The Eastern Bakery in San Francisco’s Chinatown is a must-see. As the United States’ oldest Chinese bakery (it opened in 1924), Eastern Bakery touts their specialty of moon cakes, a rich, dense lotus-seed paste filled pastry that hungry residents and intrigued tourists stand in line for.

Make no mistake, there is nothing “light” or “healthy” in this bakery – if it isn’t deep fried, its stuffed to the brim with filling or encapsulated in mounds of dough, as evidenced by the Chinese Donut otherwise known as “Jin deui,” a pastry made from glutinous rice flour and filled with lotus paste, black bean paste or red bean paste.

There are many varieties of mooncakes at Eastern Bakery – some are chocolate covered, while others contain egg yolks from salted duck eggs, to which I say, no thank you.

In addition to all the pastries they offer, Eastern Bakery proudly displays then-President Bill Clinton’s visit to their establishment, where he sampled some delicacies himself. The text reads:  “President Bill Clinton came to visit Eastern Bakery on July 23, 1996 from 5:00 to 5:30 p.m. He shook hands with everybody inside our bakery. All of us, our customers and employees were thrilled and it was just like a short, but big, exciting and memorable party!!!”

The service at Eastern Bakery is quicker than at any establishment I’ve ever seen, so if you’re standing in the line that wraps outside the building, fret not – it moves fast. The seating on the other hand is dismal, so plan to eat your snacks along the way.  Lastly, don’t plan on buying a lot, especially if you’re wanting to try the mooncakes, one is enough as I found out the hard way when I bought a mooncake wedge and could only take one bite before pretty much throwing it away. Despite this, Eastern Bakery makes for a great pit stop while you’re walking about the city by the bay.

Four hundred miles north of  Los Angeles sits the city by the bay known as San Francisco -  the city that steals your heart, makes it impossible for you to leave and is everything that L.A should strive to be. Lovely weather, culturally diverse residents and breathtaking houses and architecture make me now firmly believe that the high cost of living is worth it. There is so much character to this place; the buildings, the quaintness of it all, the idea of an orderly and efficient public transportation system ( who would’ve thought?)

How can I forget the cable cars, the world’s last permanently operational manually-operated cable car system. I had never been in one before and it was clear by the slow service and $5 one-way ride fare that it’s of no use to residents of San Francisco.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned how much I love picking out salt water taffy for a custom made bag. It’s such a relaxing, yet exciting activity. Now more than ever, there are so many flavors, that choosing them is so difficult. Caramel apple, cherry cola, gingerbread, tangerine, the list just goes on and on.

San Francisco has the oldest and largest Chinatown in North America. Indeed, it’s brilliant. L.A’s chinatown completely pales in comparison. New York’s Chinatown gives it a run for its money, but still this is an amazing place where you can find all the knick knacks you never knew you wanted, have dim sum at a nearby restaurant  and listen to the sounds of an erhu while you walk through the streets.

Of course, like any city, San Francisco isn’t without its problems, with homelessness and property crime rates higher than the national average, but when you’re in a place called The Palace of the Fine Arts, which looks like it was taken out of Rome and placed in a metropolitan American city and you look across the water and see that there are houses and apartments who wake up to this view every day, and couples walking their dogs along the path and families enjoying a quiet afternoon out, nothing else really matters.

I like San Francisco more than I thought I could. In the short two days I was there, I felt a wave of inspiration that I hadn’t felt in Los Angeles for a long time. I saw myself living and writing there, the only other city besides London that I’ve had that thought about it, and what a nice though it was. I saw that I could actually “get on” with San Francisco, as the British would say. It seems like the perfect blend of the goodness of Los Angeles and London put into one. It was actually pretty depressing to come back to L.A and realize that I had to face freeways and such a sprawling city landscape after a weekend in such a compact city. San Francisco felt like a city of great endeavors, a city where ideas were born and plans came to fruition. On a hilly street in the afternoon, overlooking a crowded Fisherman’s Wharf, where hundreds of thousands had come to watch fireworks,  I looked around and felt like I belonged.

More photos here.