Hey, East Nowhere has its advantages, if you’re the kind of person who enjoys them. The city has its advantages if you’re the kind of person who enjoys them. Both, of course, also have their disadvantages. I don’t love having Gladys Kravitz on the other side of a foot-thick firewall, and I love her even less on our shared front porch, but I DO love everything else about city living, so I suck it up. Alternatively, my best friend does not love having to drive five miles to buy milk, but she DOES love having no close neighbors, so she sucks it up.
When I go to visit her, we have fun. When she comes to visit me, we have fun. But when we have fun in her town, there are NO FUCKING CABS. I can’t live like that.
I mean, yeah, I get that they (for some reason) prefer Florida weather to Chicago weather. But A) That shouldn’t be tops on anyone’s reason to live somewhere, B) If it is, and you so greatly prefer the weather down there, what’s stopping you from moving?, and C) Do you really want to give non-natives the impression that most Chicagoans hate where they live and would rather live elsewhere, to the extent that people are shocked upon encountering a person who moved here of his own free will?
Especially with the bridges falling apart. That oughta keep those West Saskatoon folks out of the East.
[Hijack] I haven’t lived in Saskatoon since 1989 so I’m not up on the current “coolness” factors (like sushi and whatnot). I sometimes toy with the idea of moving back there to be near family (and because I’m legally married there, not so much in the US). But my folks, who are in their 70s, don’t really have their fingers on the pulse of the city. And, frankly, I hesitate to live there because the lifestyle does seem a little barren compared to what I’ve grown used to. I would love a list of some of the big city attractions in Saskatoon nowadays. I remember the symphony being pretty good. There’s a small opera company (although it tends to be the same small cast of singers over and over). Shakespeare on the Saskatchewan in the summer is fun. But what about good independent restaurants, interesting little shops, theatres, etc. What are the best neighborhoods, with walkability to all of the above? Where are the gay/artistic hangouts? Good architecture and history? Stuff to do with kids, etc. [/Hijack]
Ah, BorgHunter, so true. I’m not convinced the majority of Chicagoans hate where they live. It’s the “squeaky wheel” complainers who get all the face-time, though, so it just seems that way. But I still run into an awful lot of townies who seem genuinely surprised by people who moved here from Florida, Texas, Arizona - as if all people must prefer warm climate places and shouldn’t want to move somewhere colder. No surprise when someone from Detroit, Vancouver, or even New York moves here, but someone from Orlando? Surely not willingly, and they must want to move back as soon as they can!
I don’t get it. If anything, if I ever moved, it would be further north!
I’m a simple man whose mind is boggled by the fact that people don’t consider 300k people to constitute a big city.
According to Wikipedia, there are only 61 incorporated areas in the United States with population greater than 300,000. Of course, that’s not counting metropolitan areas with multiple cities jutting right up against each other. But according to this other Wikipedia list, there are only about 150 such “Metropolitan Statistical Areas” in the US with population greater than 300,000.
The National League of Cities says there are 58 cities with population 300,000 or more. That fits well with the 61 listed in Wikipedia. (The NLofC data is older.) The National League of Cities also says there are 19,429 municipal governments in the United States. So that’s roughly 0.3% of cities with population 300,000 or greater in the US.
Yeah, this is US-centric. Yeah, this is a crudely cobbled-together analysis from quickly-Googled data. But this is the Pit, not General fucking Questions, so that’s all I’m going to bother to do at the moment. Anyway, I think the point is clear - there are very few cities with population of even 300,000.
In short, the OP is one of them high-falutin’ Big City folk in my opinion.
When did the availability of sushi become the determination of cosmopolitan city life? (I ask partly because the mayor of Green Bay is all ga ga over talking the owner of a sushi bar into relocating downtown - as if this is some divine improvement over some other restaurant only rich people can afford on a regular basis moving downtown. I don’t get it. What is so great about raw fish?)
Isn’t arguing about crime rates of Canadian cities on a par with arguing over who is the fattest anorexic, or who is the most dominant NFC West team, or - to use a comparison more readily understood by Dopers - Who is the smartest Bush?
No, I grew up in Virginia, this kind of comment is often followed by this kneeslapper: “the 14th street bridge is the longest in the world; it connects Virginia to Africa.” (the bridge in question connects Virginia to DC, a majority black city).
kushiel, I feel ya. I moved to Calgary to work, not because Saskatchewan was a lousy place to live. I don’t think anybody ever believes that, based on their in-depth knowledge of Saskatchewan that comes from driving through it at 120 kph on the Number 1 highway.
(West Side Saskatoon, represent! I know the bad area you were talking about because I lived 10 blocks from it, Meyer. :D)
Question 1: Quality sushi is made only from the freshest fish. Fish caught the same day. Big cities, where there is a major international airport if not right on the ocean, are notoriously the only places fish fresh enough to be used for sushi can be had. The sushi places in Chicago, where they serve ocean fish far from any ocean, get fish flown in from international locations and is therefore no less than a day old, if not merely hours old, from being caught; thanks to O’Hare airport. Sushi fish is never frozen.
Having quality sushi restaurants are a sign of a city being connected internationally, and of being a major hub for international travel or very near one. A sign of metropolitan diversity.
This is completely and utterly wrong. Nearly 100% of the sushi consumed in the USA is frozen. By law. This article is old (2004), but remains largely true. The only difference is that now, the law is enforced with greater rigor. Your sushi in Chicago is hardly any fresher, if at all, than sushi consumed anywhere else in the US. We have better sushi restaurants in the big cities for the same reason why we have better everything else: people here are willing to pay more.
I live in L.A. and I do prefer a huge city. But I have to recognize that even a small one can offer a lot of the same advantages. It depends on the small city or town. If it has a good mix of businesses and amenities which haven’t been Walmartized to extinction, it can be like your favorite district of a mega-city. And the Internet has certainly made the world of international media a lot smaller. I live in California but can watch German TV any time I want to.
I’ve got nothing against the Midwest. If I could get used to the weather I could probably be happy in Columbus, Milwaukee, or St. Louis. OTOH I wouldn’t want to live in a place where I had to drive five miles from home for a loaf of bread, or a dozen times that to get to work.
ZOMG, thank you for starting this thread, OP. I’m from a smallish southern city and moved to bigger areas, and for a while went to school with a lot of urbanites. Yes, the prejudice cuts both ways but IME it’s much, much worse against small towns.
In my hometown, people don’t “look down,” on places like NYC and DC. They kind of find them exciting, and fun places to visit, even if they don’t want to live there themselves. They might at most say something like, “well, I don’t know how y’all handle that traffic up there” with a chuckle. OTOH, my big-city friends simply cannot fathom living outside of NYC, LA, SF, DC, Chicago, or Boston. Like it’s a vast cultural wasteland with nothing to do. Guess what bitches? Y’all aint going to no operas or symphonies or museums. All you do is go to bars of varying class to get wasted every night. You can do that fucking everywhere, so stop posing. I have a friend who is total homebody and yet always looks down on Georgia, where I live. Why? She hardly leaves her house; and she could get a place of the same square footage much cheaper here than in DC.
That being said, I would like to move to a bigger city, just because I have very liberal values and they clash with the milieu here. But, I absolutely value small places as well, and do not consider such living “beneath me.”
This simply isn’t true. Even in San Francisco, much of the sushi you are served has been frozen at some point, and that fact alone certainly doesn’t mean that its poor quality sushi. Fish caught in the middle of the Pacific and quickly frozen can be much better than fish that has been sitting at 34 degrees Fahrenheit for 18 hours.
Your adamant proclamation that no small, geographically distant town could possibly have good sushi is mere pretension facilitated by ignorance.
I think sushi is just exotic enough to be perceived as an amenity by inhabitants of smaller cities. Saskatoon has a sushi bar, but I bet it doesn’t have a Japanese curry joint, or a Persian market, or trucks that sell Korean tacos. If you’re going to have a marker of “city life” it has to be something that even smaller cities have.
This seems like an appropriate place to mention that when my daughter was in third grade, she was given a map of the US to color in and fill out. She did the east coast from Maine to DC, parts of Florida, Chicago, and the west coast. When her teacher asked “What’s the rest of the country?” she said “A vast cultural wasteland. Do you KNOW how hard it is to find a museum out there?”
