SF Has Tie-Dyed.

Being a tour guide in San Francisco is like describing the color and pattern of a tie-dye shirt.

There is a lot going on and a lot of ways to get lost.

The red dye could be the ever-present tech companies, with new skyscrapers and HQs and condominiums for workers all being built on silt. These companies that manage platforms in the digital world and have visibly altered the skyline.

The blue color could be the variety and diversity of the neighborhoods. However dwindling they might be, there are so many different styles of buildings and different languages on storefronts.

The yellow could represent our beginnings as a gold rush town, only 170 years old and filled with history.

But, mixed with the red, you can see how the yellow could also be a representation of San Francisco as a place for entrepreneurs, innovators, hustlers, and fortune-seekers. As well as all the gross vicissitudes accompanying that greed.

Working for Dylan’s Tours gave me the freedom to show a unique aspect of San Francisco. Like a kaleidoscope. As a native, I made my best attempt to share as many angles of the City as I could.

I laughed when hearing the tone-deaf scripts of the guides on double-decker tour buses passing by. One specifically good laugh reserved for the sleeping tourist with his face pinned against the window next to us at a stoplight.

“Never a dull moment” would be a mantra on my tours. Whether they were via bus, bike, or electric tuk-tuk. This is similar to saying “Heads Up” when something is falling towards someones head. It is self-manifesting even though I intend the opposite. Even though I might get bored of repeating the height of the Golden Gate Bridge (200 feet from water to platform, 500 feet from platform to top of the tower), I took pride in describing the City to people with pre-conceived notions of how to experience it. It was an opportunity to provoke curiosity.

That’s why being a tour guide is two-sided: I work during others vacation and yet I get to be a source of fun during work, again, as part of a vacation.

Depends on the side of sausage you bite from that day I suppose.

“Never a dull moment” — be it old men over espressos arguing in Italian at a sidewalk cafe on Columbus, or a produce delivery worker blocking traffic in Chinatown, or a worker flying down the Embarcadero on a motorized big tired unicycle looking as nonchalant as someone getting their shoes shined on Market Street.

“Never a dull moment”- it could be sitting in traffic and watching two homeless people selling lamps and dishwashing detergent to find their next fix. Quite the change in neighborhoods from the top of Nob Hill to the Tenderloin bottom.

Other themes on the tour are the weather and the parks. The weather, like the neighborhoods, can change within a block. Because the City sits on a peninsula, and has over 40 hills, the Ocean breeze causes lots of variation in temperature. To live in San Francisco is to learn how to layer your clothing, regardless of time of year.

People show up in the summer in ‘Fogust’ and expect Cali beach weather- for this reason the standard ‘San Francisco’ souvenir sweatshirts do very well. When we ride through neighborhoods and see shop signs in Chinese, restaurants making Indian, and Mexican, and Ethiopian food, when we see the variety of humankind going about their day, then visitors get to feel San Francisco’s melting pot. We believe all this variety adds to the City, to our culture, our well-being, our economy.

Our parks do the same. Because the City has a Gold-Rush, frontier beginning, ruthless fortune-seekers came here to hustle and make money. The parks quiet scenery, beautiful gardens, green space for picnics and paddle-boating and bike-riding provide a respite to the more daunting effects of a City. With Golden Gate Park we get to take in a beautiful example of humankind’s ability to alter its environment. Before development of the ‘Outerlands’ began, the whole area comprised of wind swept sand dunes.

Now there are Monterrey Cyprus, eucalyptus, and Redwood trees in the 3 miles of park. Countless gardens and glens and hollows. A bison paddock, casting pools, an archery range, horse stables, soccer and baseball fields, tennis and squash courts, a 9 hole public golf course, a disc golf course. It is all a testament to the diligent cultivation of this green space by the City’s landscapers.

Even though our streets have a grid design, no one walks a straight path. This is the place where Carol Doda performed the first topless dance at the Condor Club, where beatniks and hippies used grass and LSD to imagine a new way of life, where sailors in the 1850’s had to worry about their whiskey being laced with laudanum so captains could re-stock ships abandoned by men who flocked to the Gold Rush. Where Navy men who ‘didn’t quite fit in’ were ecstatic to get dropped off at Treasure Island.

The contemporary tales of this City are now even more like a tie-dye shirt… because the essence of San Francisco has been commoditized, packaged, sold in hard metallic angles and modern design, built with a sense of place developed by someone staring at a screen all day to someone else doing the same.