@shinyan

So… amazing food. Great public transportation. Very clean. But very conformist. Self expression limited. The irony of seeing an exhibit on graffiti, yet no actual graffiti in the streets. And the causal racism especially if you’re brown. You could be British born but still expect to be sat far away from everyone else at cocktail bars, experience comments and have weird assumptions made.

It's obscenely expensive for low quality service with kinda mean people. Not nice. The regulations and taxes here are insane too. You pay a neighbourhood tax, district tax, city tax, county tax and then state tax on every payment you make! The traffic here is insane too. And just getting from place to place is difficult because city is so gigantic. We talked to our hotel's manager here and he struggles a lot with the insane amount of rules California tells him to follow. It makes it hard to st

I lived in Beijing for almost 3 years from 2014-2017. It's an incredible city with a lot to offer. It's an imposing place and not the most welcoming, but that's because it takes time to adjust. In a nutshell: beautiful parks, very modern infrastructure , friendly people, good transportation (the subway is FAR superior to London or NYC, for example), amazing food, relatively cheap, extremely safe, loads to do, incredible history. The one major con is the air pollution—it can get really bad, so

New York is cool. I’ve visited multiple times to see my family throughout my life, and recently came back from my first post-COVID trip there. Yes, it’s very expensive — but there is no city on earth that’s more captivating in my opinion. I used to think that New Yorkers were smug by claiming that NYC was better than everywhere else, but now I totally get it lol. My personal favourite neighbourhood is the Upper East Side, which is where you’ll find the coveted Museum Mile. But I also

I loved my stay in Austin. I had heard a lot of people moved here during COVID and wanted to see it for myself. We stayed around Lady Bird Lake, like on the south side of the river, a very nice area. We were there in July so it was quite hot, but in the shadow it was fine to walk. It is dry heat, not like in Thailand, so while it's hot it's not sweaty which is much better. The average quality of food here is very high, like some of the best food I had in the world besides maybe Japan. Not eve

I just came back after 12 years, last time I lived in SF for 3 months in 2012. Back then it was a walkable and clean and fun, pretty safe city. The only place back then that you'd avoid was the Tenderloin. There was homeless but they actually weren't aggressive. There wasn't much robberies either. San Francisco in 2024 is very different, as you've probably seen from social media. The homeless problem has grown a lot since then, and they're not just clustered in the Tenderloin, they're all over

Overall, a pretty great place. Good restaurants and many breweries. Solid entertainment. It has all four seasons and lots of sunshine. Some homelessness issues downtown, like most cities.