Neighborhoods in SF

GH's birthday yesterday. We planned an easy day, lunch in a park overlooking the city, and dinner at Ideale, which he had tried unsuccessfully twice to get in. In the morning we shopped in Haight-Ashbury. The neighborhood has completed the process of gentrification that I saw starting two years ago. I bought two nice fitting shirts at the boutique Villains. We looked around the shop aptly called Creepy Crawly Things. We bought lunch at a deli and supermarket, and walked up Buena Vista Park. On top, four hippy-looking young people, two guys and two girls, had parked themselves at the best view. The two girls were doing yoga on the circular lawn. One said that they should form a sundial.

We walked down the hill to Castro, and enjoyed the relaxed Friday atmosphere. Then we went to the downtown architecture bookshop William Stout. I read in the store a book of photography about Louis Sullivan. The extracts from Kindergarten Chats combined uncompromising individualism and spiritual democracy. GH loves Peter Zumthor's writing, and so I bought his Thinking Architecture for him. I want to read it too.

Dinner at Ideale in North Beach was good but not outstanding. We went to the bar Rebel to meet his friend, who drove us to watch his friend fo a shower show at Truck, another gay bar. The two shower boys were ripped but the shower stood poorly lit in a negligible corner of the bar. The friend drove us to Club Dragon in SoMA, where GH and I had a good time dancing. It was not as crowded as I remembered it.

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