I like that I am close enough to my parents to visit, but far enough away that they don’t expect to see me every weekend.
I like that I don’t live in Mississippi anymore.
I like that I live close enough to a MARTA station that I no longer have to drive into work.
I like that I am far enough north to avoid “love bug” season.
I like that Atlanta is a growing city-maybe sprawling is an accurate description, but this is a city in it’s adolescence. The opportunities to create change are astounding.
What’s not to like?
[li]Thousands of restaurants all within an hour’s drive[/li]
[li]One of the finest natural harbors in the world[/li]
[li]An extremely diverse population[/li]
[li]Some of the best Universities in the world[/li]
[li]An outstanding music scene[/li]
[li]One of the world’s biggest economic engines[/li]
[li]Excellent food stuffs from around the world[/li]
[li]The most accent free form of English spoken[/li]
[li]Superb museums and theaters[/li]
[li]The most beautiful freeway in America (280)[/li]
[li]Quick access to excellent snow skiing[/li]
[li]Quick access to excellent water skiing[/li]
[li]Quick access to outstanding hiking and backpacking[/li]
[li]Quick access to excellent sailing and boating[/li]
[li]Insanely beautiful coastline vistas[/li]
[li]Splendid seafood and produce all year round[/li]
[li]A very high standard of living[/li]
[li]Excellent hospitals[/li]
[li]A very large greenbelt[/li]
[li]Magnificent redwoods older than Christ[/li]
[li]Superb architecture[/li]
[li]Some of the finest weather on earth[/li]Don’t get me started, you know how I get.
I love Hyde Park, IL, home of the University of Chicago,
Because I can reach the world- class Art Institute of Chicago in a 5-minute bus ride.
Because The Museum of Science and Industry is a 15-minute walk away.
Because I can see Gothic architecture housing some of the most advanced researchers in medicine and technology today.
On a related note, because I can see homes designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and appreciate his genius every time I walk to class.
Because I was able to participate in a discussion with Sir Richard Attenborough as a part of the Chicago International Film Festival.
Because I am a 10-minute bus ride from one of the premier shopping areas in the world.
Because I am not the only person with melanin in town.
Because my friends and I can walk around in the middle of the night and feel relatively safe.
Because Chicago is a metropolis with the down-home feel of the Midwest.
Because I’m a three-hour drive away from home.
Because being an individual doesn’t mean conforming with everyone else’s idea of “being an individual.”
Because it just feels right.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Zenster *
[li]The most accent free form of English spoken[/li][/QUOTE]
I assume you mean within the US 
I like having the ocean nearby.
Or the piney woods if you head east instead of south, and Louisiana’s not much further.
I like that the Museum of Fine Arts, Contemporary Arts Museum, the Glassell School of Art and the (significantly upgraded a few years ago) Museum of Natural Science are within walking distance of my home and the Rothko Chapel and the Menil Collection (home of a great surrealist collection) are a block away (free, too!).
In fact, lots of stuff is within walking distance.
The Allen Parkway and Memorial Drive.
Parks, lots of parks!
Unending stream of cultural events, both contemporary and classical.
Killer architecture - it’s fun to take visitors for a ride around town.
No zoning - rocks!
Sort of the flipside of one of matt_mcl likes about his city, I love that in the summer, I can walk from one end of downtown to the other and never go outside.
For a city of this size, it’s really not very difficult to get around (that includes driving, walking and taking the bus).
Lots of nice Dopers (of whom manny actually come to the DopeFests).
Oil biz!
Nuts! We’ve got lots of nuts! And I don’t just mean the street variety - we’ve got lots of folks that have turned their homes into alien art works or have just plain built weird-ass shit.
I don’t know how it ranks on a national comparison (yeah, I could probably search the 'net and find out), but the cost of living seems bearable; not at all like horror stories I hear about some cities.
It’s Texas!
I’m kind of a drifter, so I guess you’d say I don’t appreciate where I live, but it’s the opposite. I appreciate everywhere I’ve lived. They all had different things to offer.
Tokyo, Japan
The city never ends, it’s like something from a sci-fi movie. If you look from the top of a tall building, you just see more city, stretching in every direction. I used to ride an express train for an hour to get to work, and I still only crossed half of the city.
Friends who’ve lost their wallets have gotten them back with the cash still inside.
Identically dressed punkers dancing in a circle to Buddy Holly in Yoyogi Park.
I can see Mt. Fuji from my balcony.
Every type of merchandise or food can be found, somewhere. Grilled crickets?
Magic Mushrooms are legal. Haven’t tried them yet, though.
Miles of tiny little back alleys lined with some really wierd shops.
Cold cans of Coke and hot cans of coffee or soup from the same vending machine.
Never more than a 10-minute walk from a train station.
No muggers.
No New Yorkers.
'course, there are also plenty of things that piss me off, but that’s something for another thread. All in all, I like where I am.
–sublight.
Rehoboth Beach, DE
I like walking down the boardwalks on winter nights with quietgirl… in the winter, there’s virtually no people, and you can smell the salt and the moon dances on the water… so pretty.
I can walk down Baltimore Ave and be greeted by every fourth gay man/lesbian.
There’s something nice about being able to go to Lambda and just… talk.
I know that a lot of you get a "oh, your from <insert random city>. Do you know <random name>? In Delaware, providing that whoever it is does similar activities/is close in age to whoever is being asked, there actually is a good chance of the person knowing who it is. Small town? Ha! Small state.
Hanover, NH
The leaves.
The stars.
Fall nights.
Havre, MT
[ul]
[li]Being able to tell in an instant those who actually lived here from those who just passed through based on how they pronounce the name.[/li][li]Being a short drive from Canada (cheap shopping, similar but different culture that reminds me of Europe minus the strange languages).[/li][li]Being a medium drive away from the Rockies and the most beautiful driving in the world.[/li][li]You can see more stars than you can count on a clear night.[/li][li]Northern lights show here every so often.[/li][li]Being in a city where you can go grocery shopping in a camo outift.[/li][li]The fact that I’m not in Missouri. (No Southern Baptists here, and the religious folk are less pushy.)[/li][li]Hunting rifles in trucks (during hunting season, of course) and on walls.[/li][li]I can drive to areas so remote a person could explode a small bomb without attracting notice.[/li][li]I can also drive to cities small enough to be navigable yet big enough to have good sushi places. (I do like sushi.)[/li][li]Genuine snow in the wintertime, and plenty.[/li][li]Having great steak at very reasonable prices.[/li][li]Nobody shies away from serving the aforesaid steak blood rare.[/li][li]Signs that say ‘Eat Meat and Wear Fur.’ along the road.[/li][li]Vast stretches of empty land.[/li][li]The generally unpretentious people. (If you’ve gutted fish and cleaned deer you don’t look down on too much.)[/li][/ul]
Anyway, that’s a short list. 
The fact that everyone is moving out!
Seriously? It’s quiet. Granted there isn’t tons to do, but that’s changing slowly.
After being born and raised here, and having never have moved out of the city of Jackson, I’m familiar with it. I know it inside and out. (Except that pothole I hit that ripped a hole in my van’s transmission pan. Ouchie.)
I dunno. I’ve been lots of places. I liked some of them. But no matter where I am, this is always home.
I like the cows.
I like the maple syrup.
I love that forgetting to lock my door at night is no big deal.
I love civil unions.
I love the music scene (check out the Jazz Mandolin Project or Pork Tornado if they come to your town)
I love my momma.
I love church street.
I love the Vermont Sandwich Company.
I love hippies.
I love VT.
Peace, Jabe
Or you can call it “Dog Patch”. I don’t really like to divulge where I am living now. But it’s an average-sized Midwestern town. I call it “Hooterville” these days. Yes, I am a horrible bitch.
It’s OK. Eh. I guess. (But I will always be homesick for L.A., and do not wish to live the rest of my life in Hooterville. It’s just not “home”.)
But, if I think real hard, I can find a few things to like:
No real rush hour. I just got back from another visit home to L.A. The rush hour is hellish. Hooterville’s rush hour is nothin’.
Pretty Fall colors. Really beautiful. I love the Fall in Hooterville.
Friendly people. It’s nice to have several people offer to help you when you are waiting by your disabled car, for the Auto Club. People are just nice.
Austin, Texas…
-It’s still a “small” city - you can walk all the way across downtown in about 20 minutes.
-LIVE MUSIC everywhere you look - from blues to punk to Celtic folk tunes. Every night.
-Sixth Street - it really really wants to be Burboun Street, but without the parades. It’s where a lot of the music happens.
-Gun ownership is not frowned upon by most of the populace, and gun stupidity is not real common. (not many folks down here accidentally shoot thier kids while cleaning the deer rifle…)
-Laid back high tech firms. We have some of the biggest companies around (Dell, Sematech, AMD, etc) and most of their employees wear jeans to work.
-Drive 20 minutes from the center of the city, and you’re not in a city anymore.
-It’s where I keep all my stuff.
Okay, I live in the Bay Area, which Zenster has already gone over, but the Bay Area is a huge metropolis, and I live in just a wee bit of it, which happens to be Petaluma (pop. 50,000), in southern Sonoma County. I have plenty of negative things to say about it, but this is a positive happy thread so I won’t go there.
It’s pretty. Petaluma is in a valley, and the gently rolling hills rising from the east and south are visible from most everywhere in the town. They’re undeveloped, and patched with the black-green of oak trees. In the winter and spring the hills are green and in the summer and fall they’re gold, and they’re always beautiful. A short drive out of town will reveal that some of the green isn’t meadow, but part of the ever-growing vineyard that decorates Sonoma and Napa Counties. I don’t know what it is about the vineyards, they’re just prettier than corn or lettuce or almond trees.
150 years old, Petaluma is an old town by California standards. Even rarer, many of the buildings in the downtown area are from the nineteenth century. We’re only twenty miles from the epicenter of the great quake of 1906, but the town miraculously escaped much damage. Petaluma looks so much like “middle America” that Ronald Reagan filmed campaign commercials here. Which is kind of funny, because like all of the Bay Area, Sonoma is very liberal, something else I like.
I like strolling down the quiet streets lined with maples and oaks and old Victorian houses that were built well many years ago with real wood. I like it when the chilly ocean wind blows in from the west and I like that it gets cold in the winter, but doesn’t snow; it just rains and rains and rains. I like living in a town where the average number of murders a year is zero, and the most worrisome thing that ever happened when I was in high school was that the cross-town school dumped trash all over the campus the night before the football game.
I like it that I live in the Bay Area, for all the reasons Zenster mentioned, but I also like it that Petaluma hardly feels like part of an urban area of 6 million people - I work in the only large bookstore in town, and every single day, someone I know comes in, like an old teacher from high school, or an old friend I haven’t seen in a long while. I like that Petaluma is getting more diverse - the North Bay is the least ethnically diverse part of the Bay Area, but in the fourteen years I have lived here, there have been noticeable demographic changes.