Vancouver to SF and Back Again: When the heart hurts

I booked my flight tickets to go home for a week at the end of April. I'm excited to see what comparisons I make between Vancouver and SF. I want to see if I can, after just 4 months, decide which one I like better, or if one even is better than the other. Sometimes things are just different.

Moving to live in the US all on my own is definitely the most drastic change I've had in my life so far. There's been so much learning through all of it. I think that I've grown.. and changed, but I'm not sure in what way.

I still remember the first few weeks. They were overwhelming to say the least, and full of doubt and uncertainty. Had I made the right decision moving away from my established life in Vancouver? Was I going to be able to make it all by my lonesome?

It was a strange world full of foggy weather, palm trees, and the American attitude. The culture was dense, and the diversity was astounding. I naively thought that living in Vancouver exposed me to diversity, but boy was I wrong. Being here made me fully realize what a range of culture and races there exist in North America. African Americans, Mexicans, Latinos, Filipinos, Vietnamese, Koreans, Japanese, and a lot more I'm sure I failed to categorize would be crammed onto every street I would walk through.

It was all the little things that would always get me. People in my house insist on using the word 'bathroom' as the only means of describing what I was raised to call the 'washroom'. The first time I ordered deli meat I had to catch myself and order in increments of pounds (or in my case 1/4 pounds). What I think of as common courtesy and politeness is largely ignored here, and more often than not completely replaced by rudeness.

When I was living with my boss during that first week I was fairly miserable and pessimistic. I would wake up and go to work each weekday, return in the dark of the evening, think about any groceries that I needed, make a bland dinner, and then hide in my room. I was timid about going out and exploring the neighbourhood. The places that I needed to go to buy food were barely familiar to me, and the Mission District where I was living was sketchville in itself. The Mission is this up and coming trendy neighbourhood that is half-full of amazing restaurants, wine bars, and shops that insist on quirky originality. The other half is entirely devoted to government housing projects. It's a very confusing mix of affluent hipster foodies, poor immigrants, and crazy homeless people. Not the best place for a young female to wander around by herself at night.

And then I moved to my current abode...(to be continued)