City Lights, Hellbillies, and one thousand pillows

I'm now home safely but for the sake of closure and because I had such a great time in San Francisco yesterday I'm going to post one final time. I had breakfast with one of my roommates, a jolly Californian drifter, before checking out of the hostel. I took a long walk through Chinatown to North Beach and the legendary City Lights bookstore. It wasn't open when I got there so I went into the cafe next door and ordered an orange juice while the old men at the bar were drinking spirits (at 10am). Obviously they were poets congregating for high-minded discourse. The woman at the bar told me "It's okay to just drink orange juice... You know you're in a strange place when orange juice is the odd thing to order for breakfast..." City Lights opened and I spent a good hour perusing the shelves. I had the poetry room to myself for a long time, and eventually bought a couple of small books by Lawrence Ferlinghetti - the beat poet, founder and owner of City Lights since 1954. The man himself walked in the front door as I was standing at the counter and gave me a short smile. I walked back into town and caught the half-hour train to Berkeley. It's home to the original University of California campus and the university pretty much still defines the small town. Down Telegraph Avenue there's a great string of bookstores as well as shops catering to fashion-conscious young socialists and any other subculture you can label. The sidewalk was teeming with students and stalls were set up selling stickers, incense, etc... I found a genuine weirdo shop on a quieter end of the street. It traded equally in pornography and second-hand comic books with a few additional shelves for random junk. There was a rack of DVDs with hand-drawn covers - live recordings of local punk and metal bands. I got talking to the guy who films the shows and draws the covers, and I eventually bought a Hellbillies DVD that came highly recommended (I haven't watched it yet). I also bought a t-shirt printed with one of his designs, and a pack of Garbage Pail Kids stickers from 1987, and I felt strangely comfortable in this shop. In the late afternoon I decided to check out the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) before heading to the airport. It's got a small but interesting collection, starting with modernist paintings on the first floor and getting more conceptual as you climb upwards. I got talking to a German girl while we were standing in front of a big collage made up of butterfly wings and anatomical photographs. We agreed it was disturbing, and walked around the next couple of floors together, talking loudly about the pieces and ignoring dirty glances from the more serious art connoisseurs. Then she said that she had to go downtown in order to join a big public pillow fight that was scheduled for 6pm (it's an annual event). She had her pillow checked in at the gallery cloakroom. I didn't have a pillow but I figured I had to see this, so I went with her. I lost her in the mayhem as soon as the clock struck six, but I stood watching for 20 minutes and it was a truly memorable spectacle. Great clouds of feathers were sent into the air as hundreds of people got stuck into each other - all in good fun - and it was showing no sign of slowing down when I eventually had to leave for the airport. I rode the train with feathers in my hair and was pleased that my trip around the world had been capped off in such a surreal and unexpected way. And so that's it! It's all over! It's been incredible.