Where to live one of these days

[breloom]

been living a city near la for the last 18 years and i have a comprehensive list of pros and cons
pros:
great weather (except for this winter where it's super wet)
super beautiful views every day with the mountains
boba tea shop density

cons:
never going to afford a home
need vehicle if you want to do anything ever
shitty traffic at least one way when you wanna do anything ever
did i mention needing to add a car to the third highest rents in the country making the effective fixed cost of living the highest? (though i guess san jose might be about the same)

i think i'm over it here and want to move somewhere with a tighter urban fabric. not sure if i want to try moving into la proper or just leave for one of the large cities east of the mississippi

[funyuns]

if ur talking about sgv there is no place in the us that is better. imo just go somewhere outside of north america at this point bc its all just a compromise

[breloom]

if ur talking about sgv there is no place in the us that is better. imo just go somewhere outside of north america at this point bc its all just a compromise

i live in a city known for a flower that one would say is in the sgv

im just so tired of sitting in traffic

[funyuns]

if ur talking about sgv there is no place in the us that is better. imo just go somewhere outside of north america at this point bc its all just a compromise

i live in a city known for a flower that one would say is in the sgv

im just so tired of sitting in traffic

feel u bro life here is pain but at least there's savoy hainan chicken

[soj]

i have moved back to france for a bit. i like this part of the world. considering getting a job and staying a few years after i graduate. feels like something i should have done earlier in my twenties but maybe it's still ok now.

[SyntacticallyCorrect]

oops dupe

[SyntacticallyCorrect]

I've been in Berkeley for almost a year now and it definitely hasn't been good to me as far as community goes. Haven't made any friends, it's been super difficult. Moving down to Oakland at the end of the summer and hoping that helps, closer to community spaces I'm interested in.

I've been dating someone in SF for the while now, too, and considering making the hop over the bridge. But the city just has too much energy, feels like no respite, but I'm only ever in the mission mostly. Curious about the inner richmond as a quieter alternative.

Thoughts? Advice?

I moved to Boise and knew basically no one and ended up falling into a really tight knit community and I was hopeful I could do the same here, trying to give it time

[breloom]

ended up getting a job back in chicago. time to load up my cats for a fun drive!

[foxtail_grass]

This is the time of year I pore over a map of the US, trying to find a place that's less dark, less freezing.

My basic goal is to be able to live somewhere where every day I can spend time outside, getting sunlight. I don't mind if I have to wake up at dawn to soak up a few cooler hours, or wait patiently for warmer temps by the middle of the day. In Minnesota, from December to mid-April, the air hurts your eyeballs. The snow/ice builds up so heavily it is not uncommon to admit defeat, and decide you're not leaving the house today. After 31 years in the upper Midwest, I just can't deal with it anymore.

There are a few Southern regions that are appealing to me at the moment. First would be any city in Virginia or North Carolina that lies inland off the coast. The second would be the Atlanta metro, though it seems unlikely I could afford it.

Everyone here in MN preaches about the instability of southern climates, how untenable they will be in a decade, or less, without any acknowledgment that we too are dealing with the shadow of an unpredictable future landscape. We also bemoan the degradation of their political climate, which is of course frightening. But this too seems to be a way to downplay our own precarity, our own shortcomings. Minnesota projects itself as a blue stalwart encircled by red idiots. In reality, the majority of the state IS red by area, and only the metro itself (which many of the surrounding states do not have) is democratic. Even within the 'progressive' Twin Cities we have tons of conservative policies. The government tries its best to downplay oil pipelines and low-income relief check bungles with giant Pride parades and [redacted] lanes so poorly designed, they make streets less safe for [redacted] and drivers alike.

Some may say I have lived here long enough to be jaded, and if I move away I'll regret it. But I am not signing any sort of long term contract to be a Southerner. I'd just like to give not being cold and indoors for half the year a try.

TLDR: Anyone have experience living in VA/NC or ATL?

[skunk ape]

You might like Roanoke, but you may also find it a little quiet. You might like Richmond, but you might find that though there's a lot of great things there, it also has an overarching hangover from reconstruction.

[thewisdomoftime]

This is the time of year I pore over a map of the US, trying to find a place that's less dark, less freezing.

Jumping off from the opposite point,

I will move to Denmark.

I guess I'm just trying to say this again. I think for the last 12 months I've basically just been focused on working out and hoping it'll make me feel better and other regressive behaviors. It didn't. After coming back from vacation a few weeks ago I seized on the inspiration and I started scheduling Danish tutoring so I can finally actually learn the language (after rediscovering that using Glossika and Pimsleur just makes me scared and lonely).

Detour maybe nobody gaf about w/ a little info about how I/one can immigrate, difficulties, etc.:

Spoiler:

Even though my mom's a citizen, I'm too old to simply receive citizenship from Denmark without living there for any significant period; what I get, instead, is that I can simply receive residency before having been hired, then I'd be eligible for permanent residency & then citizenship after 2yrs w/ a Danish address. (Still have to wait 2 yrs, take a B2 language test for the permanent residency, take their famous citizenship test for citizenship.) If I make it all the way to citizenship, dual citizenship with the US, to my knowledge, will be more or less a given based on their current laws; so I can still move back to Philly and start a Snowing cover group in the far off future. If I didn't have my mom, or she were some partial combination of the following descriptors and not flat out a Danish-born Danish-speaking Danish citizen from Denmark, I'd still have a route to Danish immigration but one that takes 4x as long as a Danish non-citizen. Being as I'm not in the market for any schooling, I'd need to work there for 8 years, dependent on immigrating by getting a job offer for a job that's on the Danish govt. "positives list" (every 6 months they revise a list of professions they would let immigrate, Building Structural Engineer has been included every time I've seen it revised), which is itself not strictly but usually dependent on already achieving Danish fluency at a technical-professional reading level before immigrating, very f'n hard. Assuredly not everyone who immigrates via a "positives list" job will be Danish-fluent or even proficient, I know the transnational geotech-tunnels-bridges-infrastructure-etc construction firm COWI now works in English even in their Danish offices, but I haven't found an English-speaking structural engineering firm, and there's still the question of learning the way my profession works in consort w/ Danish and EU building codes and public agencies.

Maybe this is an utterly deranged point but even though this feels like the way I, Noah, will live, the path I choose also makes me nauseous. Like, who I am sometimes looks good to me in an act of projected hindsight (of course I learn the language, online, alone with the help of a tutor, books, and apps, in a reasonable time period while also working and being totally healthy, then I move), actually embodying it it just feels like nothing quite works, or everyone understands - every person that you talk to is, on demand, able to express - that the process is coherent but the process isn't exactly coherent. Duolingo sucks, and it's the only language learning service anyone actually uses; oh, people who actually want to learn their language to sonorous fluency use a natural language learning service like Glossika, but they absolutely suck as well and don't give you feedback at all; people who actually want to learn their language don't skip steps, they buy a grammar book and read it through, it's all very rigorous, here's the orthography of that language: {bucket of linguistic orthographic symbology that only your friend studying linguistics in Knoxville knows}; the whole process should take about 3 months, but here's someone who says they've been learning for 9 years and they aren't conversational and sound like bricks clanging together. Except I shouldn't complain, because if I'd just applied while older than 15 and younger than 22 I would've been handed a passport, no questions asked. But I didn't know that, because we didn't look into it, and we only knew what we knew when what was previously true was unwaveringly the case, but it wavered, but we blew it. I don't really believe anything too strongly. What I'm trying to say is that I wish I felt like I know what I'm doing but I think I know exactly what I'm doing but it doesn't feel like I know what I'm doing. Maybe it'll just take a long while, and sometimes a 28 year old likes me on hinge, even though I'm 25. But at 18, it felt like this was something I could figure out around 21, and I had gotten pretty good at figuring things out then.

[brücke]

yeah duolingo is total ass I was a contractor for them on the German course for like a year (reviewing user reported translations, writing sentences) and they screwed all of us on hours right after the holidays last year, so I hate them like intensely lol. such a scam besides that, all the studies they had done saying you can learn to a2 proficiency or whatever were all based on the old language progression tree that they replaced with a much shittier version so they could also replace all the human contractors with AI.

so anyway the apps are evil, good luck on learning danish ! if you're in NY i'm sure there's like language groups or meetups or something like at the library or something, definitely a way better experience than talking to the computer. if you can find any "reading proficiency" style textbooks (like https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/textbooks/520) those usually have good rundowns of the grammar but aren't great for much else - just try reading kid's books at first with a dictionary and finding a real person to talk to. I'm intensely jealous of anyone with any chance of citizenship outside of the usa I'd love to leave this hole

[thewisdomoftime]

... such a scam besides that, all the studies they had done saying you can learn to a2 proficiency or whatever were all based on the old language progression tree ...

I feel like getting someone to A2-level proficiency shouldn't even be impressive! It's a lot of hours for someone with a grad school reading level to make it to the language level of a toddler with a poor grasp of sound! haha

if you're in NY i'm sure there's like language groups or meetups or something like at the library or something, definitely a way better experience than talking to the computer. ... just try reading kid's books at first with a dictionary and finding a real person to talk to.

I think every language learning site that runs thru all your options reaches their conclusions and tells you to schedule Italki tutoring the minute you're at all comfortable doing so.. that was my takeaway when I was reading all the articles on it that I could on the plane back home before my in-flight IPA put me to sleep. My mom and a friend have kindly given me some books but maybe a YA book would actually help a lot. I wasn't able to find a Danish class in NYC (I'm sure there's a good reason for this, but, "Scandinavia House" in midtown Manhattan only runs Swedish and Norwegian classes right now), but thank you, hunting for a 'learner's group' might find me something.

I joined a discord from /r/danishlanguage but it's terrible inactive as far as I could see, I think it might have clogged up with people who have shelved the dream of Denmark (I did this for a year) or dispassionate polyglots or something. But I won't give up the dream of symbiotic tutoring.

I'm intensely jealous of anyone with any chance of citizenship outside of the usa I'd love to leave this hole

It's a fun little stretch trying not to lose sight of this idea, while also not romanticizing somewhere else. NYC is wonderful, there are moments I know I'm around people like me; but also COL in Brooklyn is like 20-30% higher than in Copenhagen, and the places NYC is cheaper in tend to be bullshit I don't need to be so inexpensive (clothing*, books, food service), while housing and supermarket food are dramatically cheaper there. (And the weather's dramatically better in CPH, if you ask me, and, uh, I stopped [redacted] for my safety in NYC, and they've got pensions over there, but anyway we're getting towards the romanticizing thing here...)

*There's plenty of cheap used carhartt WIP from grailed users in Scandinavia, so, all good here.

[Julio]

This is the time of year I pore over a map of the US, trying to find a place that's less dark, less freezing.

Jumping off from the opposite point,

I will move to Denmark.

[...]

just wanted to chime in based on my limited experience learning a third language (thai)—you definitely have a lot of things to consider and loops to jump through (not to be discouraging!), but it was also really helpful for me just being there and living amongst people who speak the language. granted, i was young (17-18) and if the theories about learning languages being easier when younger hold any water still then that was me? this was coming on board as someone with no knowledge of the language whatsoever, having a pretty helpful basic language book, and making friends who taught me words whenever i'd ask. i think i was lucky in a lot of ways, but the full experience of being amongst people who use the language you're wanting to learn really gives learning a socially-driven, warmer impetus (i feel).

if it's at all possible for you to move there and navigate existence while you already have a solid foundation of the language, then it follows that the exposure/immersion *should* help your relationship with speaking bloom into what you'll need it to be. maybe that's overly optimistic of me, but just the fact that you've really given it time and thought about it so thoroughly has me believing you'll be doing great; sometimes it just takes a little longer than we'd like for things to fall into place the way we'd like.

it is a sunday evening and i think this i could have worded this with more grace, but i hope most (or some) of this makes sense/helps out a touch, and i wish you all the best

[foxtail_grass]

Best of luck with the language learning wisdom! It can certainly be a long and arduous process but in my experience, there is a pretty rewarding learning curve overall. It starts with the slow grind of fundamentals, but accelerates once you have enough rudimentary vocab, and suddenly you're learning things that are both exponentially easier to retain and exponentially more relevant to your life.. then, finally, things slow down, you fine tune your lexicon, making little tweaks while maintaining fluency.
___

As for the southern US search- frankly, I've given up on finding any likeminded community here in the US. There will be niches of punks and nice folks almost everywhere, but so far in my lifetime I've yet to find Americans who are actually living the quality of life that they desire to live. And we are all so trapped (or worse, brainwashed) by late capitalism that we can't even allow ourselves to make the radical changes necessary to create a community that reflects our values. Except of course, the cultists. (A sad example- I told my partner that I want to live somewhere where people value their life outside of work more, and he said "well in order for a place to be nice, people need to work hard to maintain it." as if 1valuing your life outside of work means that you won't work hard at your job? or that everyone needs to suffer to maintain a nice place that no one has the ability to enjoy??)

I crave a village life, not in terms of primitivism or ruralness but in terms of closeness of community, and the shared desire to enjoy life, together, as a part of an ecosystem. I crave walking and [redacted] to get where I need 95% of the time. I crave neighbors knowing each other, going down to the local cafe or pub and always finding friends there. I crave celebrating local holidays with old and sometimes wacky traditions (obviously not the offensive ones) rather than buying whatever sugary bullshit Target has on seasonal display and calling that "celebrating". I crave mutual accountability; gifting, bartering, loaning; doctors or pharmacists who know your name; old folks who tell you where to pick the best mushrooms outside of town.

God it sounds so pastoral and sadly, at this point, delusional but goddamit some people some place are living an existence like this. I want to find out where.

I'm going to try and visit Granada, Spain in the next two years. Just because I've always wanted to go there but maybe to find my little place in the world. ¿Quién sabe?

[thewisdomoftime]

I can't help but make 1 more comment about language learning (hopefully the last until I have some kind of achievement to share lol) but I think I found out what drives me insane about language learning advice, and that's just that there's both "language learning" and "language acquisition," for instance, and I hope neither of you will mind me taking your helpful comments and turning them into examples:

It can certainly be a long and arduous process but in my experience, there is a pretty rewarding learning curve overall. It starts with the slow grind of fundamentals, but accelerates once you have enough rudimentary vocab, and suddenly you're learning things that are both exponentially easier to retain and exponentially more relevant to your life.. then, finally, things slow down, you fine tune your lexicon, making little tweaks while maintaining fluency.

This line of thinking is basically what people say about Language Learning, like how suburban Americans tend to learn Spanish extremely slowly through coursework (and, today, duolingo), then choose a dialect afterwards. It can take months of focused learning to get to that A2 or B1 level where it's helpful at all to try to speak your learned language with native speakers, and then you find out you have a nightmarishly bad accent. I think this is how most people have to do, say, Chinese/Japanese/Korean/Arabic learning in the United States, languages with extreme ranges of dialects + their own scripts, just so much information that it helps to learn everything (the script, the grammar, history, introductions to dialects) in a more structured way.

But, nowadays, you see a lot more people who are able to swing something like a language acquisition method, alone, in their living rooms, using online tools and language tutors. This happens much faster (or at least you get up to A2, B1, or B2 level fluency in listening and speaking) than learning rigorously and academically, which is really alluring. The other alluring thing about acquisition, in theory, is that "acquisition methods" seem to be better at getting the new speaker to speak the authentic, less-accented version of the language, along with the least accessible complex grammatical structures and moods of that language.

Neither of these concepts is, like, "the case in reality," though, because although we could be said to learn our 1st languages almost strictly through acquisition, we reach a certain age and start to take courses in our own languages in schools. My Danish grandmother was a schoolteacher in the first Danish generation where people in her part of Denmark learnt the Official Version of Danish - rigsdansk -, so my mom "speaks rigsdansk" and has "no accent," but she also would've totally needed to understand her dad's intense Fynsk dialekt which he kept until passing, and so she would've strictly "acquired" this unwritten dialect, so to speak.

And, speaking of acquisition, ...

just wanted to chime in based on my limited experience learning a third language (thai)—you definitely have a lot of things to consider and loops to jump through (not to be discouraging!), but it was also really helpful for me just being there and living amongst people who speak the language. granted, i was young (17-18) and if the theories about learning languages being easier when younger hold any water still then that was me? this was coming on board as someone with no knowledge of the language whatsoever, having a pretty helpful basic language book, and making friends who taught me words whenever i'd ask. i think i was lucky in a lot of ways, but the full experience of being amongst people who use the language you're wanting to learn really gives learning a socially-driven, warmer impetus (i feel).

if it's at all possible for you to move there and navigate existence while you already have a solid foundation of the language, then it follows that the exposure/immersion *should* help your relationship with speaking bloom into what you'll need it to be. maybe that's overly optimistic of me, but just the fact that you've really given it time and thought about it so thoroughly has me believing you'll be doing great; sometimes it just takes a little longer than we'd like for things to fall into place the way we'd like.

All of this is awesome advice, especially with mind to time efficiency, and I think American monolingual English speakers like myself get this advice really often. With Denmark, a lot of people actually advise to absolutely not move, especially not to Copenhagen, with a 9-to-5 job and expect to acquire Danish, because everyone in Denmark is "C2"+ level fluent in English and, so, they don't love to bother speaking with toddler-level Danish learners that they could easily totally connect with in English.

I kinda just wanted to make a comment trying to explain some of what I've learned listening to a bunch of youtube videos about 2nd language acquisition to tie a knot on the conversation.

By way of an update on myself and my plans for learning: I think I actually got to A2-level in Danish from Duolingo (my tutor says I'm between that and B1) so I might have fumbled my chance to do the method all the polyglots do with new languages (with similar scripts) and just read simple-language stories without any prior information getting in the way of just... an emergent, baby-like growth into low-level comprehension. My tutor says that I can just focus on vocab, that duolingo worked really well for him (when he learned Korean!). If I really am getting close to B1 level-- that language level is where polyglot types recommend that it's helpful to consume television and authentic-speed conversation in the new language. (I actually watched a Danish film a while ago called Jagten, one of those post-dogme-95 films with Mads Mikkelsen starring and a plot that's psychologically horrifying, and I remember it felt extremely good hearing the things that toddlers say, haha)

[funyuns]

cards are a bit stacked but if you grew up bilingual you probably already have better processing for language sounds as naturally you can discern between language A and language B intonations and cadences