decidedlyodd

So, after reading Jenn’s interesting comment/question:

Hey Jeff! I wanted to ask… do you recommend North Carolina, the state, as a whole? I’m applying for grad school there and everyone is trying to dissuade me but I figured you should be the one I should ask seeing as you live there and all

I got inspired to write this entry about my thoughts on living in North Carolina .

First, some background. I lived my entire life from birth until I was 23 in California (ok, I was in Bayreuth, Germany, for 5 months when I was 21). Of those 23 years, 18 were spent in socal (Orange County) and 5 in norcal (Berkeley). Next, I lived in Saarbrücken, Germany, for 20 months. Then, I moved back to Berkeley for about 2 months to teach summer school. My parents were both born in California and have more or less lived there entire lives there (my dad was in the military outside DC in Virginia for a couple years back in the 70s). My 4 grandparents were born in California, Colorado, Ohio and Oregon.

However, for the past about 5 months I’ve been living in North Carolina. Yes, North Carolina. As in that state on the eastern seaboard somewhere between Florida and New York. As in that state that’s not North Dakota. As in that state that’s not South Carolina (yes, there’s really a big difference between the two!). As in that state that used to be part of the Confederacy back in the day. If your life in California was anything like mine, the South was this weird place that no self-respecting person (especially somebody living it up in California already) would ever move to!

I really enjoy living here. Despite the stereotypes and preconceptions, it is not a bad place to live at all. A lot of people live in their little metropolitan bubble there whole life. There’s a big world out there. Live in some different parts of it before you get kids and a mortgage and a job you hate. Every place has good people and bad people, reasons people enjoy living there and aspects they learn to put up with.

Seriously though, this in not San Francisco. Nonetheless, this certainly a diverse state. The venerable Jesse Helms (the man North Carolinians love to hate) once said,

“We ought to put a fence around this zoo of Chapel Hill and charge admission.”

Voters chose Kerry over Bush 2 to 1 in Orange County, NC (and yes my roommate Michael likes to refer to it as “the OC”) and that includes surrounding rural areas.

I live in Carrboro (aka the Paris of the Piedmont), which is hands-down the most blue of places in this red state. I mean for crying out loud, the social center of this town of about 15,000 is a grocery co-op on whose lawn people and their offspring hoola-hoop and dance to hippy music during the non-winter time. I like to describe Carrboro as a combination of graduate students, hippies, rednecks, Mexan immigrants (it has the largest Hispanic population in the state, which means you can get pretty decent Mexican food here, unlike most of the rest of the east coast). Carrboro is also home to the famous Cat’s Cradle, also known as that place where all the indie bands play. Chapel Hill is also very chill, but of course has a much stronger “college town” feel (read more bars, more students, less hippies) to it than Carrboro, even though the two towns are basically two ends of one geographic population center.

Now, North Carolina is basically a big (red) state and none of its cities are going to be anything like San Francisco or LA. Raleigh (about 30 miles from here and the state capital) seems a lot like Sacramento to me. Durham (10 miles away) is sorta like Oakland but smaller and less urban. Instead of closed shipyards though, it has closed tobacco factories. Durham is where that movie Bull Durham was set and where American Tobacco (the early 20th century tobacco equivalent of Standard Oil) used to be based. Oh and Duke University is there with its huge campuses. “Dook” is to “Stanfurd” as UNC is to Cal. Charlotte is the biggest city in the Carolinas and is about 2.5 hours from here by car. People say it’s becoming the “new Atlanta”, whatever that’s supposed to mean. All I really know is that NASCAR is really big there .

As for sports, people basically only care about one thing: basketball. And I mean this in the sense that the rest of the world only cares about soccer. People from North Carolina are crazy about basketball. It scares me quite frequently in fact.

Now, here’s a list of things I like about North Carolina and/or the Triangle (Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill) area:

• Housing is affordable and obtainable in Chapel Hill (which I’m told is the most expensive city in the metro). I pay $400/month in rent, which is on the high side for shared housing around here. The place is 3 bedrooms and I share it with two other grad students. I have my own bathroom. The building is only about 5 years old and has a yard and large driveway. It’s about 2 miles from campus and there’s free (for everybody! not just students) bus service to campus. The place had been listed for a couple weeks and I was the first person to actually want to rent it. No credit check. No application. Paid the deposit a while AFTER I moved in.
• The weather is nice. Yes, it does get hot and humid the summer, but everything (including apartments) has A/C. At night, it’s never really hot enough to need to run the A/C. Also, I like the fact that you can very comfortably wear shorts throughout the summer (yes, Berkeley, I’m talking to you!). There are four definite seasons, but in general the temperatures are pretty mild. I’m told it snows only about every other winter. The average high in January is about 50F. Winter is much shorter though than almost anywhere outside of the west coast or gulf coast.
• People are nice. Seriously, you don’t even realize how rude people are in the rest of the country right now. I went to DC a couple weeks ago (5 hour drive) and it hit me that people in big cities are totally rude in comparison to here. When you call or visit virtually any office on campus, the bureaucrats are almost always upbeat and polite. They even tend to say please and thank you, which is weird but nice.
• Food. North Carolina BBQ is neat. No, it’s not what you probably think BBQ is. It’s a specific type of shredded pork with a specific juice (not quite sauce) with a variety of certain sides (hush puppies, coleslaw, fried okra stand out). In this part of the state, there is pretty decent Mexican food available too.

Now, of course not everything is great. Things I don’t like about this area:

• Despite claims of Chapel Hill being “the Berkeley of the South”, unlike Berkeley where there can be 12 Thai restaurants in a 1 block radius and they all somehow stay in business, Chapel Hill is seriously lacking in quality Asian cuisine. I figure it’s gotta be that the southeast is not a common immigration destination for Asians.
• Ethnic Diversity. In the Triangle, people are really very tolerant. Despite what you may have heard, it’s not really a racist hell-hole. However, the thing that sorta weirds me out is that everything is very black and white (literaly). The politics of the town and the university are very binary. The discourse has been changing as more people of different backgrounds (probably most notably Hispanics) have begun to increase in numbers, but the mindset is still very traditional.
• Shows. A TON of indie acts come through here all the time. A lot of bands are from here too and the music scene is vibrant. However, it just doesn’t have the breadth that the Bay Area does (well, does any any other area in the US besides New York and maybe LA?). There are very few punks shows here. Indie and Americana rule the roost, which is a bit of a disappointment for me personally. There is a sizeable and visible hipster community here.
• Distilled spirits can only be bought from the county-run liquor stores, which are open M-Sa 9 to 9. Fortunately, you can buy wine and beer in the grocery store, but it still is kinda weird.
• There are no direct flights to the west coast from here. The closest you can get is Phoenix or Denver. This is rather insiginficant, but I like to bitch about it.