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<li><p>zentiger’s experience with friends replicates what I think is the most common pattern for college students everywhere – for me almost 40 years ago, for my kids only a few years ago, for most of the people I know. You spend your first semester becoming instant friends with a bunch of random people, mainly those who live near you or whom you meet in basic classes. Then you spend your second semester realizing that you don’t really want to be close friends with a lot of those people, and extricating yourself a bit from those relationships. Your core of long-term college friends may start coalescing then, but really gets formed in your sophomore year and even later.</p></li>
<li><p>Funny 45 Percenter should mention “the largest urban park system in the world (. . . actual fact, no exaggeration).” Umm, I think that turns out to be urban folklore rather than actual fact, and it is quite exaggerated. Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park is 4,167 acres, and its total park system is about 9,100 acres. Los Angeles’ Griffith Park is just over 4,214 acres and claims to be the largest municipally owned park in the world (which is also wrong). In fact, neither of them is in the top 10 in the U.S., even if you exclude national parks and forests that are only partially within a city. Phoenix, Portland, Houston, and Anchorage all clearly have more park area than Philadelphia, and Los Angeles probably does, too. <a href=“http://cloud.tpl.org/pubs/ccpe-largest-oldest-most-visited-parks-4-2011-update.pdf[/url]”>http://cloud.tpl.org/pubs/ccpe-largest-oldest-most-visited-parks-4-2011-update.pdf</a></p></li>
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<p>That’s OK, 45 Percenter. I used to say (and think) that about Fairmount Park, too. Until a few years ago, when I saw the Griffith Park claim, and started to research the question.</p>
<p>All of that said, Fairmount Park is amazing. You can walk from the banks of the Schuylkill River across from Penn’s Franklin Field to the northwestern border of the city, a distance of about 17 miles, without crossing more than two city streets (a block apart, at about mile 6). Some of it is groomed and formal, like Central Park, and some is wild and free, sprinkled with ruins of 18th century factories.</p>
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<li> Philadelphia is not anywhere near as glitzy and sophisticated as New York, LA, or Chicago, but there’s a lot going on, and it is very student-friendly and comparatively cheap. College students really matter here, and get catered to quite a bit, which is not the case in the aforementioned cities. It is not as affluent as New York, but it is not horribly depressed and dangerous, either.</li>
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