Current Events > What kind of experience is it, to live in Los Angeles?

(+) Yeah! (+)

I know there's at least one person on CE who lives in LA.

How does it compare to living in the rest of America?

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Bump.
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I live in the next largest city down, San Diego. (Yeah I know that skips the Orange County cities, but, do they really count?)

Some things are ridiculously similar:

-same weather, easy to go outside all year long, easy to stay active.

-incredibly high risk of apocalyptic fires. People always talk about earthquakes, but the real common risk is the potential for a fire to sweep in.

-SPRAAAWWWL. They didnt build these cities upwards, they built outwards, and further out, and further out. Things are far away, SD and LA people are likely to refer to something thats an hour away as local. And its kinda true, since it takes over an hour to drive from one side of the city to another on both cases.

-beaches. SDs got better beaches IMO because theres more nature preserved and smaller communities built around the beaches, but nonetheless theres plenty to love about them all.

-mountains. Everything is mountainous besides the occasional Mesa community (built on a Mesa, a flat top of a raised mountain kinda situation), with the wide sprawl they just built these cities around the textured geography. A lot of midwesterners sometimes feel motion sickness when driving through certain areas haha

-diversity. It always throws me off visiting the Midwest and seeing the super white town names and lack of diversity. Here everywhere has Spanish names and there are communities for all sorts of countries from every continent. You can eat a diverse diet, get Ethiopian food right around the corner from Vietnamese food, get some Jamaican food a mile down, then some Afghan cuisine, Korean BBQ, etc.

-beer is huge in southern CA. Moreso in SD, we somehow became the beer capital of the US for a while but IPAs are kinda oversaturating the market now. But youll never run out of local beers to try.

-irrelevant to adulthood, but our schools were all outdoors, meaning we didnt have cafeterias. Instead every student spent lunch anywhere on campus with their own groups of friends. As a result I think it affected our culture, because traditional alpha-beta status didnt manifest and instead every random group could have their own space and do their thing, and jocks didnt hold much more social capital than punks or artsy kids or whatever, and that followed into the real world where our social order over here is looser and different active unique communities form for every weird niche.

-car culture. Transit sucks in both LA and SD. You will spend lots of time in a car. But locally, walking is nice because again the weather permits it year round.

-best Mexican food in the US.

But yeah my city is different from LA in a few ways:

-our earthquakes are weaker, we just rumble and sway a little bit at worst.

-its slower paced here, more chill.

-status is less important. Still plays a role in daily life like any city, but compared to LA we're way more chill about it. People are just a bit more low key and nice.

-we get bad traffic compared to any midwestern area, but compared to LA its nothing.

-SD has way more preserved nature, more trails and cliffs and canyons and mountains without things built on them. Its way more friendly to outdoorsy types here.
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I lived in Palm Desert for a year. Chicks are TOTAL sluts you can get laid hella easily.