![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Jun. 18th, 2011 10:03 amI've discovered, with help, the secret of LA and how my perception of the area got kinda negative.
LA is big. Really effing big, so it's not a city, it's cities, and far more influenced by vertical geography than I'd imagined. Some things wind up being strangely close to each other and others are long drives away. Some of the area is actually beautiful. Right now I'm in Pasadena, which reminds me a lot of Palo Alto - nice place to visit, nice place to live, you are not going to afford to live here. My friends have shown me areas which remind me of Oakland, in the good way.
So the equivalent is if you named everything from Petaluma down to Gilroy "San Francisco," and then based your opinion of the resulting San Francisco on;
It's a nice place, and the jury is actually still out on whether I'd like to live here, which is probably academic since I want to move to Portland, and I have this bad feeling I'm stuck in the Bay Area.
LA is big. Really effing big, so it's not a city, it's cities, and far more influenced by vertical geography than I'd imagined. Some things wind up being strangely close to each other and others are long drives away. Some of the area is actually beautiful. Right now I'm in Pasadena, which reminds me a lot of Palo Alto - nice place to visit, nice place to live, you are not going to afford to live here. My friends have shown me areas which remind me of Oakland, in the good way.
So the equivalent is if you named everything from Petaluma down to Gilroy "San Francisco," and then based your opinion of the resulting San Francisco on;
- traffic on 92, 84, 880, and the 880/237 exchange around rush hour
- media which showed you an exciting collection of Oakland slum, Fremont soulless sprawl, trendy soulless San Jose, San Francisco tourist attraction, the Apple campus, the most abusive police in the entire area, the Mini-Gourmet, and a little bit of Santa Cruz surf/skate culture
- friends who basically were stuck in the equivalent of South Bay manipulative-profiteer-o-rama jobs, with easy access to cultural highlights like the El Camino/Lawrence Starbucks, for years.
It's a nice place, and the jury is actually still out on whether I'd like to live here, which is probably academic since I want to move to Portland, and I have this bad feeling I'm stuck in the Bay Area.