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1. Meetup.com- Meet-up is a good place to start. Smaller areas probably won't have a lot of entries, but a large city should yield up a group for just about anything (Southbay Goth Meet-up, LARPers, Raw food and board games night). Pick your keywords and see what you find. Now, I'm not sure how wide-spread meetup is, and it may be used more by some age groups than others. Or maybe you don't even care about age groups. Check it out.
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3. Google Street View: I can never use this feature without thinking HOLY SHIT IT'S THE FUTURE. I've used this to check out my childhood home (they cut down my damn tree!) and find bike-able roads. Now, I can snail my way through entire neighborhoods. Looking at things from above always make them look weird and clinical, but street view is nice. The absence of deciduous trees in California makes me sad, but using this I could see that there are plenty of leaves out there. Through a freak occurrence, J wasn't able to rent a car for his trip, but he could use the street view maps to check out the sidewalks.
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4. City-data.com- Discussions from their forum often come to the top of my searches when thinking about moving/trailing. It's a large enough website that you can almost always find someone moving from/to where you're going. The design leaves much to be desired, but it is chock-full of facts. You won't laugh (you might cry, looking at housing prices) but you'll get some of the big answers. This doesn't particularly give you the feel of a place, but gives more precise information about demographics/employment/industry than any Wikipedia article.
5. WalkScore.com lets you know how much your city respects pedestrians and cyclists, which isn't important to everyone but it is to me. And since it's hooked into Google Maps, you also get a list of cool places, by category, near the address. For me, if all that pops up under coffee is Starbucks, I've hit a dud.
I hope this helps someone. When J applied for jobs in Portland, I had more of an idea of what to expect. I'd been there and its reputation preceded it. This part of California, though, boggled my mind. And when you're feeling boggled, it's easy to focus on the bad stuff.
Using these tips, I learned that my new apartment is next to a gay strip club! I couldn't be more excited. <3 <3 <3!
ReplyDeleteGreat links! I like the walk score one especially.
ReplyDeleteGood idea with emailing crafters--and I'd never heard of walkscore before, which seems potentially really helpful. I played around with putting in places I've lived in previously and places we're thinking of moving and got mixed results. While I think it's spot on for where we are now, it gave some pretty good scores to places I've lived that I didn't find walkable. Or I might have been more car-oriented at the time, hard to tell. Thanks for sharing all the ideas!
ReplyDeleteThe responses I've gotten from Etsy have been very heartening. I'm not sure why I'm so nervous-- I've got a lot going just by being willing to put myself out there.
ReplyDelete@Eileen Pairing Walkscore and Google Maps makes it work better, I think.
Hmm, I went to university in that area (the big fancy one up the road). it's not as bad as you might think. great local radio (university's student/community-run station), lots of good live music and art scene and, with several colleges and universities around, surprisingly diverse options for entertainment all around. also, so many great day trip locations near by (santa cruz, san francisco, highway 1, etc)!
ReplyDelete@Anonymous Hello! You say "community-run" radio station? I was a DJ at my campus station all through undergrad.
ReplyDeleteI'm starting to get excited about the area. My resistance was to just how different it looks (I'm used to hills, lots of trees, more space) and I'm getting over that. I didn't realize how rural my tastes were.
Please keep commenting! If J gets the job, I may need to ask you some more questions.
Check out Stanford's radio station, then! It's run by students and the community (when I was there, probably 30% students, 70% non-students from the area) and quite cool. Santa Clara might have something, too. I grew up on the East Coast and definitely count it weird looking at first, but you get used to it! Oh, for what it's worth, I've been reading your blog for a couple of months. I'm a female academic whose long-suffering husband has 'trailed' me through Asia and Europe over the years; reading your blog has helped me a lot with understanding his moods/reactions/emotions much better.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad it helps. So far I've only been writing from conjecture, so in the next few months you'll see how a trailing spouse really feels once I move. Soon!
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