General

Several of us locals do live over here in Berkeley, and some of us are really close to downtown. The practice space that the Berkeley Social Scene uses is nearby in Oakland. Your hotel may be considerably cheaper here than similar quality stuff in San Francisco. If the hotel you're looking at is the Hotel Shattuck, it was just completely remodeled and is supposed to be very swanky.

Where are People Staying?

Frankie Big Face - Hotel Shattuck
Inevitableguy - The Mosser
Spud & Co. - Four Points Sheraton Bay Bridge

Sightseeing

As far as touristy stuff in the East Bay goes, the few things that come to mind are the Oakland Museum of California, the Chabot Space and Science Center, the UC Berkeley campus, and lots of nice parks and cool little neighborhoods. Some stuff would be reachable by BART, but mostly you'd either be on long bus rides or you'd need to have a car or a local tour guide to explore the East Bay, unfortunately. Things are a little more spread out over here than in the city.

Transporation

BART stops running around 12:30AM, so you'll have to plan accordingly if you're going to stay in Berkeley. Also, BART really only runs along the East side of the city through the "downtown" area on Market street, then down through the Mission and to points far South. Getting to the ocean or other points on the West side of the city involves also taking an SF MUNI bus or train. SoCha looks walkable from BART but Mojitos is definitely not. You'd have to catch a cab or a bus or get a ride to BART or back to Berkeley. Getting a cab should be doable as both North Beach (where Mojitos is) and Market Street get decent cab traffic. As far as accessing touristy stuff from BART goes, that shouldn't be too hard. Some of it is near BART and some you can get to via a train or cable car near or co-located with BART. If you have specific tourist sites in mind let us know. Another consideration with BART is that the ride in/out takes 30-45 minutes depending on where you get on/off. Also it's not as cheap as people might expect (it can be $4-5 a ride each way). As far as safety goes, you probably won't have to worry about that. It shouldn't be sketchy near any of the BART stations you'd be using at the times you'd be using them.

Other Music

FROM KEN: There will be another cool music Festival on Saturday. Not sure the line up yet, but it should be a lot of great local bands:

mission creek music and Arts Festival

FROM GLENNY: Friday July 16th at the Starry Plough, Scubacat is playing. You may know the drummer of ScubaCat as "The Prisoner" on Song Fight. He's our drummer for Zipline, and much of the 2007 West Coast live tour. They are a great band!

Starry plough is only a little over a mile South of Hotel Shattuck, and is actually on Shattuck ave. They have good beer. But if you're at the hotel Shattuck and you like beer you MUST walk across the street to Jupiter for a fantastic beer selection!

Baseball

The San Francisco Giants are playing the NY Mets on 7/15. This is the Thursday night before SF Live. Jack Shite obtained 6 tickets, and Frankie, fluffy, and the full brody (party of 4) are attending. If you've got tickets, hook up with them.