Holy Crap Holy Crap San Francisco!

San Francisco has welcomed me with open arms. It is more than I could have anticipated, although certainly I had great expectations to begin with. To my luck, my first couch surfing experience just happened to be at the couch surfing headquarters, consisting of two communally occupied attached apartments with 16 people living, working, and loving together. They are all well travelled and talented lovely people and it has been a blessing to take part in their community. (I'll be doing a video tour of this house tomorrow)

The first night I arrived, I was fortunate enough to instantly be thrown in to a good-bye party for one of their members Mandy, who was moving to their other headquarters in Istanbul. She was a lovely girl, wearing a moustache most of the evening and having the best time someone could have while saying goodbye to her loved ones for 4 months (while she was packing, I managed to score a blue cashmere sweater off her that she was leaving behind...h'amazing!)

Anyways, at this party I happened to make friends quite quickly with a girl named Yoshi, who has just moved to San Francisco on a whim from Los Angeles, and through her couch surfing friend landed a room in an artist activist collective down the street called Million Fishes,

to which I promptly invited myself over for dinner the next evening.

This winery-turned artist living/work space was one of the most inspiring, beautiful places of inspiration and community I've ever seen, (besides the Couch surfing house just down the street). 16 people of all different artistic backgrounds, singers, painters, designers, actors, dj's, you name it, all existing under one roof, all with their own studio spaces, and to top it all off, their very own personal storefront gallery to host shows and events, and possibly soon enough a cafe space.

I spent the evening teaching everyone my favourite game, broken telephone pictionary, and we followed it up with brownies and beer and Brazil. It was magical. You can see Yoshi and Damon, aka baby cobra, giving me the grand tour in three parts below (the place is so big I had to do it in three parts!) I would love lovve to recreate this amazing community back here in Toronto.

A few things I noted that made this group successful:

--Nearly everyone had full time, pretty well paying jobs that helped keep things running.

--They had a schedule of chores and responsibilities within the house that seemed to me for the most part they kept to pretty strictly.

--The house was big enough to accommodate that amount of people, with several communal spaces and lots of individual work spaces to help balance out private and communal time quite well.

--Nearly all the bedrooms have raised beds, to make more space for desk space and personal space.

Overall it was one of the most inspiring places I've ever had the privilege to experience, and I hope one day the DCC or the About Face Collective can match its ambition.

(You can see some photos from a Million Fishes on my Facebook, I've found the process of uploading photos onto blogspot too long and tedious to endure for every posting)