Having finally seen it first-hand, it makes complete sense why real estate is so expensive in San Francisco; it's quite possibly the most beautiful American city I've ever seen and it's pretty damn small. You've got a lot of people that want to live in a finite landmass, which basically represents the two central forces that drive real estate values; space and demand. (I guess it takes being in a place like San Francisco to really see it tangibly.)

You can go on and on about how you'd never, ever live in a town where $1,000 rents were the norm. But until you've spent a weekend there, until you see the views from the Golden Gate Bridge, until you get lost in the immense gorgeousness of Golden Gate Park, until you spend a Saturday afternoon in Wine Country when the weather is so perfect don't even notice it, you can't honestly say that. I would literally need to double my salary to live as comfortably there as I do in Chicago, but I'll be damned if, as I was walking around Fisherman's Wharf and North Beach districts before I had to catch my flight back home, all I could think about was how I wanted to live there. No matter the cost.

Chicago's great. I've loved this town since the minute I got here over two years ago. But San Fran is a whole different level of urban delight. The culture, the views, the history, the vibrancy, the Victorian charm and the laid-back vibe of its people are all one thing. To top it off with the fact that it NEVER SNOWS (considering the winter we just got through and apparently aren't even really done with yet), I couldn't help but wonder what the hell I was still doing in Chicago while others were out here living this kind of life.

Sure, maybe this is merely a response to having just undergone the most grueling and unpleasant Midwestern winter in my memory. But I honestly doubt it. I guarantee I could go there in June or September — the two best Chicago months weather-wise — and still feel the same way.

With that in mind, here are some random observations on the city:

For starters, one of the first things I noticed was they have public bathrooms in the downtown areas, which is something I've always been annoyed they didn't have here. I mean, what a novel concept, to have public restrooms in a city of four million people. Sure, it costs quite a bit of money to keep them clean and functioning. But considering the number of times I've seen and heard about vagrants doing the deed in public here, AND, the number of times I myself have been stuck in the middle of the city without a place to go, I think it's something worth looking into. Besides, this city has wasted much more money on far less competent endeavors in its past.

Dig this: The BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) cars are carpeted! And they're not actually soaked in urine (or at least they don't smell like it).

There are quite a few homeless people, especially in the Civic Center and Tenderloin districts (btw, isn't the Tenderloin one of the most hilarious names for a inner city skid row there could be?). But they're a different breed of homeless people than what you find in Chicago. During my time in San Fran I was never once accosted by one of them. Nobody asked me for so much as a penny. In downtown Chicago, you can't go 30 feet without somebody hitting you up for some spare change.

They seemed a little more dignified than Chicago bums, and they certainly weren't as needy. They weren't hustling, they weren't begging. It's like they have either chosen not to participate in society the way the rest of us do, or our society turned our backs on them and, instead of pleading for our help to get back in the game, they're just like "well, fuck you then," and they go on scratching out their subterranean existences without our assistant.

There's also the fact that it's such a liberal city that it rarely cracks down on its open-air drug market (which is, oddly enough, smack dab in the middle of the city's civic district). So I bet many were so sufficiently stoned that they were too dazed to bother anybody.

Then there's the Haight Ashbury, which is a far cry from what it used to be in the late 1960s. Sure, you're still got some modern day hippies floating around, but things aren't nearly as grimy as they used to be. Haight itself is mostly lined with trendy clothing boutiques, bars and cafes. Hell, at the actual intersection of Haight and Ashbury there's a Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream shop. Really revolutionary stuff.

I guess that's how commercialism goes. It takes an area that used to be the epitome of the counter culture, and over the years it homogenizes it to look like every other "hip" intersection in an American city. Before long it'll have a Chipotle and a Starbucks across from each other.

Still, though, it's a unique place, if more for the interesting characters that frequent it than the actual buildings and stores.

Golden Gate Park is amazing. And it's massive. I thought I was going to walk all the way through it until I realized the damn thing was four miles long. I spent two hours there and only saw maybe an eighth of it. It's one of the few parks left in a major urban area where you can get truly lost. It also may be the best park to take a nap in I've ever been to.

Also, just upon entering it, I saw what was the most obvious weed deal made in public I've ever seen before. Some middle aged Asian guy wearing regular street clothes walked up to a young hippie looking guy with raggedy clothes, dread locks, etc. and just straight up asked him if he had anything. The hippie said "sure," grabbed something from his pocket, reached out and made the exchange in mid day light in a city park in front of about 50 people and with a cluster of cops no less than 100 yards away. Nobody acted as if anything out of the ordinary had just occurred. As I walked past I almost turned back and asked, “dude, did you really just do what I think you did right in the middle of all these fucking people?" You pull a stunt like that in front of 50 people in Grant or Millennium Park and you'll wind up in cuffs.

Wine Country was pure paradise. It’s not nearly as windy up there, so the temperatures are usually about 8 to 12 degrees warmer than they are in San Fran, which means it’s absolutely perfect. It’s funny how the best weather is weather you don’t even notice. There’s no breeze, no humidity, no clouds, it’s not hot, it’s not cold, it’s just … perfect.

The one thing that did surprise me though, as we were heading back down Highway 29 towards the city, was that there weren’t any highway patrolmen lined up along the road to pull over all the drunk drivers.

And so I suppose if I could make one general statement about what I found so endearing about the city — or maybe just the West Coast in general — was the people just seemed to operate with much more ease. People weren’t honking their horns in traffic. Bums weren’t on the hustle. Cops weren’t busting your balls. It was awesome.

But, just like everything else, it comes at a cost. If it didn’t, we’d all live there.