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The writer had some expectations and was used to things being a certain way in his native Poland, but was disheartened to find that they were different in CA. U

• toomuchtodo 5y ago
  Appreciate the summary.
• chrisseaton 5y ago
  > Weather: The Bay Area has none. I experienced this same feeling in Silicon Valley and San Francisco. Every day the sky and air are almost exactly the same, day-in-day-out. I was very ready for some seasons and weather when I got back to the UK.
  • sooheon 5y ago
    You can visualize this: https://weatherspark.com/compare/y/557~23912/Comparison-of-the-Average-Weather-in-San-Francisco-and-New-York-City https://weatherspark.com/compare/y/557~23912/Comparison-of-t...
• JumpCrisscross 5y ago
  I’d push back on weather and culture. There are entirely different microbiomes within short driving distances of any city in the Bay. And if you look for it, you’ll find tons of underground art shows, theatre, music and film. It just isn’t organised and marketed the way it is in Europe or New York. On variety of conversations, Oakland, Berkeley, Vallejo, Fremont, Cupertino, Mountain View, San Jose, Belmont, South San Francisco and Sausalito offer drastically different bar talk with friendly strangers.
  • kasey_junk 5y ago
    The music scene is notoriously bad in SF and has been for decades. You’ll find better music shows in third tier cities throughout the country. Oakland and Berkeley keep the area just above fourth tier.
    • tptacek 5y ago
      You can also get to this conclusion axiomatically just by following Jamie Zawinsky's DNA Lounge blog and reading about how hostile SF is to nightlife, and also how hard it is to book shows in SF.
    • psanford 5y ago
      If you are talking about musicians coming out of SF, then I agree. If you are talking about tours coming to SF/Oakland, I don't see this at all. I can't think of an artist I care about that hasn't been through.
      • legerdemain 5y ago
        I mean, I can see Beyonce at Levis Stadium and the Foo Fighters at Shoreline. I don't think this even remotely counts as a local music scene. Compare this to the era that gave us that little-known Palo Alto band, the Grateful Dead.
        • psanford 5y ago
          I don't know what you want. I find bands I like, I add them to Song Kick. I get emails when they come to SF. Music venues have been expanding in the last 10 years, not contracting. I've never seen a show a Levi's or Shoreline. I guess your complaint is there aren't more artists coming out of Palo Alto? Yeah, sure, I'll concede that if I lived in Palo Alto I'd probably be unhappy with its music scene.
• gamblor956 5y ago
  Indeed, for the writer to blithely assume that CA has no weather, culture, public transportation, variety, affordability, or politics ignores that the Bay Area is a tiny portion of the state, and that Silicon Valley is but a small portion of the Bay Area.
• anyfoo 5y ago
  This is a "dangerous" summary. Not in the sense that I think it may cause significant harm to anyone, but that I consider it misleading for everyone reading your comment, thinking that it sums the article up accurately, and then ignoring to read it. I'm not Polish, but I'm another European living in the Bay Area as well, and I don't think your comment reproduces what the author is trying to say, most likely through no intention of your own. I won't repeat the same mistake by giving my own summary, but I understand too well the weirdness and isolation that suburbs and zoning laws give compared to European cities. It's totally weird, but I live in San Francisco, a dense city, and the zoning laws and "built for cars" layout[1], as well as spreading the population over California style suburbs, still make me feel more like I'm living in some backwater village. After close to a decade of living here now. [1] I think European cities are just "lucky" that they've mostly been built when cars weren't a thing yet, and also organically grew over much longer timespans.
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  • robomartin 5y ago
    > I think European cities are just "lucky" that they've mostly been built when cars weren't a thing yet, and also organically grew over much longer timespans. Yes. That's it. This is what a lot of people critical of the design (or execution) of US cities don't seem to understand. This also applies to the many failed attempts to make mass public transportation --and the reduction of automobile-based transportation-- a thing. Cities evolve. And these cities are no exception. By the time they reached scale it became pretty much impossible to re-engineer them to fit a new vision of how things should be. The best example I have is the absolutely failed California high speed train. We are about a hundred billion dollars into it and have nothing usable in place. I believe they built about ten miles of low speed track that you can't even use yet. To make things even more interesting, it was supposed to cost ten billion (that's how it was sold to voters). This high speed train goes through so many towns and counties, each with it's own rules and issues, that the probability of it ever approximating something like the TGV or the Eurail ICE I usually take from Amsterdam to Munich during my visits is kind of laughable at best. We'll see what happens at a trillion dollars, I guess.
• colin_mccabe 5y ago
  The Bay Area has weather. What it doesn't have is winter. There is plenty of live music in the Bay. Example: https://thefillmore.com/ https://thefillmore.com/ Public Transport (or lack thereof): The Bay Area has none Wrong. The South Bay has Caltrain, the East Bay has BART. SF has... a few systems, but mostly Muni. Variety (or lack thereof): There is a lack of variety, whether it be in the type of people encountered, the conversations, the cities/suburbs, or the scenery. Very untrue. Try visiting Oakland, San Francisco, Palo Alto, and Santa Cruz and see if you think they are the same. Affordability (or lack thereof): Flimsy, modest houses cost north of a million bucks minimum. Everything that requires human labor is stratospherically expensive. The situation is the same in NYC. Housing is expensive.
  • Redoubts 5y ago
    > There is plenty of live music This is the lowest expectation one could have for a music scene. > The South Bay has Caltrain Damning with faint praise.
  • chrisseaton 5y ago
    > The South Bay has Caltrain The Caltrain is literally a single railway line. I think this reasonably approximates to no public transport system.
    • kajecounterhack 5y ago
      On top of that it isn't available all the time (how can last train be at midnight -- that means everyone has to wrap up their thing and head out between 11pm and 11:45pm depending on where they are. So it's impossible to not live in SF, not own a car, and say attend any normal house party. Like even one that ends on the early side, at 12am, you'd have to leave before it's over. It is entirely accurate to say that there is literally _no_ public transport for major routes, for part of the day. Also within the city, to access most parts you have no BART or other train, you only have Muni. And if you've ever tried to take it without the help of an app like Transit (or even with the help of the app) it's pretty unreliable and can be difficult to figure out. Compare to Taipei or even NYC where you can more or less jump on a train that arrives at regular intervals, at any time, and get to most parts of the city.
• JamilD 5y ago
  Regarding culture, variety, and politics, I think it’s more a consequence of the Bay Area being socioeconomically segregated. My neighbors are all artists, and have great and vibrant communities around their work — but of course, no one in tech mixes with those people! Fewer people in SF work in tech than is often perceived, but the social circles are very clique-y and exclusive. It creates perceptions about the entire city that are really only true for one’s friend groups. I wonder what it is about the design/culture of SF that makes that the case.
  • ironman1478 5y ago
    I think the poor public transportation really hurts the city. The time to arrival is a crapshoot and discourages it's use. It's also not a walkable city or bikeable unless you stick to certain parts of the city. I think this + lack of density in certain parts of the city means that SF is largely a suburb with tall buildings on one side. It's not really a city, or at least not on the level of NYC. You are just surrounded by people in Manhattan at all times and I bet that helps promote socializing. You just don't really meet people in SF unless you stick to certain pockets of the city.
    • bigyikes 5y ago
      > I think this + lack of density in certain parts of the city means that SF is largely a suburb with tall buildings on one side. This is a great take. I was driving back into SF this week. As always, the green population sign stuck out to me. There are fewer than 1 million SF residents. Part of this is because it’s only 49 square miles, but the fact is you’re exactly right. SF may be urban, but it isn’t dense.
  • analyst74 5y ago
    > social circles are very clique-y and exclusive This rings true to my experience as well. I only managed to make friends with some fellow engineers after living there for a few years. And it's not for lack of trying, I joined sports teams, wide variety of meetups, social clubs and tried to chat to strangers I encounter. It seems people are generally not interested in adding another engineer to their friend circle, except fellow engineers. It's quite ironic because my interests are actually more athletic and artistic than geeky.
• mint2 5y ago
  I really disagree with those points about Variety, public transport, culture, and weather but I suppose if ones frame of reference is NY or a large euro city then perhaps some of them may be that way. But variety? That one just is weird. Within a couple hours driving distance is a vast array of hugely different environments. Within bart-ing distance is a huge variety of very distinct neighborhoods and cultures. And the comparison of living in Poland and being able to walk from the suburb across city districts to having to drive or take a long train ride from Palo alto to Sf doesn’t make sense. I doubt he walked 25 miles back in Poland. I lived in a small German town for while, it also took 1.5 hours to train into cologne. I could walk across cologne like I do SF. But I could not walk to cologne from Juliche. And driving would have been much faster than taking the train, just like driving from PA to SF is. His points about suburbs are mostly accurate, but sounds like he was in the wrong spot in the bay. Oakland/Berkeley/sf are better than Palo Alto or the South Bay for actually walking to bars and places. He also doesn’t like the brown looks Mediterranean climates have, so NY does sound like a better fit.
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• type_enthusiast 5y ago
  The comment about the lack of seasons was odd to me. I grew up in the Bay Area, but spent about 10 years in Southern California where there truly is no such thing (based on my schema) as autumn and winter. When we were moving back to the Bay, my wife (an LA native) and I were looking at neighborhoods during January or something, and she remarked, "everything is dead here!" It's winter. We have deciduous trees in Northern California... In autumn they turn orange, and they spend winter without leaves! A foreign concept in LA, where most of the trees are palms or coral trees or other evergreens. It's true that we don't get snow like many European cities. But I guess the presence or lack of "seasons" depends on what you're used to.
  • dasil003 5y ago
    Sort of a strange comment since January is when everything turns green in the Bay Area.
  • rmk 5y ago
    For people who come from tropical climes, such as Hawaii, Singapore, or subtropical Australia and India, the Bay Area does indeed have "seasons". But the majority of Americans and Europeans hail from places that have much more delineated (and varying) weather across the four seasons, the Bay Area seems lacking in comparison.
  • bartwr 5y ago
    My point of reference is very European. In most of Europe you get very distinctive four seasons - cold, sometimes snowy, almost always frosty and depressing winter, fresh and optimistic spring bringing some change, muggy and sweaty, but exciting summer that you spend outdoors with your friends and 'white nights', nostalgic, colorful and beautiful smelling autumn reminding you of passage of time. And all of those are sometimes dry, sometimes muggy, often raining/snowing. To me (growing up in central-eastern Europe) it's essential to add some "rhythm" of life, otherwise I get into "day of the groundhog" workaholic mode. I'm sure though that people who grew up in those non-seasonal climates have internalized some different ways of marking the passage of time. :)
• nickysielicki 5y ago
  > The writer had some expectations and was used to things being a certain way in his native Poland, but was disheartened to find that they were different in CA. I think this is pretty unfair, he's just giving context for the things he's experienced elsewhere. It could have been anywhere. It's hard to say what you like and dislike about a place without having another experience for contrast. The story is not, "I came from Warszawa, SF was not like Warszawa, so I went back to Warszawa." The story is, "I came to SF, and I loved it, but we think NYC is a better fit for the lifestyle my wife and I want to live."
• khazhoux 5y ago
  > - Culture (or lack thereof): The Bay Area has none. The main leisure activities in the Bay Area are centered around enjoying nature and food . There is no music, or art scene of any sort. Wrong. Plenty of music in SF. Lots in Oakland too. Great shows at the Greek in Berkeley, or big acts at Shoreline (kinda meh the last few years though), Levi's Stadium, or San Jose. If you enjoy chamber or symphonic music, you get it year-long at Stanford, Music@Menlo, and more.