I don’t have to.
2 New Zealanders did it for me, & very well, too.
See?
Suburban Chicago here. We have a train station and some nice old houses in town. M’kay. I’m done.
Absolutely. Everyone is friendly and says hello, unless they’re reticent Yankees but even then they are pleasant. I can leave everything unlocked and not feel worried about it. People will stop and help you when you’re in trouble. Free spirits are welcome and you don’t have to dress up to be accepted.
I love Santa Rosa. It’s a great mix of urban and country living.
The downtown area has grown leaps and bounds since I’ve moved here. Lots of cute little shops, nightlife, fine dining, etc.
We’re only 50 miles from San Francisco, but we’ve got plenty of our own ‘city’ culture here in town - museums, symphony, arts, etc. It’s a pretty liberal town, with one of the best community colleges in the country. We’ve got a decent public transportation system, I just wish we had train service to SF.
30 miles from the ocean and the redwoods. 3 hours or so from the snow (Tahoe.)
Some of the best cycling in the world and one of the best brewpubs in the country to hit up after a long ride. 
Lots of wineries and dairies and farms. This is ‘foodie central’ and wine country.
Love, love, love it here.
Granted, there’s not a lot right here if you’re into all that touristy stuff, but my town is located fairly close to everything. In under two hours I can drive to the city (Melbourne), the beach, a cool temperate rainforest (actually, less than an hour away), a ski resort or a goldmine era town. If you can get a job working for one of the major local industries you can earn a fairly decent living, and while you’ll pay more for fuel than in the city, accommodation is much more affordable.
My town is beautiful and historical. It has a picture-perfect small town New England center and colonial history and architecture spread throughout the whole area. Despite being a Boston suburb, it looks more like a New Hampshire or Vermont setting. Horses are a very big deal here for reasons I have never figured out and there are two horse farms and many people with horses on my street alone. The town is provincial in a somewhat spooky way however. If you move here you WILL be personally invited to join the Newcomers club until you are sufficiently acclimated to set out on your own (they recommend 5 years but we only lasted two). Town activities are heavily attended are most people are active in some of them.
I was recently in Weston, MA and they had quite a lot of homes with Horse stables, and pastures. Are you near there?
Incidentally, some of the homes were amazing! Huge gated mini-palaces…
Yes fairly close but Weston is THE wealthiest suburb of size in the Boston area so judge accordingly. The median household income their is over $150,000 with people at that range being grandfathered in as retirees or some such. The western suburbs are nice and have a different feel than the northern, southern, or shore ones that I much prefer. Holliston is still fairly wealthy overall and has some very wealthy citizens but it is far enough out from Boston that it is (a little) more affordable and has some rural-ish parts.
Pasadena has big shady trees, a mountain and a train that I can take to work. And every shopping place has decent parking.
Sorry to double-post and I don’t really count as a Boston Brahmin because I moved to MA when I was 12…but it’s so true! I went to undergrad in Canada, grad school in the Midwest, flipped a coin to see which bar I would take and ended up in California and now that I’ve had my fill of stomping around, I’m dying to get back to the East Coast. I’ll settle for Boston to NY (though I’m not really keen on the latter) though but refuse to go anywhere near DC.
Which just means I’m going to be in L.A. forever because all the jobs for my field are either in D.C. or California. The Bostonians are holding on to their postings with what seems like a death grip…people seem to refuse to retire.
We’re close enough to the commuter train to get to Chicago easily, but out here where the forest preserve is just down the street. My kids have gone to a high school whose demographics should indicate some troublesome issues, but the troubles just don’t seem to be there. The town was intentionally integrated at its founding, and it has just developed from there. And we have a pretty good mix of cultural things available, including a small art gallery and what seems to be a large number of decent community theater groups, in the vicinity. A well-known art fair and a nationally rated 10K run round things out.
I live in Orlando and there must be something really nice here because everyone is moving here.
Er… it’s really sunny. And there are hot chicks. And theme parks!
I live in Youngstown, OH.
Now, Youngstown is a former steel town, doesn’t have a good economy, high taxes, history of the mafia, high crime…
That said, there are two things I like about this area. First, the people are fantastic. Like everyplace, there are occasional rude people, but for the most part everyone I’ve met has been very friendly, open and very nice to deal with.
The other thing is the proximity to other places - I can be in Cleveland, Pittsburgh or Akron in about an hour, Columbus in about 3 hours. And they’re easy drives, any of them.
(That said, it’s still not home and I don’t expect to be here forever. But I can see why some folks like it here.)
Dunnow, I didn’t get to see much of LA when I was there, but what I saw looked too American (tiny houses with tiny attempts at gardens rather than flats; need a car to go to the nearest anything) for my wanna-walk-everywhere taste. The beret of smog was pretty, mind you.
Wouldn’t mind getting to move to Italy. I know from previous stays that I’d be speaking Italian just fine in no time; there’s even Italian companies that advertise in monster.es asking for people with complicated technical skills and who include the line “you don’t need to be able to speak Italian, don’t worry about it.” Food’s good, weather’s like back home, I don’t need a work permit, nor a Visa except to pay in restaurants… and I can reserve the right to cuss at dem when dey’re foreign and they cuss me back and then we all get a laugh.
Not a bad place at all, the land where Chinese restaurants serve pizza.
I live in Pavel Banya, Bulgaria, pop. 3,000. PB is in almost the exact center of Bulgaria, which is nice because I can get pretty much anywhere without it being too much of a schlep. We have mineral hot springs here and people come from all over Bulgaria, and Turkey, to be treated for various ailments. The resorts provide jobs, which is a major plus, as unemployment is very high in Bulgaria. In the summer, there are more tourists than residents here and the town does go out of its way to make itself as pleasant as possible, with lots of flowers (especially roses; as you may guess from my location, our valley is famous for its roses) and a large, immaculate park.
Our town is multiethnic, which I think makes it more interesting. It’s about 30% ethnic Turkish, about 30% Roma, and the rest ethnic Bulgarian. The Bulgarians and the Turks get along okay, but the Roma are terribly looked down upon and live in a typically horrifying mahala (ghetto).
Also, it’s kind of funny watching random passers-by shoo stray donkeys from eating the well-tended rose bushes in the park.
The San Diego metro area is big enough that you can find your niche*, but just barely small enough that it’s easy to escape the people-overload if you want to. The climate is almost completely perfect–I don’t own a single piece of winter clothing. Not one thing that I can trust to handle snow or temperatures below 30 degrees. I don’t plan to own such clothing in the foreseeable future, either.
Most of the big-city entertainment you could want is here–nightlife for those over and under 21 has really improved in the 10 years I’ve been here–and anything else (anything else) is an hour and a half away in LA or Tijuana. I love driving up to Hollywood to catch comedy shows. (OK, so I’ve only done it once. But still.)
- This is true politically, too. Though San Diego is a red county, there’s still a pretty decent balance, and I can still find plenty of like-minded contemporaries.
Harrow, up in the North-West of Greater London. There’s reasonable school up until sixth form level, and we have a couple of the best private schools in the country (not that I went to them ;)). Apparently it’s the most religiously diverse region of the UK. We’ve got a decent amount of greenery.
We’re on the edge of Greater London, so Harrow stops are among the last on one line of the Underground; easy to get in without all the hustle of actually living in the city.
Most of the people that have thwarted the cities developement, should be dead in another decade.
My community has no schools, and is in unincorporated county. This saves me some in property taxes and suits me fine as I have no children.
About the best thing that can be said is that we’re pretty sure they’ve removed all of the munitions from the ground that were scattered in the Port Chicago explosion.
Not all of it is like that.
I do have to drive to work, but could probably get along without a car otherwise, at least most days. My neighborhood consists mostly of apartments, and I have the nearest “everything” within a mile or two, and most of that much closer. Usually the areas lived in mainly by students and childless, or even with grown children, tend to be denser (=apartments, not houses) and more interesting, with many amenities in walking distance.
But for many couples once the first baby comes they get the urge to move out to the suburbs, and then you do get that suburban lifestyle I wouldn’t take if you gave it to me for free.
“Tiny houses”? That’s the first time I’ve heard anyone say that about the U.S. You might have been in an older neighborhood in the city itself; the ones comprising detached houses tend to be zoned, meaning that there can only be houses in the vicinity and not stores or other businesses, so it’s like a suburb within the city. Do you remember where you went?
I wasn’t serious anyway. I wouldn’t move here either, if I could choose between a dozen European countries with my only obstacle to living and working there being that I had to learn the language.