Stimulating City

Ten years ago, I came to San Francisco from a boring backwater town in Washington State looking for adventure and new horizons. Including a brief summer tour of Europe in 1999, I've spent those ten years discovering interesting people and ideas I would never otherwise have known.

Engaging in the successful rent-control battle of 2000, and the unsuccessful fight to save New College in 2007, I got to know the City of Love in ways perhaps most new-comers don't. Watching the massive march against war in 2003 from the steps of City Hall, where in 2006 four thousand gay and lesbian marriages were performed by the mayor, stirred my imagination in ways that only San Francisco could.

Dining in a French restaurant recently with my new friends from Hong Kong and Shanghai, I listened to a native San Franciscan recount growing up in the Mission in the 1930s, when the now Latino-populated district was home to mostly Irish-Americans. Whatever one might say about Fog City, it's never boring, and despite all its flaws, it's the place I now consider home.