From: Samantha Atkins (samantha@objectent.com)
Date: Thu May 30 2002 - 01:03:05 MDT
I like some cities. San Francisco was home for 14 years or so.
It was great while I had my "city legs". Now that I've been
out of it for a while it feels to jangly and dangerous and dirty
and crowded. But then after 2 or 3 hours it starts coming back
to me.
Ann Arbor was one of my favorite places to live. But then it is
one big college town so what's not to like? I also enjoyed six
mounts in Calgary. The pace was slower and the people were much
nicer overall. Even in the city it felt more at ease.
When I left SF I went to Boulder Creek up in the Santa Cruz
"Mountains". When I first saw the place I thought it was too
dark from all the trees and sort of spooky. The first month it
was so quite I thought I would go mad. But then I quickly grew
to love that quite and the rain gently falling through the
redwooeds and looking over the lush hillside outside my window
and smelling mint and other woodsie smells from my home office.
There was a cute little town within easy walking distance but
serious shopping required a bit of a trek by car. I never got
fully used to the scary commute or working most of the daylight
weekend hours in winter to keep the place up in the heavy rains
Boulder Creek gets at that time of year. But I miss it a lot.
Since then I've been in suburbia of San Jose for some years. It
is missing most of the advantages of each except shopping and
access to the interstates is a bit easier than it was up in the
wonderful local woods.
I live in the valley for work, for groups I am involved in
locally and for the large number of bright people close at hand.
Add in a good part of inertia. Being mainly into my thoughts,
books, computers and a few friends, I really could mostly live
comfortably just about anywhere. But I need intellectual
stimuatlion of good company. I can do some of it online. But
it is good for me to be around colleges and centers of brightness.
- samantha
steve wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "the animated silicon love doll" <cheshire@velvet.net>
> To: "steve" <extropians@extropy.org>
> Sent: Tuesday, May 28, 2002 9:09 PM
> Subject: Re: Cheap Living (was Invisible Friends)
>
>
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: MD5
>
> Tuesday, May 28, 2002, 1:06:42 PM, you wrote:
>
>
>>Very interesting. If it is so cheap and generally pleasant to live in
>>
> small
>
>>town/rural America (as I'm sure it is) then why do people pay to live in
>>Silicon Valley etc? Is it just that all of the jobs are in the high cost
>>metropolitan areas? Or is there some other reason? You can see the same
>>phenomenon here in Europe. The French are abandoning the countryside and
>>small towns (very beautiful, fantastic quality of life) to live in mass
>>suburbia around Paris and Marseilles. Here in Britain London is like
>>
> Silicon
>
>>Valley - a house like the one I live in (4 bedrooms, £50 thousand) would
>>cost £500 thousand in many areas. I just don't understand:)
>>
>
> Some of us like living in cities. I know if I lived in a rural area,
> no matter how beautiful and how good the quality of life is for most
> people, it would be about as low as it can get for me because of my
> allergies. Even when I have/can afford medication, they're still hell.
> If I could find an area to live with no plants or animals or dust
> around, I would be VERY happy. And cities happen to be closest to that
> :)
>
> Oh, I agree completely, I'm a city person too - that's why I live in
> Manchester. It's suburbia that I hate! Also I am puzzled by the amazing
> contrast between expensive cities/urban areas like London/Bay Area and cheap
> ones and the way that despite the huge cost of living differential there's
> no trend I can see for people to start moving from the high cost to low cost
> areas.
>
> Steve Davies
>
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