other types of establishments. His neighborhood was three miles or so from downtown but still had a lot of places to walk to. It amazed me that there were so many businesses on each block and that they were all so diverse.

Walking through all of these unique, vibrant neighborhoods made me realize how unique San Francisco is among American cities. It was amazing how dense the city was and how many square miles it covered. It's a huge city and I felt it reached a potential that most cities never dream of. It certainly has its flaws, but its lively neighborhoods make San Francisco a pinnacle of urbanity and one of the few great cities in the country. It's definitely a place that I would like to go back to and experience further.

Here are a few pictures we took in various places throughout the city: