I love where we live. I really do. But it’s a small city (I kind of giggle when it’s called a city… I suppose it meets the population requirements, just barely, but it was a town for the first 28 years of my life and that’s how I’ll always think of it) and, except for during the summer (and actually, kind of in the summer as well), there just isn’t that much to do. There’s one bar. There are two… MAYBE three restaurants that aren’t fast food franchises or tourist traps, and they are so expensive a normal person would have to save up to go once a year. There’s the movie theatre where they seem to only show “teenage” movies (not that there’s anything wrong with teenagers; it’s just difficult to find anything intellectually stimulating about High School Musical 37). One bookstore (speaking of which I bought the latest Jennifer Weiner novel, “Certain Girls”, which is sort of a sequel to “Good In Bed”, which I loved. I’m about halfway through and I’m not sure I’m going to be okay with this one. It’s really good, don’t get me wrong. I’m just having some prescience about the fates of some of my favourite characters and I won’t be happy if they come true. Also since it takes place 13 years after the original story, Nifkin is sadly no longer with us… wow, digress much?) which is a chain. A Wal-Mart and a Zellers and that’s about it. Oh, but like, seventeen Tim Horton’s. Yep.
What’s your town like?
I live in the city but I call it a “country city”. We have more bars and churches than anything else – 15 of each. Walmart and Lowes ran out most of their competition. We have 2 major grocery stores and a ton of quick marts. We have a good mix of restaurants – some are pretty high brow but we have a few middle of the road places as well as the usual fast food places too.
Oh… and an International Bridge too.
I wouldn’t want to walk from one end of the city to the other but it’s possible, if you have to. Overall it’s not a bad place to live.
My town is like a giant rest stop. There is access to two major highways and this section of town (between the two onramps) has Friendly’s, Burger King, Papa Gino’s, McDonald’s, Domino’s, Dunkin’ Donuts, a breakfast place, a kickass pizza place, 2 pharmacies, couple of convenience stores, a great bakery, a chain grocery store and something like 6 gas stations.
Downtown consists of 3 “townie” bars, a couple of upscale-type tiny restaurants, 5-6 churches,3 more pizza joints, 2 chinese places, 2 italian places, a mom & pop grocery store and a couple of banks.
(this looks like a lot of restaurants for our population, so I decided to check the stats. There are 6,413 households and a little over 17,000 people total)
So, unless you like really bad karaoke or spend the entire night eating, not so much to do. The teens just kinda hang out on benches near the downtown rotary and watch traffic.