Bay Area

From the CouchSurfing Wiki, an informal workspace which anyone can edit.

The San Francisco Bay Area consists of the East Bay (Berkeley and Oakland), South Bay ("Silicon Valley" down the Peninsula to San Jose), Marin (just across the Golden Gate Bridge), and the city of San Francisco proper. "SF" is a small city bordered on three sides by the Ocean and Bay. Like New York, it varies wildly from neighborhood to neighborhood, and sometimes from street to street. If you're traveling to San Francisco, ask questions about the local neighborhood— is it a trendy boutique-y place? Is it a street lined with old Victorian houses, and are they in good repair or falling apart? Is it bustling at night, or quiet and family-oriented? What are the closest public transit options? All of these might affect whether you would want to stay there, and what you hope to be doing and seeing while you're in town.

San Francisco Neighborhoods

• The Mission
• SOMA (South of Market)
• Nob Hill
• Russian Hill
• Noe Valley
• Twin Peaks
• Castro

others...

East Bay

Across the Bay Bridge is the "East Bay", best known for Berkeley and Oakland, those both ~30 minutes from the City by BART. Transformed culturally by the "Dot-Com Boom" of the mid- to late 1990s, the East Bay is now a thriving creative nexus, with a "Burning Man art" scene exemplified by collaborative media art spaces like The Crucible and NIMBY.csgroup:566 wikipedia:San Francisco Bay Area wikitravel:Bay Area (California)