I spent a few days in the Bay Area and relied almost entirely on public transport. These are a few observations that may be useful to other visitors.
Commuting without a car
I stayed near San Jose Airport, a short walk from the Metro/Airport VTA light rail station. For someone without a car, this turned out to be an excellent location. The VTA light rail network made it easy to get around San Jose, Santa Clara, Milpitas, Mountain View, and beyond.
Buying tickets is straightforward. Credit cards work at station vending machines, and the Token Transit app lets you buy day passes. Ticket inspections seemed rare during my visit, but public transport is inexpensive enough that it hardly seems worth gambling on.
The VTA trains attract a fairly diverse crowd, including the occasional homeless person or addict. I travelled as late as 11 PM without incident, but, as in any city, situational awareness is a good idea.
The Bay Area's public transport system is really three systems stitched together. VTA light rail serves much of Santa Clara County. Caltrain connects San Jose, Mountain View, Palo Alto, and San Francisco's peninsula. BART serves the East Bay, San Francisco, and the SFO airport. Once you understand how these systems connect, getting around without a car becomes surprisingly easy.
I used Uber only twice during the trip. The rest of the time I relied on trains, buses, and walking. Walking turned out to be more practical than I expected. Distances that look intimidating on a map are often manageable, especially in Palo Alto and Mountain View.
The Bay Area
Palo Alto and Mountain View both have lively downtowns. Palo Alto benefits from its proximity to Stanford and has a distinctly academic feel. Mountain View's Castro Street is livelier in the evenings and perhaps a little less polished.
One of the highlights of the trip was Bell's Books in Palo Alto. It is one of those increasingly rare bookstores where browsing is an intellectual activity in its own right. During a short visit I spotted textbooks on classical mechanics, relativity, cryptography, algorithms, and mathematical physics. Had baggage limits not been a concern, I could easily have left with far more books than I intended.
Another discovery was Streetlight Records in San Jose, which has an impressive collection of CDs and vinyl records. Both stores reward unhurried browsing. I picked up three classic vinyls - Wish You Were Here (Pink Floyd), So Far (CSNY) and the blue album (The Beatles) for a pretty good deal, at half the price of what they'd go for in India, or less.
Food
Food was more variable. I found some places excellent, others merely adequate given the price. Dish Dash and Dish n Dash are reliable options for Middle Eastern food. Banana Leaf in Milpitas was a standout. Oklava Cafe in Palo Alto and Cafe Baklava in Mountain View offered good desserts and coffee. Oren's Hummus was decent, although the sabbich sandwich was less memorable than I had hoped. Maggiano (Santana Row) and Il Fornaio (Westin, San Jose) are safe bets for Italian - with the former serving some memorable desserts.
San Francisco
A day trip into San Francisco was easily the most enjoyable part of the visit. Starting at the Ferry Building and walking north through North Beach makes for an excellent introduction to the city. The waterfront provides views of the Bay, while North Beach retains enough character to feel like a real neighborhood rather than a tourist attraction. I had limited epicurean forays into the city given the short time window that I had to cover it, but Stella Pastry's sacripantina and pear tarts were the memorable highlights post the lunch at the humble The Italian Homemade Company.
I spent some time in both City Lights and Bell's Books. The contrast was interesting. City Lights is historically significant and intellectually adventurous, with a strong emphasis on literature, politics, and countercultural thought. Bell's felt a bit more aligned with my own interests in science, mathematics, engineering, and computing but shares some overlap with City Lights. Both are worth visiting, but for very different reasons.
Impressions
Overall, the Bay Area struck me as a place where intellectual curiosity is unusually visible. Bookstores carry serious technical titles. Conversations drift easily between startups, research, music, politics, and food. It is expensive, occasionally underwhelming, and not always convenient. Yet it remains one of the few places where one can spend a morning discussing distributed systems, an afternoon browsing mathematical physics texts, and an evening listening to live music over coffee.
Footnotes
1. The area I lived in is served by the common segment of the Blue and Green Lines of the Light Rail. From here, to head to Milpitas, like the Great Mall or to Mountain View or Palo Alto, you need to take the Orange Line of the Light Rail. So you would typically get down at Baypointe (Blue Line) or Champion (Green Line) and take the train towards Alum Rock for Milpitas, or towards Mountain View.
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