While I love it here most of the year, there's a point where it really sucks. We're there now. Smog alerts, afternoon rain that destroys everyone's commute home. And then, the heat. There's just something about having a freshwater river that makes a town SO much worse. Memphis was like this in the 80s. I spent a month in Montgomery in the 90s that was WHORE-ible. But, this image really sums it up:
Men. I'm in LA now but I grew up in New England. You wanna talk about shit weather? You'd get like 99 in the summers with 90% humidity and then two feet of snow followed by a couple days of single digit temperatures during the day and 20 below at night during the winter.
Threads like this make me very happy to live in the northwest. The weather is very predictable and consistent. Although I wish it actually rained up here in the summer months.
I'm a couple of hours away from Atlanta, I feel ya. Whenever I go down one of the rivers around here in the summer and get away from all the pavement it makes me realize what a subtropical jungle this place actually is And the mosquitos have been really bad this year, ugh. I probably have Zika by now
you live in the county or So. Cal in general? If you live in the actual city of Los Angeles....I'm sorry.
Haha, fellow New Englander here! The weather is quite mercurial. I don't mind the intense heat and humidity, but those unpredictable shoulder seasons and brutal winters are enough to make me want to head south recently. Although, I guess not Atlanta, given the OP. Yikes.
I admit it was hotter in Tunisia, the Sahara, Indonesia and the Caribbean. And it's not as bad here as it was in Orlando. The one advantage to hot weather is watching all the clothing come off!
Half the problem.. the smog and the commute, all has to do with cars. Thats the defining characterisitc AND the downfall of Atlanta - its an automobile-centric city. It has probably the worst traffic behind Los Angeles. I would never choose to live there UNLESS MAYBE I had my lifestyle planned out to have short commute, via bicycle, motorcycle or MARTA (metro atlanta rapid transit) and I would NOT own a car. Atlanta is one of the most dangerous cities to ride a bicycle. Thats not from some study posted on the internet, thats from firsthand experience. The poor quality public transit is largely due to old racial biases and tensions. Now that Cobb county has the new Braves stadium and all the new highways they are building there on top of and between and around the existing highways it is absolutely ridiculous. Cobb is old money, conservative, christian, white... would rather fix the problem with literally highways on top of highways and highways between highways instead of mass transit because that would bring black people into town. Also any kind of intelligent decision is just too progressive for them. I really don't miss that place. A lot of hot women though.
Cobb is a strange place to be sure, but there are plenty of black folks, Mexican folks and a smattering of Asian folks as well. The stadium was a boondoggle that will cost the taxpayers in Cobb more than it will the old money families. And yes, there are a lot of them. Just west of them is Paulding, a primarily white-flight county filled with "refugees" from Douglas, Carroll Floyd and Bartow counties after they had the "gall" to build affordable apartment complexes that were quickly filled with Fulton county's "projects" dwellers and a lot of people displaced by Katrina. I've watched all of this unfold. The actual problem are the developers who are controlling this shell game. They are playing both sides of the racial coin to make a buck. Look at Sandy Springs, who fought MARTA for a decade before being voted out and overwhelmed by the "minorities" they despised. Only, that was never the case. Sandy Springs was a liberal Mecca and still is in many ways. We go there often for cool stores and events. Unfortunately, their crime rate did spike when MARTA put a station next to Perimeter mall. It was easy pickings. The same thing happened in Douglasville when they put in a mall almost 2 decades ago. Even without a MARTA connection that mall became shoplifter's paradise. But the Douglas county cops were run by a relic from the past who built a massive jail to lock up all the black folks who dared to steal from the mall. They would chase robbers and shoplifters all the way back to Fulton, Clayton and Dekalb county and drag them back to Douglas where armed robbery merits a life sentence (county laws in Georgia are not to be trifled with). While I admit I expected to see the KKK and weekly cross burnings when I moved here years ago, I have indeed seen the racial flames get fanned around. And most of the time it seems to be "outsiders" trying to manipulate resources and people to score a fast buck and move on. I have to commute through 3 counties to get to work and back. I drive like a nun because I know exactly how these small town oinkers are, regardless of their "color". The good thing though is that when it's so freakin hot around here, the crime rate seems to drop. And yes, you are so right about the raw beauty so many of the women in this area, again regardless of color. BTW, Guernica? Dark stuff!
I went to Southern Polytechnic State University before it turned into KSU... a school thats reputation was built on the emphasis of hands on and practical knowledge that is bow waning fast. I took a hand drafting architecture class there the absolute last time it was ever offerd. I lived in a shack 1 mile from Marietta square that was literally smack in between $800,000 town homes and the poor mexican neighborhoods and homeless encampments. Now I live in Nevada in the Sierras! About the same temperature, but no humidity
Why? I like it here. It's expensive, sure, but so was Boston. Though I'm glad I took the advice to live near where I work. So many cars and such a huge, spread out area. You always hear about So Cal traffic but you can't really appreciate it until you're in it. Maybe if they built it more like, you know, an actual city and not a never ending suburb, it would be different.
