Fun Stuff > CHATTER
Hey you, where do you live?
squawk:
where i am from is this shitty town called bakersfield and if you are from california then you know shit's nasty. republican as fuck (the extra-frightening kind), big brown and sprawling, it's stuck halfway in between becoming an actual metropolis and the agricultural/oil smalltown it has been for a couple centuries. the suburban areas are okay, there's million-dollar-home neighborhoods next to the upper-middle-class and then there's the really really impoverished areas where you risk getting shot.
yeah it's generally a really stifling place but honestly i do miss it, for the food. has a lot of good local food and a LOT of favorite fast food chains. here in santa cruz, where i am now, all i get is goddamn taco bell and mcdonald's. i love them both but i need my variety. bakersfield also had a lot of targets and walmarts. they built this fancy park called river walk and they meant to instate fancy higher-end shops to make it a really nice place to go but instead they scrapped that and just built a giant target instead. i don't understand.
and i like bakersfield because it's not a big city. i mean if i want even shittier traffic and more smog and urban landscapes then i have LA a hundred miles away for that. i like how there are random oil pumps wherever the liquid gold resides. i like the open spaces of farmland, even though these keep diminishing due to the inexplicable need for more housing developments. which are terrible, by the way, because they're just boxes now; they used to have local developers build the neighborhoods and they were all nice and varied. now you fire up google maps satellite view and it's just like wtf what are all these squares of shades of gray.
as a delinquent bored teenager who had literally nothing to do but meander and maybe smoke pot (bakersfield--where everyone just bakes in a field) there were certain areas that were fun to visit on excursions of random driving. like this overexposed picture of a tree on the outskirts of the suburbs:
in the wintertime it can get pretty cool, here are some tanks filled with crude oil nearby previous tree:
and here are my friends exploring some farmland (while it was still green!)
but despite all this complaining, bakersfield is pretty unique in its location; it is surrounded by mountains, though you often can't see them as they are obscured by the intense smog. but after a good rain or a good wind storm when the sky turns actually blue, it's pretty nice to look around. and on the opposite outskirts there is this neat park called hart park where you can witness the raging killer kern river (whose water flow is controlled by the city and so sometimes we have a river and sometimes we don't. depends on the amount of rain/snowmelt). here is my friend at said park!:
and in the winter time we get this shit called "tule fog" and it's super foggy and the schools have to call "fog delays" which sounds ridiculous to other people but they are in all earnestness entirely necessary. shit gets real. (though such dangerous driving conditions didn't stop me from taking a picture while going 55mph anyway):
i live in santa cruz now. it's a laidback beach town, not really a college town since most of the undergrads live on campus. it's... okay. definitely more picturesque
i don't know where this is but a lot of places look like that, except browner because it's not rainy season yet
the campus of UCSC is set on this hill of forest and to be honest it is pretty annoying, i mean everyone is like "oh what a beautiful campus" as it's all winding through tall-as-fuck redwoods and shit but i hate it and i'm sick of walking, although i am appreciative of the forced exercise as well as the ability to actually breathe an air that isn't filled with a billion particulates, and you have to take the bus everywhere which is fine because it's an efficient public transportation system but i suppose i can't shake some of the right-winged influences that plagued me growing up so goddamn it i want my fucking car, it's an acura therefore made by honda therefore its emissions are just fucking fine.
anyway, you should come visit me! either location.
peterh:
I live in a country called The Netherlands.
The Netherlands is a country that is, compared to the USA, so small that, if you should unfold your roadmap of the USA in, say, approximately where I live, the bit showing Seattle would get wet because it would be in the North Sea (west of us), and the part of the map with Maine on it would extend into Germany (which is east of us).
South of us is Belgium, which is notorious for its beer and its inability to form a decent government.
The Netherlands is also very flat (you probably saw that coming). Our highest "mountain" is 321 meters (a little under 1000 feet).
The inhabitants of the Netherlands are called Dutch (no, the Duct are not from Denmark, that's the Danes).
Sometimes people call this country "Holland". While this is generally accepted, it's also wrong. Same thing (but in reverse) about us sometimes calling the USA "America".
And yes, Amsterdam (which may ring a bell with a few more people than The Netherlands would) is our capital. I do not live in Amsterdam. I don't want to live there, and I cannot afford it (Amsterdam is, like, say, London, extremely expensive).
The Netherlands is the most densely populated country of Europe - sixteen and a half million people on a surface just a bit larger than, say, Maryland.
Jimmy the Squid:
You sound kind of bitter about this.
jhocking:
You forgot to mention how everyone in Amsterdam smokes pot and has sex with hookers.
I mean, when they're not tending their tulips.
--- Quote from: squawk on 12 Oct 2010, 19:31 ---which are terrible, by the way, because they're just boxes now; they used to have local developers build the neighborhoods and they were all nice and varied. now you fire up google maps satellite view and it's just like wtf what are all these squares of shades of gray.
--- End quote ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_2lGkEU4X
Barmymoo:
I was in Amsterdam for three days and on two separate occasions men attempted to buy me. I mean, that is not normal.
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