Time for some more content fodder. I just recently sold my car and moved to one of the largest cities in the US. Considering how for basically my entire life I've lived in rural areas, why not throw down some observations? Everyone's out there making vlogs about how they've got a farm now, why not go the other direction?

Context

In short: I grew up in a town with a population of 300. As an adult I've lived in a mid-size city but mostly in a town of 20,000 people which is about 40 miles from the next town over. Now I'm in a city north of a million in population.

The First Few Days

I think I'll split this up into a bit of an OCC-ey format. Right now I'm already on day....3 I guess? I arrived around 1 AM on Sunday. I got settled, got internet working, get the gas set up. The level of convenience is actually a little insane if I'm being honest. The buses run frequently and stop often enough to matter, roughly every other block it seems. Food is cheap and ridiculously good, especially after being in the middle of nowhere for so long. I haven't found mexican as good as I had back in NC but I'm hopeful. The nearby park holds a farmer's market, I'm pretty happy with the whole move right now honestly.

5-14

Pretty much settled in now. I still need to get my hands on a lot of furniture but I plan on looking at some of the local vintage stores before going for Ikea, when your building is 100+ years old I figure you should go a bit old with the interior styling. Ran into a break into the convenience last night: I wanted ice cream, but it seems like all of the convenience stores here close some time between 8 and 10. Not sure if this is a post-covid thing, an I don't wanna get robbed thing, or just that these stores are all locally owned and (it seems) run by the owners/their families, but it was a bit of a surprise. I can still just walk a bit further to the chain convenience stores though, which are 24 hours, so it's not the end of the world.

5-18

I was all sorts of busy getting the roommate out and traveling yesterday. I'm actually originally from the area, so yesterday I made the trip out to see some family. I've also been making full use of the Chinatown here.

It's definitely not my field but I think it'd be interesting to do like, comparative health of city vs rural populations over time. There was definitely a point back when rural populations actually had farms that I suspect they were getting a lot more exercise but now, well, I feel like I'm still walking like 2 miles (4.something km?) on a light day, often carrying groceries or similar. I've definitely noticed an uptick in how hungry I am from all the extra exercise, for example.

5-23

The excitement is more or less handled now, I think. I'm settled (save furniture shopping, which I'm doing with my boyfriend next week.) There has een one interesting change of note: on-call rotations are a lot harder in the city, which I never thought about. Technically this isn't so much of a city problem as a no-car problem, plenty of people keep cars here unfortunately, but basically if I were to leave the house on a normal on-call then I would get there fairly quickly because I had a car, and if I did get paged, then I could just work in my car. Here if I travel I have to know where there's a cafe or similar where I could work if I get paged, which makes things much more complicated.