23 Dec Haight Ashbury

San Francisco as a city is best represented through the small neighbourhoods, each with their own character, history and distinguishing features. Haight Ashbury captures how I imagined San Francisco would look in the 1960s and it’s possibly my favourite neighbourhood in the whole city. My friend Mathilde lives in Lower Haight so it gives me a perfect excuse to go there every week, much to my wallet’s distress.

Here are some of my top places in Haight:

• Buffalo Exchange – a vintage shop with decent affordable prices! I have found some of my favourite pieces of clothing here, including a pair of farmer dungarees for only $20. The selection is incredibly good, and it’s the only place that I’ve found where the prices don’t make you want to cry.
• Topdrawer – a small stationary shop with fancy notebooks, pens, and photo albums. My favourite are a series of notebooks with famous book covers on so that you can pretend that you are reading Darwin’s Origin of the Species in public.
• Piedmont Boutique – a costume and disco shop which captures the 80s perfectly. They sell big chunky colourful earrings for anywhere from $1 – $4, meaning that I now own maybe 10 new pairs that I definitely didn’t need. It’s perfect for browsing for funky costumes too.
• Amoeba Records – if you love music then you will love Amoeba Records with its huge warehouse room of vinyls, cds, merchandise, and even cassette tapes! I have inherited my dad’s old tape collection and am constantly trying to add to it so this place is like a dream.