For the love of mid-sized cities

I met a woman recently who swears by the mid-sized city. She's an American, from Portland, married to a Swede from the only non-mid-sized city here: Stockholm. Aside from Portland, this woman, let's call her June, lived in San Francisco, Stockholm and now Gothenburg. June argued that big cities were too hard to get around in, people living there were unfriendly, and the big city's large number of cultural offerings made her feel like she was missing something all the time. Mid-sized cities, on the other hand, were friendlier, and just big enough to support a few good restaurants, a museum or two and maybe even an opera or symphony. Plus, you could get from one end to the other without too much trouble.

I was surprised that my first reaction was to agree with her. As a native San Franciscan it's perhaps heresy to do so, but so be it. I love being in a smaller city. Or perhaps I should say that I loved moving to a smaller city. It was so easy to get settled, to get around town, to get a handle on driving around town. Being in the bumping tourist chaos that is Rome regardless of the time of year, I was reminded how nice it is NOT to live in a city that is a tourist destination. Because the city's so small we run into people we know all the time, and everyone knows every cafe so meeting up is a breeze. It's a bit like living in San Francisco if San Francisco were only Noe Valley and Glen Park. Plus City Hall. And the Police Station. You get the idea.

The downside of Gothenburg is that after 8 months there's nothing new to see. Frankly there wasn't a lot of new stuff to see after a week, and in winter in particular there's not a lot to do with the kids except stroll downtown, go for coffee, go to the library or the Universeum (kid's museum) and ... go home again. Merel assures me this is not just the plight of those of us with children, but I'm suspicious. Anyway, the antidote to the absence of haute culture is of course friends. So now that the holidays are over and our friends are back from South Africa, Copenhagen, Texas, Stockholm, Jamaica, Amsterdam, Oslo and wherever else they were, we can do what generations of people living in small towns have done - make our own fun. Maybe we'll do what my mom always suggested when I was bored - play Monopoly.