I’m adjusting to my new surroundings… San Leandro isn’t the most exciting place to live, but at least it’s a lot closer to Oakland and Berkeley than my previous place in Sunnyvale (90% of all my social activities are somewhere in Berkeley or SF). So first things first, I found the local coffee hangouts (Starbucks doesn’t count).
These are places that open early, have couches and lounge space, and preferably a bunch of random magazines lying around. Zocalo CoffeeHouse definitely fits the bill; their coffee is great and they have subscriptions to a bunch of the pap news weeklies like Time and People. They also have a rotating schedule of locally-produced art on the walls. There is also Latté Da, which also has good coffee, and is a little more mainstream, so it’s kind of mobbed on weekend mornings. They have great coffee and a variety of really random social clubs that meet there. As an aside, they don’t have a web site, and crazily enough one of the only references I found to them online is on the home page of Dal Rae, someone I knew in elementary school and haven’t really seen since!