I’m sitting at the gate at San Francisco International Airport, waiting for my plane to board for the flight home. I’ve been here for a few days for a work-related conference (which you already know if you read my Twitter feed).
Sigh… I could totally live here. Maybe it’s just the novelty of the place… maybe it would get old. And I’d miss Broadway. And worry about earthquakes. (Which is silly, since I lived in Tokyo for three years, and only a few times did I ever feel a tremor.)
And California… it’s beautiful, but it’s environmentally unsustainable, isn’t it? And the state government and budget are a mess. On the other hand, its political system is like ancient Greece compared to Albany.
My company has an office here… so I wouldn’t even need a new job… but on the other hand, Matt would have to find a new job.
Anyway. California dreamin’.
This really is a beautiful state. I spent six weeks here when I was 14 years old. I would love to come back some time — drive all the way down the coast with Matt, stop in tons of places. (But first, get behind the wheel of a car again and practice driving, since I haven’t driven a car in about five years.) It would be wonderful.
I had a long, leisurely dinner with Thom and Jeff the other night, who moved out here a few years ago. They love it here. Jeff is from here, and Thom is from Virginia. Sometimes I feel like they are my and Matt’s West Coast counterparts.
Odd thought: people always say “out West” and “back East.” American historical bias, since the East Coast was settled first. But the West Coast was settled more than 150 years ago at this point. Linguistic tics persist. What do you call Arizona and New Mexico if you live in California? Out east?
Traveling is mind-expanding, even work-related travel.
Time to go “back East.” Sigh…
I heartily endorse the idea of you and Matt moving out here; on the way home after dinner with you the other night, in fact, I kept saying to Jeff all the way home how great that would be.
For myself, I enjoyed living in Boston and in the DC Metro Area well enough, but I actually feel at home here more than anywhere else I’ve lived in my 47 years. The first time I visited San Francisco, in 1986 at the age of 24, I had the feeling that I’d come back to someplace special, to a city that was meant to have been my home. I knew I’d eventually live here, I just didn’t know it would take me so long.
My friend Tom, visiting from DC this weekend, did that drive up the coast from San Diego via LA this past week, and is heading back down to LA via San Simeon and Hearst Castle this coming week. He doesn’t want to go back East now.
Oh, and I just call them “Arizona” and “New Mexico”.
Although I don’t live there, I’m not exactly sure what you meant by environmentally unsustainable, at least in terms of the energy side of things. California has very clean energy production (very little coal and lots of hydro/other renewables), and due to relentless energy efficiency programs over the years, the lowest per capita electricity consumption in the entire US.
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/07/28/energy_efficiency/print.html
I guess I was thinking more about climate — forest fires and droughts and earthquakes. Sometimes it seems like more people live in California than the land can sustain. But I was kind of speaking out of my ass.
I was out there couple years ago, started going to realtors cause I wanted to stay…. Might go back someday, if I could find a cool place that wasn’t crowded…
I would love to move to San Francisco. It’s a beautiful city and the people just felt different. I talked to more strangers there just walking around and taking the public transportation during a long weekend than I do for months at a time in NYC.
Having lived here all my life you need to move to SF, I have wanted to move to NY actually so maybe we should house swap for a year?