San Francisco can be surprising in unfortunate ways sometimes. For an urban center, an amazing amount of historic buildings in the city remain intact. You can walk down some streets in this town and every house on the block is the same one that was there a hundred years ago.

So you’ve got that big trip to South America coming up but you haven’t really spoken anything but Drunken Taqueria Spanish since freshman year of college. Which means you know enough Spanish to navigate your way around say, San Diego, but it probably won’t do you much good in somewhere

I love me an overstuffed bookshelf but let’s face it, books are pricey (especially new ones) and storage space lacking.  So, the library it is.  Don’t get me wrong, I really love the library: its musty smell, its quiet’”it’s a core-of-society kind of place’”plus remember what a rite of passage