Our Year Living Abroad

If you’re paying any attention to this web space (And, really, what are you doing here?  There must be some sort of web 2.0 Twittering Face Space that might better deserve/exploit your attention) you’re familiar with my penchant for overwrought soliloquy (See love letter to SF, below).  This is a blog, after all, so what else can one expect?

In line with that, I’d like to inform all two of you that m’ladyfriend and I up and moved to Oakland a few weeks ago. It was an impetuous act, and by impetuous I mean it unfolded so quickly after a solid year of looking for a better place to live that we could hardly process how much moving across the Bay might affect us.

The reality is that it feels like a different state.  Our jobs are the same.  Our commute is seemingly only ten minutes longer (though it feels like much more). And we’re living only a short distance away from the place we’ve called home the last 7-10 years.  We can still see it, in fact.  It looks so strange from over here. But we were unprepared for many things in this move; things that would seem, on face, completely obvious.  

We moved into a house, which was one of the primary motivations in moving over here in the first place. This also meant that we moved into a neighborhood of houses.  Just in terms of density, this is a very different kind of place to live than a neighborhood of apartments.  Likewise, it’s eerily quiet, and suburban-feeling.  We’re a short walk to Telegraph and College avenues.  A short walk to BART.  But in feel, we’re far away from the city. And even those active avenues feel sleepy.  Sleepier somehow than when we walked up and down them before moving here.  There are clearly a lot of great shops and restaurants in the East Bay. But from this nascent perspective, they seem spread across a broader matrix, rather than concentrated in neighborhoods. Thus, the neighborhoods themselves seem defined more by geography than character.

Did I mention that I’ve been a resident of Oakland for all of a three weeks?  Yeah, I’ve got a lot to learn.  But at this point I see our move as simply that: a learning opportunity.  Like studying abroad, I hope to absorb and appreciate the experience and celebrate it even more upon returning home to San Francisco.  We’ll see if we can even last a year.