Well, I can't write a blog comparing NYC and LA without taking a look at this doozy of a list.
From my explorations of LA, I already knew that I was most attracted to the areas of Los Feliz, Silver Lake, and Echo Park. According to these lists, that should also mean I'm an East/West/Greenwhich Village, SoHo, and Chelsea person. Which I am! If I made a $100k+ salary, that is. I could probably afford to live in a closet with no windows with 3 other people in a 2-bed apt there, but that wouldn't really be living, would it?
The LA/Brooklyn comparison is definitely throwing me off, though. At this point I've spent 4 years of my time in NYC in Manhattan and the other 4 in Brooklyn, and the 4 in Brooklyn have been in various places in the borough, so I feel I know it very well. Carroll Gardens, Boreum Hill, Park Slope, Cobble Hill...yes, I am attracted to these hoods (minus the babies + strollers), but is Echo Park really like Williamsburg? If that is true, I may have to nix that neighborhood from my list...
I'm not going to spend all my time on this blog making snarky comments about NYC and LA (though much of my time will be directed towards that)--I also wanted to use this space to outline our move, including creating our plans, finding out what actually goes according to plan, seeing what compromises/modifications we'll have to make along the way, etc. All these nitty-gritty details will be answered in a series of Moving Questions we'll be posing to ourselves. Here we go...
The first obvious question we had to answer was the question of When. We're both on leases for our apartments that end at different times (N and I live separately in different neighborhoods in Brooklyn), and I have a college-friend roommate who I won't coldly ditch with no warning. N is working a flexible job where he can telecommute while I've been at the same not-for-profit for 2 years, and owe a lot to my organization and my current boss, who have treated me very well since I started working there. And even if we pretend these factors didn't exist, could we just get up and move tomorrow? Not unless we hitchhiked our way across the country, cuz, well, our bank accounts aren't exactly overflowing at this moment.
After a lot of short bursts of discussion over several weeks, we are now planning on making the move in April 2009. We chose this month for a couple reasons: first, N's lease on his apartment conveniently ends May 1st (my lease is a little more flexible, so I think I can make it work); second, this will give me enough time to phase out of my current job and also get the graphic design coursework I'd like to get done out of the way; and third, it gives us time to plan and save money. This also gives everyone in our lives (including my roommate) a nice heads-up about our future plans. This gives us roughly 6 months to prepare. Prepare how? That's still something we need to figure out ;)
ohmygod. I haven't started to appreciate this until recently, but NYC has the BEST. WATER. EVER. I really don't know the mechanics of it all, but for as long as I remember the house I grew up in the Chicago suburbs always had hard water/soft water issues. We'd try to control it by adding salt/mineral blocks, but it was never exactly right. To this day, whenever I take a shower at my parent's house the water is always way too hard or way too soft. Oh, and the tap was undrinkable since the water sometimes got mingled in with sewer water due to flooding or something.
But everywhere I have lived in NYC (the upper west side, hell's kitchen, prospect lefferts-gardens, downtown brooklyn and what the hey, i'll throw in N's spots, too--crown heights and bay ridge) has had the absolutely perfect level of hardness/softness. Perfect. At first I took it for granted because I thought that my family's house in Chicago was just a freakish place and was the only one that struggled with this. But when I visited LA, the small hotel we stayed in had terribly hard water that made my skin hurt! Yes, my skin would hurt after showering. And N's parents' place upstate near the Adirondacks also has water on the hard side. And my siblings' places in San Francisco and outer Bay Area is also too hard and too soft.
NYC water...I love you! It's something that you'll only miss once it's gone.
