Ever since I moved to San Francisco as a 24-year-old in 2017, I religiously attended the pub crawls hosted by Crawl SF on Polk Street. For about $15 you can get access to a wristband that gets you cheap drinks across 20 or so different bars along the Polk Gulch corridor. It was a great excuse to explore new bars and neighborhoods (and get unceremoniously trashed). In March of 2020, I was eagerly awaiting the St. Patrick’s Day Bar Crawl until… the pandemic struck.
Doors shuttered, bars closed, and nightlife in San Francisco was put on hold. I felt like life was paused. The summer saw some boozy outdoor picnics with a small bubble of Covid-safe friends, but nothing of the likes of the debauchery seen pre-Covid. So when Crawloween 2021 was announced in the post-vaccine era, I was naturally excited to reignite the tradition.
My friends and I started early in the day, raiding McTeague’s Saloon in our matching Kirkland sweaters. At first, it was just us and a few Squid Game contestants, giant bananas, and the like. Was the city still dead? We reached Trade Routes bar in the afternoon and were soon swarmed by hundreds of costumed revelers. We were squeezed inside a tiny corner in the bar sipping our cocktails, pressed against early-20-somethings talking about their NFT portfolios. This was NOT the bar crawl I remembered. Polk Street bar crawls were always crowded affairs but for some reason, this one felt different. We ended up retreating back to my apartment to drink and play board games. But it was a weird feeling, what happened to the Polk Street crawl?
This wasn’t the only unsettling experience in my post-vaccine adventures. My nights out at my favorite bars have felt different too. Li Po Lounge is one of my favorite bars in San Francisco. It’s a Chinatown dive bar that dates back to 1937 with a dangerous Chinese Mai Tai (as Anthony Bourdain will tell you). Pre-covid it was a favorite spot of mine, a lively spot that never felt overwhelming. Now? It feels exceptionally crowded on the weekends, with barely enough room to sit, let alone stand.
What happened? Going out is still a blast, but things feel different from what I remember. Then, the scariest thought dawned on me: am I getting old? When the pandemic started, I was 26. Lockdown and quarantine felt like a sudden time warp to 28. Am I getting too old for nights out?
Nonsense! 28 is still young. But two full years had still passed. The pandemic had made me feel like life was paused and I imagined going out as going back to continue where I had left off in March 2020. But life hadn’t frozen. And I was reminded of that by the crowds I saw when I went out. Before, I was used to being one of the youngest ones in the room. In what felt like a shock, suddenly I’m not. I never got the chance to ease into it, I went from feeling young to feeling… old.
It was also another reminder that I’ve been living in the city for a while. Before, everything was brand new. My friends and I felt like intrepid explorers, marking places on the map to come back to another time. The pandemic meant we couldn’t return to our favorite spots. Coming back with fresh eyes though, I realized that my favorite places aren’t so new anymore.
After getting vaccinated, I was trying to make up for lost time, continuing from where I had left off. But it was impossible, times have changed and people too. The best thing I could do is accept that things are different and focus on the present instead of grasping at memories of the pre-covid days.
In order to do that I decided to go along with the change, starting with my Saturday night spots. Even though I’ve been in San Francisco for 5 years, the city is still huge and there are tons of places I haven’t explored. With Google Map pins and EaterSF in hand, I went to work marking all the places that had been on my radar and in neighborhoods I hadn’t explored: the Haight, South Mission, the Tenderloin, and more. Suddenly, the number of places to discover overwhelmed my favorite spots.
Over the past few months, I’ve gotten the chance to put the map to action by exploring bars and restaurants that are brand new to me. At first, it felt weird going out beyond the places I normally call home. But instead of trying to relive past memories, I’ve created incredible new ones with friends.
The Halloween Bar Crawl was a stark reminder that things have changed. I had been trying to grasp at memories from the time before Covid, but those are long gone. We really are now living in the new normal. Instead of trying to focus on the past, I’ve decided to make new memories in the present.