On the Friday of the dead week, I finally went to the famous Mission Street in San Francisco with my high school friend. I always wanted to go there seeing many photos taken at Mission Street by my artsy friends on Instagram. The photos showed many beautiful mural paintings and I felt a bit more strongly than usual the urge to remember to go to the place one day. Ironically, that day I finally made to Mission Street was the Friday of the dead week, one of the busiest days of the semester.
We took bart to get to Mission. The farthest I got on bart was till the Civic Center station so I never knew there was station literally named as “16th St Mission.” Our first destination was Four Barrel cafe. The cafe was so pretty and nice “inside out”. By “inside out”, I mean the appearance and the taste of coffee, respectively. The cafe had a special kind of ambience. I would like to call it, “raw aesthetics.” It was mostly brownish and blackish all around. There was a sense of ruggedness to the kind of feeling that we got from looking around the cafe. The whole space was pretty large, including a small factory place at the back of the cafe where the process of coffee beans is done. That raw kind of feeling was well-matched with the small factory place and the coffee-bean machine that were taking up the half of the cafe space. Everything was pretty boundless and open. People could watch the factory over their wooden coffee tables. There were several art pieces hang on one side of a wall and they all were geometric shapes. The cafe had that distinct sort of a raw beauty.
Second place we went was the coolest thrift shop I have ever been to. The shop’s name is NO. The name is simple and strange so I wonder what would be the meaning behind its name. There were lots of nostalgic yet still-fashionable used clothes. The clothes were unique in their own styles that I felt like I could take them all to my closet. The clothes were special fashion pieces that a person can not easily find in common clothing stores in shopping districts. I finally entered the world of thrift shops and I am sure my start is a very special and good one. I did not buy any because I wanted to be extra-careful and make the best choice of my life and also because I wanted to have an excuse to visit the shop once again. My friend got unique pastel-orange flannel.
After getting out of NO, we went to a series of many other cool thrift shops that were on the walk along Mission Street and took some rest at the Dolores Park as the end of our journey. Mission imbued with creative spirit that comes from so many thrift shop that seemed like telling each one of them’s own unique stories. There were so many delicious things too. The Four Barrel coffee and the hand-made ice cream we brought to the park were the best. Mission was so uniquely cool and it urged the people there to be like that too. It was not only a place of everything but also a place of niche. Everyone should go to Mission at one time of their lives and find their own niche coolness. Mission is the place of self-discovery and self-exploration.
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