and they want their stereotypes of cities back. Dirty, filled with crime, derelict neighborhoods, etc. etc. Thanks to the meth epidemic I'd say that suburbs and rural America have inherited that rap.
I live in Brooklyn. Yesterday I took a break from programming and went for a casual walk through the neighborhood, swung past the cafe on the corner where there was a full-fledged ceilidh going on, then went up the street through a block party where the kids were drawing with chalk on the street and playing in the fire hydrant they had opened a bit as a sprinkler. Through Prospect Park where people were playing cricket and eating tandoori BBQ. Then around through the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens where they were having a bonsai exhibition. Out the north entrance and sat and watched the mathematically patterned dancing fountain in front of the Brooklyn Museum of Art for a bit. Then swung back through the green market at the top of Grand Army Plaza where I picked up some of the finest organic veggies on the Eastern seaboard for dinner. There was a bluegrass/folk trio jamming just inside the GAP entrance to Prospect Park, so sat and listened to them for a while. Then walked back home past artists selling works that would be hanging in a museum in the rest of America.
That wasn't a special festival day, just an average summer day in New York. Didn't have to plan to see any of those things. Just did, because they're just there and they're just happening like that all the time, everywhere here. Had I walked in a different direction I'd have seen plenty of similar things that way.
None of any of that sounds anything like the weird, dystopian picture you painted of the big, bad city.
For me, being around that degree of refined creativity and passion is incredibly inspiring as a human being and as a technologist. So, yeah, because the suburbs are the opposite of that sort of density and complexity, they are soul-crushing.
But I'm glad you like it there. Please stay.