Having been a local of the South Bay for the past decade or so, I’ve recently been pondering: What are the most interesting spots here? Now, there’s what I perceive as the popular perception: This region is known across the nation as that zany, techy, startup land overflowing with Googles, Zuckerbergs, nap pods in rainbow-painted offices and (unequally distributed) dollar signs.

But I think Silicon Valley can be a little more interesting than that, so here I’ve spotlighted a sneak peak of the travel guide to Millie’s Silicon Valley. Obviously, it’s based purely on my highly subjective experience, but it’s also hopefully at least a little illuminating:

Stanford University

Besides the fact that I actually attend this school, and besides the fact that Stanford is one of the top universities in the world … you should visit because this campus is hella photogenic. It’s as normal for Stanford to be infected with sunshine, squirrels and cheerful Taco Bell architecture as it is for San Francisco to be cold and foggy. Stanford’s generic (but still cool) tour path is to watch the sun glint off Memorial Church, strike a pose with the angsty Rodin sculptures, feel the camaraderie of the Asian tourists and the students whizzing by on their bikes, etc., etc.

But I’d recommend something to make your visit be extra unique (or, well, slightly off the beaten path, really): Roll down one of those grassy mounds in the School of Engineering, stand at the Circle of Death during passing period and watch bikers narrowly avoid collisions; lie in the center of Lake Lagunita (don’t worry, it’s not a lake, but rather a gorgeous dirt pit) to get in sync with Stanford’s heartbeat.

99 Ranch Market (or Lion City, if you’re more hardcore)

Warning: This may not be the most classic, Instagrammable tourist experience.

There are a ton of Asian immigrants and American-born Asians in the Bay Area, and with the Asian comes the culture. I’ve visited some of the more Chinese restaurants and markets and such, and I could recommend you to try some hot pot, or Din Tai Fung or boba – but the real experience, my friends, is in the Chinese supermarkets. Being unable to read any of the food’s packages (I’m nearly illiterate with Chinese), every journey into one of these giant rectangular prisms is a wonderful cultural adventure, so different from a warmly decorated Safeway or cleanly organized Costco.

In a Chinese supermarket in the U.S., be sure to notice the charming lack of aesthetic design, the scraped tiled floor, metal tins of moon cake, the occasional rusty light above your head. Travel to the back of the store, and you may see the crabs and clams floating around their tanks, accompanied by the more absurd, macabre sight of rows and rows of squishy dead fish lying atop beds of ice. The reason I recommend Lion City is because it is the busiest, fishiest and coolest of them all. I believe my biology teacher annually plunges into Lion City in order to procure pig hearts for class dissections.

So for y’all who arrive at San Francisco, feel disappointed that Karl the Fog has, once again, draped himself over the Golden Gate and subsequently decide to check out the stuff a little south of SF – I hope this article has given you a glance of one interesting window into the South Bay.

 

Contact Millie Lin at milliel ‘at’ stanford.edu.