My fucking brother calls it Shit-cago. And he was born and raised here. He moved to Boulder (the city with no soul) 25 years ago, and never misses an opportunity to diss the city of his birth.
Fuck 'em. We have culture, history, affordability, diversity, a lake so big it might as well be an ocean, architecture, excellent transportation, skyscrapers, two major airports, and boonies less than an hour away. You just can’t beat it.
Except the winters are really starting to wear on me. Sigh. But the weather gives us all something to bitch about.
I’m not from Chicago, I live closer to the Twin Cities. I absolutely hate driving in or around Chicago. It seriously scares me. The last time I drove through I timed it so I’d pass through at 4:30 AM. :o
Other than that, Chicago rocks! I spent a lot of time there as a young un.
Hey dropzone, observe my join date. I promise, next one I’ll be there if possible. We’ll see to it your wife sends out a search party for you this time.
:: returns to silly dance and stupid singing ::
I love Chi-ca-go, oh yes I love it,
I love the winter,
I love the summer too.
Yeah, yeah whoo-hoo-hoooooo!
I got the same shit after moving to St. Louis from Florida for college. “Why would you come to St. Louis? I’d rather be in Florida!” Dude, try entertaining yourself as a high-school student in Lee County for four years and get back to me.
I love Chicago and my fiancée has made me promise to live at least two years in Chicago at some point.
A guy I work with is a new grad student at my university and came here after working on Kauai for the summer as a reporter. He said about three weeks in, the chief of police got mad at him and everyone stopped talking to him. That’s probably more a small-community thing than a Hawaii thing, but still, he didn’t have any fun and he’s very happy to be in St. Louis.
I’ve been to Chicago twice and loved it. Last was in summer '04 and the Millennium Park had just opened with that cool glass block/live face/fountain sculpture, chrome orb sculpture, and Frank Gehry outdoor music stage. The huge amount of interesting architecture, the Art Institute, the hot dogs, the steaks, the blues, I could go on and on. Great city. Also the fact that Steve Goodman’s ashes are buried under home plate at Wrigley Field is just the coolest thing ever.
Philadelphia has had the same problem of self-perception - there used to be a slogan, “Philadelphia is not as bad as Philadelphians say it is.”
Um…probably someone I went to high school with. God, it’s nice to be able to run my errands and not run into one single person I know.
I don’t really mean to totally dis my hometown. It’s not a bad place. It’s safe, has good schools, it’s in the Bay Area so you’re close to many cultural attractions, blah blah blah. But come on! Chicago is one of the great cities of the world! It’s not even a contest to be a contest.
I’m a little baffled at peoples’ obsession with weather. There are some climates I’d prefer not to live in, like, say, the desert. Not a fan of the desert. But if there was some totally awesome city that I just loved that happened to be in the desert, hell, I’d move there. The weather isn’t that big a deal to me. I can’t say that Chicago’s climate is my absolute ideal (I’m really originally from San Francisco and I like cool and foggy best), but meh. I just can’t be that concerned about it.
Oh, and traffic in Chicago is a disaster. (Unlike in every other metropolitan area, where there are no traffic jams, ever!) I don’t have a car and I don’t miss it. I’m happy with the el and bus and the occasional cab.
Ha! After 11 years in Boulder, CO, I moved back to my hometown in da UP. At 25K people, we’re the biggest city within a hundred and fifty miles. We go to Green Bay, WI when we want to get a taste of culture.
People think I’m crazy, too. Boulder is consistently rated one of the top small cities in the country. I’m so sick of it I don’t even want to go back for a visit. Sure, we get a lot of snow, the restaurants are miserable, and there’s no real entertainment to speak of. But it’s so much better than Boulder (“the city with no soul” - HA!) that I can’t even count the ways.
I was just talking about this with my stepdaughter last night. She moved to Chicago from Potatoville, ID about a year and a half ago. She confessed that when she left she thought she would come back after a year with a new found appreciation of home. But nope she loves it there! (I do too, I went for a visit last month). She said that while she misses her family and occasionally the wide open spaces and desert, she doesn’t want to come home, and honestly I’m am so glad she’s happy there and wants to stay. I wanted her to have all opportunities and experiences that a large city has to offer, and to see a world that is much different than the one she grew up in.
A friend of mine (who’s also a Doper, incidentally) here in Chi is also from Honolulu. I’m sure she gets this crap even more than I do, but personally, I’d never want to live in Hawaii. You’re all stuck there, out in the middle of the ocean, on this tiny piece of land, thousands of miles from everything else. And everything is so freaking expensive there!
Perhaps, but I figure in event of nuclear missiles-flying-all-over-the-place war, Hawaii would be a fairly low-priority target (despite the numerous military bases), and quite likely to survive otherwise worldwide nuclear disaster. Plus it’s a small target, and hopefully any missiles aimed there will miss anyway.
:nods knowingly:
I lived in West Palm Beach for three years before moving back to Baltimore, and when people find out that I willingly left South Florida, they’re horrified. I usually end up explaining that there’s a huge difference between “Palm Beach” and “West Palm Beach” (namely drugs and crime), and that I’m not really a fan of hot weather and bugs. I like winter.
I think a lot of people assume living in South Florida means you just hang out at the beach all day, sipping fruity frozen drinks and looking at hunky lifeguards. :rolleyes:
Something to that. But I have friends there, who can go to Fiji, or Thailand, or Kiribati without it being a 2-days-travel-each-way kind of trip. And the Big Island kicks ass. (Actually, we have a good thing going. They stay with me when they visit Chicago, and I can stay with them when I’m on Oahu. I go there in January, and they come here in July.)
That’s what Costco is for. You don’t have to shop at the ABC store.
