City 1
- a cool job at an institution that is both one of Canada’s Best Diversity Employers 2011 and one of one of the province’s Top Employers**
- proximity to Asia for travel and cultural influence
- moderate weather all year round that suits retired people
- really great adulthood friends, a fair amount of extended family
- the laid-back West Coast mentality
- Asian content
- really good Asian/Chinese food
- healthy lifestyle is ingrained
- everything is really close together
- close to the States
- NPY
City A*
- more jobs
- a truly central city that is a travel hub to Asia, Europe, and elsewhere; save money traveling “home”
- as they say, “four real seasons”; and real thunder and lightening storms
- immediate family and really great university friends
- East Coast sensibility
- diversity–true multiculturalism
- wide offering of good food
- lower cost of living and better pay
- a true big city, with all the highways and sprawl
- warehouse outlets and getting American stores first
- get into house (condo) market
- friendly people (yes, really)
Can you tell which is City 1 and City A?? Life is a lot simpler when you’ve only ever called one city home.
I can see the charm of my hometown. In the past ten years, it has grown to acquire all the “basics” (read: shopping) of an average North American city. It is so affordable (read: houses) and the people are by far the friendliest.
I also hacked whole summers in a tropical Asian supercity that makes any other contender home city for me very pokey. But it was just summer and I was in my youth. To work and really live there? I could, I truly wish I could but my own work is not what would take me there.
Aside from those two cities, I’ve lived in two of the three biggest cities in Canada and the years accrued in each city surprise me whenever I stop to think about it. Six years in the latest city! I never really thought of myself as a nomad but the urge to go somewhere else is strong.
You could say that I’m standing at a crossroads and who knows when I’ll make my next move.
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* Way back in high school my grade grew to 40 students (!!) and we started to have two homerooms and two of each class. The teachers shrewdly named the classes “Math 1” and “Math A” and “English 1” and “English A”. They didn’t want the ultra-competitive amongst us to feel like one section was better than the other. In hindsight, we were at the age to probably rib each other so cruelly over something as silly as being in the “B-class” if the teachers had gone that way.
** Canada’s Best Diversity Employers 2011 reference, Top Employers reference