California Dreaming

Bye Bye, California,

Untill we meet again!!!

Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair

San Francisco is the city you wish you lived in, back in the sixties. As we enter the city over the Golden Gate Bridge - after the world known fog is gone - we see a vivid, colorful town, with beautiful districts and amazing views on the bay area as soon as you drive up in a street somewhere.

This is a city that feels like a whole different world, very distinct from everything we experienced along the way.

We visited the Berkeley area, which had a strong protest movement back in the sixties; Make Love not War and ..One, Two, Three, What are we fighting for?? - against the war in Vietnam - but it is still a very young (it has the University of California) and openminded, critical neighbourhood. We walked the famous Telegraph Avenue and saw some real characters; old men selling pamphlets, wearing hippie-sunclasses with peacesigns ingraved, or defending the right to buy and sell California Cannabis.

The Haight-Ashbury district is amazing; I could see myself living there; among the houses of Janis Joplin, The Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and Jefferson Airplane; those beautiful, magnificant Victorian Houses, that catch your imagination the minute you see them. After some Ginger and Lemon Tea (a tea I discovered here in the Bay Area, it's great) on the porch, I would go for a stroll down the Golden Gate Park or the Panhandle; the area where all the big concerts where and the Human Be In; the gathering of tribes, the first gathering of the hippie-generation. Of course I would have to try some LSD (I would have no other choice), 'to discover', as Diane from the Ace of Cups told me, 'my own human nature, which makes me want to take of my clothes, because that's not human, what is that, I don't know', and to become a true spiritual entity; body and soul. As you can see, I am becoming a neo-hippie. And I don't even walk bare-footed..