h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Trinity's Final Thought:

Come on you peeps,
Let's keep cool and all calm down, I must admit I am beginning to like England more, although I still want to live in the USA when I'm older. Both countries are great and they both have they're good and bad points. So let's stop arguing over it. The only reason why I put this forum here is so that I could maybe get some American e-mail friends, not to cause world war 3.

Trinity

The argument died out yonks ago.

Arguement?.......I call it Frindly Fire!

It's my obsevation that the "Brits" and "The Colonies" have been bantering back and forth for a few hundred years now. Nothing mean spirited meant by it......just part of the culture!

Something akin to an old married couple who seemingly argue constantly. They'd have no one else, but you couldn't tell by listening!

NM

Which bit of America do you want to live in? I work in the US quite a lot, sometimes in Boston and sometimes LA. There's a substantial difference in the culture from coast to coast (and I'm sure it's different wherever you go in the US, I can only talk abou the bits I'm familiar with though!).

Well, I didn't read all the rest of the forum because I'm lazy, but I live in the USA. Currently I'm in Texas, but I still claim Claifornia as my home. Where are you from, Trinity?

Finally... Someone who wants to talk about
what this forum was meant for..

So IanG.. You work in the USA a lot?

That's great, Well, I'd love to live in
Eastern America, in somewhere like
Illinois (Chicago) or New York city.

Although I'd also like to check out some
of the states further north that are closer
to Canada, maybe..
Washington, North Dakota, Minnesota,
Utah or Colorado.

But anywhere's great, cuz I'd love to
get more information on all of the states
and towns if you don't mind!

Boston's in Massachusetts isn't it?

Well anyway, thanx for writing to me here and
actually writing about something decent!!

Trinity (aka Jeni X)

And Another sensible person..

Hey Princess Bride, I haven't spoken to you
before either... so welcome to my page!

Don't bother reading the rest of the forum
It's mainly arguing! (thanx Quorthon!)

So anyway, I'm from Essex in the UK.
And you're from Texas (and California)
Wow, they're quite a way apart!
So, what's it like over there?

I've only ever been to the States once
and that was to Florida!

Trinity (aka Jeni X)

Yup, although it varies - in the last month I've been out there twice, but sometimes months pass without a visit there.

Yes, Boston is MA, right on the East coast, but further up than NY. Home of, amongst other things, Harvard and MIT. (Well strictly speaking they're in Cambridge, but that's more or less a part of Boston.) I like it there. There are two main differences I notice between Boston and LA (the other place I work in the US): (1) in Boston people seem more into ironic humour than, and (2) in Boston people like going out to bars and pubs more. Now obviously those are gross overgeneralisations, but I'm just trying to portray the way it struck me.

I always think of Chicago as being central, mostly because it's not actually right on the coast. However I think it is East of centre, and it also feels like it's on the coast, being right on lake Michegan! (You really have to remind yourself that it's not the sea, when you go to the waterfront.) I've only been to Chicago once, but it's *really* nice. I gather it also gets unbelievably cold, but I went late summer, and it was great. I loved the architecture there - there aren't many towns I've turned up in, wandered around and just thought "This looks great!". Maybe I was lucky with where I stayed, but it was really striking. And it seemed to have a good buzz when I went out in the evenings. Shame I was only there for about 3 days!

I went to Colorado ages ago, Denver specifically. I can't remember a whole load about it, and it was my first time business travelling, so I was busy being fazed by the massive hotel, and the wonder of expense accounts. I gather it's great it you like skiing though.

Also went to NYC. In fact that was on my first ever trip to the US. (About 8 years ago - eek!) I was on tour with a choir, so I didn't get much time in any one place, and I think the main thing about New York is that you need to be able to spend a little time there - there's too much to it. So I'd better leave it to someone who knows what they're talking about!

I've got friends who have recently moved to Indianapolis and Austin, Texas, and I expect I'll be seeing them at some point this year, so I'll report back.

Blimey, I don't half go on! Any questions?

Wow - you're so lucky!

Anywhere else?


I think one of the main reasons why I love
Chicago so much is because it's on Lake
Michigan. I've seen pictures and it looks
really beautiful.

I guess Illinois is more towards central America
rather than Eastern America, it's sort of in between!

Have you ever been to Canada? I'd like
to visit there, it looks really nice and natural.

I think I'd prefer Chicago to NY because of the weather,
it's s'pposed to be real hot in the summer and real
cold in the winter!

Tell me more...

Trinity

Well I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, which has mild temperatures year round and is really nice. I've been to many places. Texas, Oregon, Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Colorado, Washington, Missouri, Arkansas, (all of these when I can remember) and lots of Eastern States when I was too small to remember. Which one do you want to know more about?

Anywhere else?

Well I went to Orlando once, but I didn't exactly get to see it. As is usually the case with most of the travelling I do, I was pretty much couped up in a hotel all week. On this particular occasion the hotel was actually in the same building as the airport. From my window I had a charming view of the baggage retrieval system! (I'm not making this up.) It was a fairly busy week - working from 8am to 10pm most days, which limits your scope for seeing the surrounding area. I did manage to get part of an afternoon and a whole evening off though, and my main memory of the place was that it was unbelievably hot! However I'm sure I'm not doing it justice, and besides, you said you'd already been to Florida.

Been to San Francisco airport once, but only on my way to somewhere else... I've also been to a number of places on the East coast between Boston and NYC, and I've been to Yale, but this was all very much whistlestop stuff - I was on a choir tour at the time. And I'm fairly sure that's the complete list for my USA visits. Oh hang on, I've also been to Hawaii, which is part of the US, strictly speaking. Oh yes, and Alaska too. I can recommend avoiding Honolulu if you go to Hawaii; I'm reliably informed by other people that the rest of Hawaii's quite nice... Alaska was cold (well duh! ) and the town I was in reminded me oddly of Milton Keynes!

I've been to Canada once - Toronto. That was fun, but probably not quite like the bits of Canada you've got in mind - full of natural things like the CN tower.

It might be easy to imagine lake Michigan as a beautiful place from photos, but those photos fail to capture its essence. Chicago is a miserable city... I lived in a burb just north of it for a year. Lake Michigan is horribly polluted, and the wind in the winter comes right off the lake, freezing everything and everybody it touches. Chicago itself is a filthy city, too, and the Chicago River is a muddy brown cesspool, except when it's a muddy green cesspool every St. Patrick's Day. Oh, yeah, and the freeway system was designed by an idiot.

I spent a few years living in Hawaii, and especially in Honolulu. The traffic is terrible, and stuff is expensive. but aside from that, it's quite a nice place to live. Visitors who are looking to get lost in the jungles and mosquito clouds are best advised to go to a neighbor island.... Hawaii for adventurers, Maui for the more relaxed, and Kauai for newlyweds looking for someplace to fornicate in a splendid natural setting. But people-persons and dedicated party-goers would find more of their sort of thing on Oahu, and it still has its mosquito-infested jungles.

Currently I'm a Southern Californian. Tip to the traveller: Los Angeles sucks. Orange County has some fun places, and San Diego is great fun, but LA is an armpit.

Other notable US places I've been: Washington DC (lived an hour away for 6 months), Portland, Oregon (visited for a week... excellent town when it's not raining), San Francisco (can't say much about this one... I was still pretty partied out from the Portland blowout), Boulder, Colorado (very cool college town), Las Vegas (there's better gambling elsewhere... one goes here only for the ambience).

Major cities I got to visit, but never got further than the airport: St. Louis, Phoenix, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Denver.

Then there's all the small towns, and of course the foreign travels, but I don't want to come off as a braggart, so I'll stop right there.

Hey I wouldn't worry too much about looking like a braggart - I'm sure it'll look like nothing next to how I've been going on!

I guess Chicago must be a much better place to visit than to live in then - I really liked it, and I know a couple of other people who loved it when they visited too!

LAX is my least favourite airport. As for the rest of LA, I've only really seen Beverly Hills, and an area known as Torrance. (And mostly one particular office in Torrance...)

The thing about LA that I don't like is the pollution and the horrible traffic. I try to avoid LA proper whenever traveling for these reasons, although some day I would like to go back to Long Beach because that's where I was born...

Chicago does have some fun things to do, and I have to admit, I found the people of Illinois to be very friendly and open. I think it has to do with being snowed in for 6 months out of the year. The year I spent there, they had their worst winter in 12 years. Wind chill factors sometimes put the temperature as low as -70 Fahrenheit. The snow fell in late October, and didn't melt until mid-May. After that, there were three absolutely spectacular days of weather, and then it turned hot and muggy. Plus, the cottonwood trees started blooming. I never even knew I had allergy problems, because my symptoms had always been so mild, but when the cottonwoods bloomed, I couldn't function without medication.

So, my grades for Chicago would be:

People: B+
Fun Factor: B
City: C (Traffic sucked, but the L made it easy to get around that. The place was dirty, there were lots of bums, but there was also fun stuff to do. Lots of plusses, lots of minuses.)
Climate: F

And since I'm giving out grades, here's my own personal honor role:

People: Newcastle, Australia, with honorable mentions for Perth, Australia, and Portland, OR.
Fun Factor: Honolulu, HI. There is just toooo much to do here.
City: Washington DC. You have to admit, it strove for beauty, and got there. The subway is pretty easy to use, too.
Climate: Lahaina, Maui. It's a good deal warmer than the other islands, and it rains less often. Still, it's hard to find bad weather anywhere in the chain. Doesn't mean you can't find it, though... but it'll pass after a few minutes.

And the Hall of Shame:

People: Dubai, UAE. I hate fundamentalists.
Fun Factor: Sydney, Australia. If I were a shameless yuppy or a filthy crackhead, this would have been my town, but as I am neither, I hated it.
City: Los Angeles. Traffic sucks, air is dirty, city is dirty, absolutely no public transportation... I could go on and on.
Climate: Chicago.

Well, as I was telling IanG earlier I like
the sound of Chicago but I'd also like to
visit Washington, North Dakota, Missouri,
Colorado and Oregon sounds nice too!

San Fransisco? is that in CA?
I wouldn't mind going there either,
What was that like as a town?

I think most of the states look great,
I'd like to go over to the US and base
myself in central America and then visit
every state in turn, that would be fun,
you could spend something like 2 weeks in
every state!

Princess Bride - Are you actually American
or were you born somewhere else and decided to
live out there?

Trinity

Hmmmm, I know it's supposed to have weather
extremes but I'd still like to live there.
It's not called the windy city for nothing!
I think Chicago is one of those cities that
would be more appealing when you're younger,
I mean say when you get to the age of 40 or
something, that's when I'd like to go and
live somewhere else further North - like
Southern canada, North Dakota or Washington
or somewhere where I wouldn't be in a major
city, if you know what I mean.

IanG - what was alaska like, apart from cold?!?
I'd like to go there too!

Trinity

Two weeks in each state: sounds like a good idea on paper, but I don't think you'd want to do that, in reality. California has so many things to see that two weeks isn't enough. Nebraska, on the other hand, is something you can fully experience just by driving through, and stopping in at a couple of diners on the way.

San Francisco, California: as I said before, I was pretty well worn out from Portland when I got there. I only had a few days to spend there, and I didn't venture out as much as I could have. But here's my impressions:

- People: Not like people anywhere else. This is a very odd town, and it attracts very creative people, and very odd people. That's not to say that it's a bad thing... just means that you may find yourself experiencing things here you wouldn't expect. For instance, while club-hopping, I found myself at a very intimate pub with live music. It was an open-mike night, and people came in playing their own instruments, and their own original songs. As one would expect, some of those songs were crap, but some were very well done, and one in particular was very funny. About the only complaint I have about the people there is with the bums. Every major city has its freeloaders, but the ones in SF are the most annoying in the world. The ones in Chicago will try to sell you a service. The ones in Portland are rather passive, and I actually gave money to a couple of them, because I found them to be entertaining (one young man with an obviously false cast on his leg came limping up to me, and with a smirk on his face, asked for a "donation for an amputation?"), but the ones in SF are aggressive and annoying, and I had one that followed my friends and I for three blocks.

- City: Not a dirty city. Public transportation is available, but I took cabs, so I didn't experience it. Streets are wide, and traffic isn't too horrible. Overall, it's not a bad looking city, and it's not too hard to get around.

- Fun Factor: Lots to do, but I didn't do too much of it, as I said. When I was out in town, though, there was plenty to do, including the open mike place, and club-hopping on a week night wasn't a fruitless journey.

- Climate: Typically Californian, which means sunny and pleasant. The proximity of the coast and the harbor brings in lots of morning fogs, and it gets much more rainfall than the southern half of the state. That's not saying too much, though, when considering that somebody actually wrote a song called "It Never Rains in Southern California."

There... is that way more than you wanted to know?

The Windy City: you'd be suprised to find out that Chicago actually isn't all that windy. When I talk about the wind coming off the lake, it's cold, but it isn't particularly hard. During the summer months, the air is positively stagnant. Chicago got its nickname sometime around the 1930's (but I could be off by as much as 20 years either way... I'm not too sure of the specifics), because it was a center for what was then known as "yellow journalism," which we now call tabloids. The "windy" in the Windy City refers to gossip, not weather patterns.

I was born in California and raised there and now I live in Texas.
To add on to what Gargleblaster said about San Francisco- The city of San Francisco (SF) has many touristy things to do as well as office buildings and houses, although the people that live IN SF are usually rich. Land is extremely expensive in SF. There are historical landmarks, museums, and pretty parks all over. The SF Bay has lots and lots to do, and all within a pretty short distance. Berkeley, which is across the bay, has bistros and coffee shops and beatniks. There's one street with vendors all along it selling really interesting things, like jewelry or bumper stickers. There is an amusement park fairly near the Bay Area that has roller coasters and other attractions, there's a few zoos and marine parks. There is an amazing mix of cultures in the area. I went to a high school with 30% Caucasians, 30% African Americans, 30% Hispanic, and the rest was a mix of Pacific Islander, Asian, and Indian. You can eat any food you want, and usually find a restaurant for that type of food. It is a bit breezy and foggy in SF itself, but if you cross the bay it is usually a bit warmer but the proximity to the ocean still makes it a very mild and pleasant climate. Anyway, you can tell I like SF a lot. There are a lot of bums in SF, but not nearly as many once you get out of that city. The biggest complaint I have about the SF Bay Area is that it can be very crowded, although I'm sure not as much as say New York or London... Was that enough info for you?