When I first moved to California last January I made a very conscious decision that I was going settle in Sunnyvale, at least for my first year here. To my friends who had experience of the Bay Area, this sounded like absolute madness. “You’re young!” they cried. “You need the social life of the city! Sunnyvale is so boring!”

But boring was exactly what I was looking for.

I was well and truly citied-out after eight years of living in London, the very definition of the word “city”. I needed some time in a quiet, dull, suburban sort of place to regroup my thoughts, and start to build up some form of life in America.

The first couple of months of wrangling with the DMV, the Social Security, and settling into a new niche at work needed concentration. Living just 5 miles from the office was perfect - a 10-15 minute commute, and the company’s generous facilities on hand (being able to pop over to your desk at the weekend is a godsend when your broadband isn’t yet connected). Most of all, I reveled in that blessed, soul-enriching boredom.

Nine months later, however, it’s getting to be time for a change. You can take the man out of the city, but you can’t take the city out of the man (to borrow a cliche). I’m too used to a social life focussed around variety - weird little bars that you discover on street corners; artsy little film festivals where the hipster quotient is enough to make your eyes water; restaurants which make you realise what a pleasure food can be.

You can find these things out in the sticks, but they’re far fewer and further between, and nine months in the South Bay has been enough to explore most of them.

It’s more than possible, too, to venture into the city fairly regularly for a quick fix. But visiting is not the same as living there - it involves an hour’s drive (or 80-minute train ride) each way, and there’s no possibility of stepping out of the front door on a Saturday morning and just spending a few hours exploring the streets. You can’t really stay out partying until 3am either, unless you don’t drink and enjoy driving on freeways in the small hours of the morning.

My lease in Sunnyvale is up at the end of January, and so the plan, simply, is to return to California after Christmas back in the UK, find an apartment, and move up to the city by the start of February. In a way, it has a nice sense of symmetry about it - exactly a year after I moved here from London and dashed around looking for somewhere to live, I’ll be repeating the cycle (only with a 40-mile move instead of a 5,000-mile one).

So here goes…

This article first arrived on the interwebnet on Wednesday, September 28th, 2005 at 8:03 am .
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