08 Dec Beautiful Oakland

Oakland is a pretty excellent place. I’ve made a few friends who live over there, in the year that I’ve been here now, but haven’t made nearly enough of an effort to get over there and experience all the cool things it has to offer. There’s an incredible amount of character on the other side of the bay, and the few times I have been over have been nothing short of excellent.

My most memorable Oakland experience was probably attending a friend’s dining event in a community garden called Bottoms Up. She runs a small catering company that puts on pop up events in different, outdoor locations every few months. The evenings normally host about 30 people and involve a few, Southern Italian courses paired with very awesome wines. She really makes an effort to embrace the character of each location the dinners are held, and this was particularly effective for the one set in Oakland, since the town itself, along with the community garden and the people who run it, have so much. Also, since it is a garden, she was able to use its own produce in some of the courses. Everyone had an excellent time.

The guys that run that garden are some of the coolest I’ve met since I arrived in California. Along with simply being interesting and fun to be around, they had pretty well-developed, positive, and productive perspectives on life, what they wanted out of it, and how they saw themselves fitting into the grand scheme of things. They were passionate about the garden and growing beautiful, organic produce, and their lives were very much centered around it. They were also much more down to earth (excuse the pun) than some of the people I’ve met in SF.

Oakland has a distinctly different feel from San Francisco. You hear a lot of people in SF harking back to the time before gentrification and the tech boom, proclaiming how different and how much cooler it was then. It’s all a matter of perspective, and while I certainly don’t have any significant gripes with this excellent city, but if there is a difference, I feel that Oakland has perhaps held on to and developed some of those ‘cooler’ elements that those people are referring to. Either way, Oakland is an excellent place and definitely has its own vibe. Please check it out some time.