I do love living in New Orleans, either this or Brooklyn are the only real cities for me here. I need to be able to walk to a grocery store. I'm privileged to have lived here for 6 years, and the only reason I recently got an old truck, was to evacuate in case of a hurricane, and we didn't even evacuate during ida. The sidewalks are torn to shit, the streets are full of holes. I'm quite certain that the streets are never fixed because they wouldn't have enough cops to keep people from driving drunk. The city hall sign has been broken for 4 years, the lights don't work in some of the letters and it just reads "ity all" at night. It's illegal to be fully nude in SF these days, but NOLA still has a fully naked bike ride. This place can feel like burning man or joshua tree, but with toilets and electricity. Except for during hurricanes, then its exactly like burning man. I went to the bar next door during ida to find a couple fucking at the bar and open bottles of lube softly lit up with a dark orange glow from the 3 candles that dimly lit my favorite bartenders face as he asked about whether my house got badly damaged or not. The architecture is very old and very unique, actually its very european and feels quite distinct from the architecture in boston/nyc. I don't know a single person in tech here, everyone has some sort of creative endeavor and makes money through a hodge podge of sources. I live next to a 24 hour gay bar, and across the street from a supermarket, next to a vet, and caddy corner from a pharmacy. I never have a reason to leave my block, and this neighborhood boasts the most dense concentration of trans/queer people I've ever encountered.
The city boasts a strong spiritual history, which I sense, causes people to come here to either flourish, or get spit out. There's not much in the way of hiking/mountains around here, and the most beautiful natural environments are in the swamp amongst the gators and pelicans dancing through the soft and grassy patches of muddy land dotting the waters edge. There are no other cities I really like visiting within an hour. It's a bright blue dot in a fire-red state. Car-jackings are up 550% over last year, and the particular circumstances by which someone killed someone with a machete at the gas-station down the street from my house, I'm sorry to say, were unsurprising.
Having said that, I can't live the rest of my life not having *lived* outside of the US. I'll be moving to Berlin at some point, because that's the closest city that felt like it feels here. The food is cheaper, you can find Indian food, and there are more languages spoken. The government there doesn't feel like some morally corrupted festering cesspool of civil indifference and political myopia. Despite everything I love about this place, and that I'm quite certain I'll retire here, I'm eager to GTFO while I still feel young, to experience what its like to feel young in a place more free than the farce I've been raised to believe. I have friends in Berlin, and though German is pretty hard to speak well, I'm up for the challenge.