Small Town Folks: If you left the small town life for some big city livin', what did you learn?

I realized how much I know from living in a small town. None of my housemates have head of storm windows or pipes freezing, and I have to be the default spider-remover of my apartment.

I learned I’d rather be a big fish in a little pond. I’d rather have less than twenty sirens in the night rather than a 24-hour food delivery.

Ohhh @slices…that’s a good point. My big Boston friend didn’t know ANYTHING about the big world, our roles were wuite reversed since I was the small town girl.

When I moved from a small town to a big city, I learned that small town living really is as bad as I always thought. I so prefer cities. The only positive thing is what @sliceswiththings mentioned. I know a lot of things I wouldn’t have known if I’d grown up in a city. But damn am I glad I don’t have to live in the sticks forever.

How small of a town are we talking about? 200 people? 200k?

It wasn’t tiny, it’s the biggest town in our county with about 6 or 7k when I was growing up. We got a Super WalMart when I was in high school so…..yeah.

My small town is 1800 (dialup internet, no cell service, no commercial stuff—just a post office!)

I have no idea if I want to settle in a small town or a city. Whenever I get home it’s just so damn cozy and beautiful that I can’t imagine ever living somewhere else, but it would be a bit slow.

@kikibirdjones ahh, then I might be out of this question then. We lived in a 200k town in the middle of nowhere.

Where’s that @gemiwing??

@kikibirdjones picture a land of mountains, hollers and more tobacco farms than people.

What the hell? A 200K “town”? The city I moved to was only 31K or so. (Still about twenty times larger than the town where I grew up.)

@MacBean 200k is a small town to me. I moved to a 5mil city and it was too big. Now I live in a 1mil city and it’s just right. I lived once in a 25k place- but everyone called it a village. So perhaps it’s geographic linguistics?

I do like very big cities like New York, Chicago, Philly… But the perfect size to me is somewhere around Boston/Baltimore/DC-sized.

I grew up in suburbia, but from 14 to 19 I lived in a rural area, and now am living back in suburbia.
I learned that suburbia is loud. Louder than I’d like. With people yelling at their kids to get in the car at 8am, or mowing their lawn, or otherwise making too much noise.
I learned that having the grocery store 1 mile away from home is awesome.

Oooo @gemiwing I’m thinking my favorite state of NC…

Well, this isn’t your question but I did it the other way around. I grew up in Annapolis and lived in D.C. for a while. Then, I moved to a small town. I mean a really small town. The kind of small town where the high school football players get taken around town in a fire engine (with sirens) after winning a game. That kind of small town.
I learned that in small towns people live better lives. Personal opinion. Sometimes I miss the city but I never want to move back. I love that I can trust my neighbors and spend all day in my backyard reading in a hammock with no traffic noises.
Both places have perks but small town living is much more relaxed. (I have found)...

People seem to take living in a big city to mean living right downtown with the skyscrapers and everything. I live in a city of 800,000 that’s packed with skyscrapers downtown and visitors from all over the world. But the part of the city I live in is a quiet upscale neighborhood that rarely gets traffic from people who don’t live here in the neighborhood. That would be a very different experience than living in an apartment downtown. There also aren’t any businesses around here.

It’s good to not have to drive >15 miles to the nearest supermarket.

It’s bad that I no longer have the privacy to crank my stereo until the walls move and piss off the porch.

Being known by a lot of people is a double-edged sword, but so is anonymity, and it’s a LOT easier to get a job in a small town because there is a good chance that the person doing the hiring already knows how competent you are.

I learned that I couldn’t possibly go back. I love living in a city, I never lack for something to do. Actually it’s physically impossible for me to go back to small-town/rural life any more because I’m visually disabled and unable to drive, so I need good public transport, and essential amenities within walking distance. If I lived in a small town I’d be unable to work.

@DominicX I’m in a very similar position to you – I live in England’s 3rd-biggest city (pop about 1.5m), but I’m 3 miles out from the city centre. It’s not quite suburbs, still a bit too built-up for that, but there’s plenty of green space nearby and most important for me, there’s a supermarket, a branch of my bank and a variety of shops within walking distance. Sometimes I think I’d like to live in a loft apartment in the city but I wouldn’t be able to have my dog with me if I did that.