| I went to high school in SoCal, and I got my first taste of the NorCal/SoCal rivalry when I did a weekend environmental conservation retreat in Tahoe freshman year. It was my first solid experience with regional dialect ("hella," anyone?) and regional hostility.
My mother grew up in Marin County and I remember many lovely summer vacations -- we lived in Texas during my K-5 -- to visit my grandparents in San Rafael (and take horseback riding lessons in the hills by Novato, hike in Muir Woods and drive along the coast by my dad's old home in Point Reyes).
I go to Cal now, and am glad to be back in the Bay Area. I've been a few places, certainly not as many as I intend to visit, and I find it hard to believe I'd ever be comfortable living so far away from the redwoods and the bright, beautiful green hills.
My time in SoCal taught me to speak in numbers (it's so true, ellemenope, and your description made me laugh), measure travel in hours (it never took me less than a 15 minute drive to get anywhere, and often included 1+ hours since I lived in the mountains), read billboards in Spanish, and plan snowboarding weekends around trips to the beach.
My absolute favorite part of California is being in reach of everything you want to be, as long as you're willing to deal with travel. It's perfectly fine (and sometimes fairly common, depending on which metro you're near) to commute from the suburbs to the city for work, and with the high cost of living in the cities themselves I don't expect this to change anytime soon. I just hope public transportation catches up soon. BART is the only workable public transit option I've found -- the buses are horrible in the Inland Empire and Bay Area alike. |