I live in Boulder, Colorado. It is widely believed to be a haven for hippies and stoners, up there with Madison, WI and Berkeley, CA. It hasn’t been that way for at least 20 years. The hippies have all moved up in the mountains to the west where the living is cheaper.
The town is really now full of high acheivers - slackers just don’t reside here anymore. There is a large IBM campus on the north side, Sun Microsystems on the southeast, and Google has an office right in the middle of town. Biotechnology companies are scattered across the landscape.
World-class athletes call Boulder home. Cyclists and distance runners live and train here. The current Olympic women’s marathon champion and a former men’s world marathon champion live less than a mile from my house.
I’ve lived here since 1991, but if I were looking to move here right now, there’s no way I could afford it. Hippietown it isn’t. Boulder is full of engineers and scientists.
I know all about Boulder since I watched every episode of “Mork & Mindy”
I live in Chicago and am always amazed that people elsewhere think it’s like the Roaring 20s, with Al Capone still running loose and mobsters shooting up people.
Anyone who might have watched 20/20 last week probably had their worst stereotypes of Eastern Kentucky confirmed. I don’t live in the mountains, but people from Kentucky have long been painted with the hillbilly brush. There certainly are problems of poverty in the mountains, and drug addiction. But there’s also a lot of money there too, coal money, and many regular middle-class people. You won’t find anyone friendlier than mountain people, also, if you’re friendly yourself.
But I don’t live there; I live in the “blue-blood horse country.” I really don’t know of any misconceptions about Central Kentucky, unless people think we’re all horse breeders. Or University of Kentucky basketball fans.
People think northern New Jersey is a suburb of New York City and expect a crowded, busy place. A friend from Germany who stayed with me kept taling about the “grass, trees and open spaces.” She thought I was crazy to pay so much rent and commute to the City, but she know says if she ever moves to the area, she’ll do the same.
That it must have something to do with Duck Soup (Fredonia, New York.) Or, if you look at the slightly larger city right next to it, Dunkirk, that I was born on the English Channel
I can’t think of many about Boston, but my home away from home is Martha’s Vineyard. A popular misconception about that place is that it’s full of rich snobs who want to distance themselves as much as possible from the hoi polloi. That’s pretty much the polar opposite of the truth.
Movie stars everywhere, everyone’s blonde (there aren’t even white people in LA anymore), nice cars, good surf, pretty beaches. Please. LA is dirty, the people are assholes, and our beaches are lousy.
Well, my hometown is too small, but I can do my current town (Burlington, VT.)
Most people not from VT (and even some from the far reaches of VT, :p) think it’s basically nothing but hippes/granola heads/stoners/hipsters.
Yes, we do have a lot of those (and it’s worth noting that they aren’t all the same group, either. I could go into the many differences, large and small, between hippies, granola-heads, stoners, and hipsters, but I don’t think anyone wants to read that.)
But most Burlingtonites are average people. A little more left-leaning, but most of us don’t only eat organic vegan diets while smoking pot in the middle of the street and drinking a PBR tallboy.
Or worse, they think New Jersey is an industrial wasteland. A lot of people get this impression from riding the Jersey Turnpike past the refineries in Linden and Elizabeth. The nearby cargo terminals and the Newark Airport don’t help. Or they see the opening sequence on The Sopranos, and figure it’s reed-covered marshland with dumps.
But you don’t need that – I once drove someone raised in upstate New York who’d never been to NJ before (and this was long before The Sopranos aired), and she was amazed at how rural most of New Jersey was. Heck, it’s called “The Garden State” for a reason. My hometown’s big business used to be exporting fruits and vegetables to New York City, and the next town over was filled with apple orchards. (All gone now, sadly. We really are now becoming an urban industrial wasteland)
As for Boulder, Colorado – you may no longer be Hippy Heaven, but your gift stores and book stores still suggest that you are. An out-of-towner might be forgiven getting that impression from a tour of the shopping district.
My hometown is too small, but the most common misconception about my homecountry, The Netherlands, is that coffeeshops are legal and that everyone smokes weed all the time. They’re not, and I think the percentage of people who smoke weed is about the same as elswhere.
I think something got lost in nontranslation here. AFAIK, coffeeshops are legal everywhere (except possibly in parts of Utah ) Do you mean shops for smoking weed?
If those aren’t legal, then were those news shows and that episode of Insomniac lying to me when they said they were?
I’m from Chico, CA, and everyone assumes that the whole place is filled with partying college students. IRL we aren’t all that high on the scale of party schools and it’s calmed down a lot in the last 20 years. Sure, there’s plenty of drinking and such, but riots are rare and you have to go into the college neighborhoods (or downtown on weekends and holidays) to find the icky stuff.
Chico is in fact a lovely town and we think it’s great.
Well, some of Norhtern New Jersey is. We live in Jersey City. I get more annoyed at the NYCers who think I live waaay out in the suburbs, even though our commute to many parts of Manhattan (usually those we are in) is less than people we know who live in Brooklyn or Queens. (See map here)
I agree with your post, but you must admit that the nickname was applied centuries ago.
I live in a town that nobody’s heard of in Michigan. Most people I talk to about Michigan seem to think the whole state is Detroit. Nope. My town is cute, to the point it’s getting touristy. We have hundreds of miles of bike and cross country ski paths snaking in and around the town. We’re a college town, so we have book stores and hippy food co-ops and a pretty decent band scene at night. Just about every weekend in the summer there’s a festival of some sort - art festival, bluegrass festival, rock-n-roll/blues fest, microbrew fest, etc etc. We’re right on Lake Superior, so we get the water sports as well.
To contrast the OP, I moved back here after 13 years in Boulder (I moved there in 1991 as well!) I left Boulder for a lot of the stuff the OP lists. I didn’t want to work my ass off for a small ranch house in a boring part of town, which is about all I’d be able to afford even given that both me and Mr. Athena have good earning potential as software engineers. I wanted to live in a real hippy town, not a trustafarian wanna-be hippy town.
My hometown is San Francisco, CA. Ummm…let’s see, the stereotype that it’s super left-wing and really, really gay is actually true.
Based on the way tourists dress, there is apparently a misconception that it is warm. This is…not accurate. I always wonder what the hell is wrong with the people wandering around in shorts and t-shirts, freezing their asses off. Don’t you check the weather of the place you’re visiting to make sure you bring appropriate clothing?
Yes, I meant places for buying weed. I’m surprised that this usage isn’t internationally known. And they are,strictly speaking, illegal. It’s just that the government has decided not to enforce the law. So, yes, you can still buy weed in a shop in The Netherlands, but officially it isn’t legal.
) Do you mean shops for smoking weed?