# Where is home?



## luckyscars (Jan 24, 2012)

Just wanted to get an idea of where the folks who post on this forum live. I find the notion of 'home' to be a big part of a writer's identity. of course, some people we already know thanks to the 'location' detail 'neath the avatar. but i'm interested in what the place you live is actually like. is it a small town or big city? is your climate temperate, rainy, tropical, coastal, hot or none of the above (in which case you probably live in britain)? how long have you lived there? do you ever want to leave and, if so, where would you like to live?

i'll start: i was born in london, england. i have dual british-american citizenship, but was raised mostly in europe until my twenties. as far as nationality goes, i consider myself to be 'british by mind but american by heart'. sort of a mixed soul. i have lived in the U.S for a few years, in a small town in the american midwest, which is my my wife's home-town. the town is a few miles north-east of columbus in the middle of the buckeye state (ohio). new york is about eight hours' driveto the east through pennsylvania, chicago about the same to the west, via indiana state. above ohio is canada (across lake eerie) and michigan. my town is named Westerville (Westerville, Ohio - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia), famous for banning alcohol, being the hometown of benjamin hanby, who wrote the christmas carol 'up on the housetop', and really nothing much else. it's a pretty dull place by most people's standards. in the summer it gets pretty hot, easily in the 80's or 90's (farenheit). in the winter the mercury rarely gets more than ten notches over freezing. surrounding the town are fields, farms and woodland. politically, we lean republican, with most liberals living in and around columbus. most people who live here have never left america, and many have never left ohio. i like it here, but sometimes i think i'd like to move. mainly just because of the cold, and because i don't like not being able to walk like i could in europe.


your turn!


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## Deleted member 33527 (Jan 24, 2012)

Considering that you have blood spatter all over your avatar, I'm not really sure I want to tell you where I live...


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## The Backward OX (Jan 24, 2012)

Why cannot one walk in America?


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## philistine (Jan 24, 2012)

Manchester, England. Famous for counterfeit designer clothing, crime, unemployment and the philistinism of it's occupants.


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## Rustgold (Jan 24, 2012)

Grew up (but technically wasn't born) in a place nicknamed Moccasin City, where they didn't finish building the wire fence around it.  Town is most famous for its exports of unskilled unemployed, along with druggie murders and the killing of toddlers.
Now promoted to a dump who's residents pretend they're not obese shoeless rag-wearers who desperately need to learn that soap isn't for decoration.


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## luckyscars (Jan 24, 2012)

The Backward OX said:


> Why cannot one walk in America?



it's just not safe to. no exaggeration either. i'm fortunate in that i can just about stumble to a supermarket, but for a lot of people here you just can't walk anywhere, at least nowhere further than your own neighborhood and literally everybody drives. it's not just laziness either, or even crime, it's to do with distance and a lack of general infrastructure for pedestrians. also it's illegal to walk down freeways and major highways.


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## luckyscars (Jan 24, 2012)

philistine said:


> Manchester, England. Famous for counterfeit designer clothing, crime, unemployment and the philistinism of it's occupants.



and morrissey.


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## luckyscars (Jan 24, 2012)

Dreamworx95 said:


> Considering that you have blood spatter all over your avatar, I'm not really sure I want to tell you where I live...



considering that in your avatar you appear to be quite bloodless, i'd say you're quite safe. perhaps


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## The Backward OX (Jan 24, 2012)

My on-site location was created during the big flood 12 months ago, when my urgent surgery had to be re-scheduled because there were miles of water between me and the hospital. Maybe it needs updating.

“Small town” and “big city” are relative terms. I used to be in contact with a girl in North Carolina who told me she lived in a small town. I live in a small town too. But it turned out her small town had a population of 18,000, whereas my small town has a population of less than 1000. I become stressed if two other drivers, as well as I, have some potential to arrive at the same intersection within five seconds of each other. 

Our climate depends on which map you read. Some call us sub-tropical, some temperate. All I know is we can’t grow Brussels sprouts and the rabbits are becoming acclimatised.

The district experienced a five-year drought that ended just over a year ago. Today they have to let water out of the dams to prevent them overflowing.

Surfing is two hours away to the East. That’s two hours in a fast car. Otherwise there’s the Council pool, or the upper reaches of the Brisbane River. The pool does have its drawbacks, mostly to do with the water aerobics classes, led by one who I can only describe as a female reincarnation of former Nazi party member Herr Reichsmarshall Herman Göering.

I went bush, as we say, twenty years ago. Today, age has caught up, and medical reasons have been intermittently dragging me back to the big smoke, which is where all the medical specialists are located. I’ve begun to hate the travel involved, with a deep and abiding passion. The cure is to move back to the smoke. But I won’t be doing that. That cure is worse than all the illnesses put together. The peace and quiet out here is worth the other inconveniences. So I’m between a rock and a hard place.

The first four lines of the second verse of My Country, by Dorothea MacKellar, sum up our environment, and how I feel about it, quite nicely:

_I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains._


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## theorphan (Jan 24, 2012)

I am from Western Washington (Seattle Area).  Rainy and green.  I was raised on the East Coast in smaller towns and miss it.


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## The Backward OX (Jan 24, 2012)

luckyscars said:


> it's just not safe to. no exaggeration either. i'm fortunate in that i can just about stumble to a supermarket, but for a lot of people here you just can't walk anywhere, at least nowhere further than your own neighborhood and literally everybody drives. it's not just laziness either, or even crime, it's to do with distance and a lack of general infrastructure for pedestrians. also it's illegal to walk down freeways and major highways.



I wasn't thinking. Outside of the shopping centre, we also lack infrastructure for pedestrains but due to low traffic volume everyone who walks, walks on the streets. I wonder if that makes them streetwalkers?


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## Bloggsworth (Jan 24, 2012)

The Backward OX said:


> Why cannot one walk in America?




A) Anywhere & everywhere is too far, and B) People who walk must be "strange", God invented feet to operate the accelerator and brake pedals...


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## Bloggsworth (Jan 24, 2012)

luckyscars said:


> and morrissey.




I was trying to forget Morrissey - If I wan't to be that depressed, I'll come out of retirement and go back to work.


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## Kevin (Jan 24, 2012)

Bloggsworth said:


> I was trying to forget Morrissey - If I wan't to be that depressed, I'll come out of retirement and go back to work.


Ha. He lives here now, along with jonesy, and johnny rotten, and ozzie, his wife harriet...and all the bitches of beverly hills, which is another popular reality t.v. show... with ex-pat, and her husband with the rod stewart hair, and her friend, injected duck lips, whose dead husband beat her, and plastic tits, and what's her name, drunken mess....Oh, and uh, none of 'em walk either, unless the cameras are rolling...

It's a big place, typically a $100.00 a week on gas, unless you have to commute.


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## Offeiriad (Jan 24, 2012)

philistine said:


> Manchester, England. Famous for counterfeit designer clothing, crime, unemployment and the philistinism of it's occupants.



I find Manchester to be useful. It's the city I fly into from the US when I visit my friend who lives in Morecambe. 


I live in New Orleans. I'm sure you can figure out what you need to know about this place.


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## shadowwalker (Jan 24, 2012)

My small town (Spring Valley, MN) is just a few miles north of the Iowa border. Population around 3000. I can walk from one end to the other in less than an hour (without rushing). Our idea of a traffic jam is getting caught behind farm machines in the spring and fall (which travel right through town to get from one field to another). I can look out my east and south windows and see cornfields a couple blocks away. The county I live in is also the poorest in the state. Well over half of the houses here were built in the early 1900s. It gets hot in the summer, but made worse by the very high humidity. Winters are bitterly cold with a lot of snow (although this year has been very mild). The nearest 'big city' (about 106k) is 30 miles away (which is still too close). Spring Valley's biggest claim to fame is that Laura Ingalls Wilder lived here very, very briefly. There's also a rumor that an old abandoned building east of town was a speak-easy where such personages as Al Capone would drop in - but that's only rumor.


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## garza (Jan 24, 2012)

Offeiriad - New Orleans was my second home town, in a manner of speaking, when I was a kid. My mother did much of her shopping at Maison Blanche and the other big stores on Canal Street. My first sheet music when I started piano lessons came from Werlein's. We would ride the local from Gulfport to New Orleans two or three times a month. I always wanted to ride with the window open, but of course that would mean smoke and cinders so it wasn't allowed. The local was a flag-stop train - just stand by the tracks and wave and the train would stop for you. In the afternoon we rode the express home. Its only stop between New Orleans and Gulfport was Bay St. Louis. I don't remember if the afternoon express was already called the Hummingbird at that time, or if that name came when Diesel engines came into use. When I was older, 11 or so, I used to ride over on the bus on Saturday mornings and hang out in the Quarter, take pictures all over the place, and have lunch with a great aunt who lived out by lakefront. 

I heard my first rap on a side street in the Quarter. A kid was sitting on a front stoop with his buddy who was using an old flattop guitar like a drum. The first kid was rapping (I found out later) and as I passed he added a bit about a little skinny white kid with his two flat feet. I wish I could remember exactly, and I wish I knew who the kid was. He may have been a big star later.

My new home is a recently refurbished first-floor flat overlooking Rainbow Town, the north end of Corozal Town. I worried a bit about climbing the stairs, but that has not been a problem. Probably the exercise is good for me. I go for a daily walk from this end of town to the other, a distance of about three-quarters of a mile along the edge of Corozal Bay. This thread gave me the idea of showing exactly where the Newsletter is prepared. When the February issue is published you'll find a photo of this corner of the front room on the back page.


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## Terry D (Jan 24, 2012)

I live on a low ridge overlooking the Mississippi River valley in southeast Iowa between the small cities of Burlington (pop. about 25,000) and Ft. Madison (pop. about 10,000).  I was born about 45 miles east in Galesburg, IL, another small city of about 35,000 which has the minor distinction of being the hometown of the poet Carl Sandburg, and, for a time, of the novelist Jack Finney _(The Body Snatchers_, _Time After Time).  _


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## theorphan (Jan 24, 2012)

Where you live sounds nice Terry!


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## patskywriter (Jan 24, 2012)

When I say "home," I'm talking about Durham, North Carolina, in the southeastern USA. It's a lovely, diverse city of 200,000 that hasn't suffered too badly from the economic downturn. We're the home of Research Triangle Park, so we have lots of software, nanotechnology and other technology- and health-based businesses (one of our nicknames is "City of Medicine"). I often refer to Durham as a small city (even though it's pretty big to lots of my friends), because the place that I call "back home" is Chicago, Illinois.

It's hard to think of everyone in the USA as sharing the same outlook on anything, and that includes walking. Durham is definitely an auto-centered town. That might be the only thing I don't like about it, but "back home," people walk everywhere—to the store, school, the park, the bank, the post office, etc etc. Of course, this varies from neighborhood to neighborhood. Some communities are more "walkable" than others—it all depends on the retail environment, how close the businesses are to the homes, and perceived safety factors.


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## RomanticRose (Jan 24, 2012)

My residence is in the High Desert of New Mexico -- also known as the Tularosa Basin.  I watch the sun come up over the Sacremento Mountains and watch it go down behind the San Andre Mountains.  I'm walking distance from the White Sands missle Range and watch missles whistling down at night.  Every now and then an oryx from the white sands will come by and nibble out of the goat's feeding trough.   I live pretty far outside the village backed up to BLM land.  The best aspect for me is the silence.  

I love my backyard wildlife, too.  Cottontails, foxes, horned lizards, roadrunners, golden eagles, hawks, jackrabbits. The coyotes at night are a lovely lullaby.


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## Tiamat (Jan 24, 2012)

My hometown is called New Castle, Pennsylvania (yes, two words, not one like the original).  The population is somewhere in the vicinity of 20,000.  The town has an interesting enough history (insomuch as it can be for western PA), but the "interesting" left New Castle right around the same time the Nazis left France.  Due to the steel factories that abound in this part of the state, WWII was a boon for this town, but when the demand for steel slowed after the war, our neighbor to the south, Pittsburgh, took over the production.  Since then, the population dropped from just shy of 50,000 residents to what it is today.

As for climate, I'm not really sure what to call it.  It's in the 20s now (Fahrenheit), but yesterday it was over 50 degrees.  We've had several snow storms this winter, but because of the seesaw effect, the snow buries us and then promptly floods us as the temperature rises.  It's great for driving--you never know if you'll be out in snow, sleet, freezing rain, ice, or some diabolical combination of all four.

And yes, we all drive here also.  Areas that call themselves "New Castle" can be more than fifteen miles away from each other, so walking would require a fair bit of time to spare.  Plus crime is a big issue here.  An out-of-towner once told me he'd heard of New Castle being called "Oxy Castle" because of the massive drug problem going on.  'Course a doctor was recently arrested for giving away prescriptions (followed by a round of robberies to the local pharmacies), and then a kingpin of the Oxy trade and half his family were busted not too long after that (followed, yet again, by a round of robberies to the local pharmacies).

So, for anyone considering a move to western PA, first of all, you're out of your damned mind, and second of all, if you really insist on it, move to Cranberry instead of good old NC.


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## IanMGSmith (Jan 24, 2012)

According to the write up, we live at the very center of Roman England. 

The Midlands is mainly a farming area, I would say. There is much beauty all around our town which is called Lutterworth and (when my achilles heel permits) I love to run (very safe here) in almost all weathers, including snow. This is very different to where I grew up on the semi-tropical east-coast of South Africa. There I spent much of my youth catching waves instead of doing schoolwork. How time passes ...sigh. (smile)

Sir Frank Whittle invented the jet engine here in Lutterworth and our neighbor's wife was his personal secretary. Barry is 84 and brings us fruit every now and then, from his trees.  

Pre-roman Lutterworth was an Anglo Saxon settlement, “Lutter's Vordig" meaning "Luther's Farm". It was here that in the fourteenth century John Wycliffe made his pioneering translation of the Bible and not far from here in the city of Northampton is a church dedicated to my ancestor "William Carey" who, as a missionary in India, converted the bible into many languages and successfully lobbied for the abolition of Indian wives being burned on the husbands funeral pyre, depending on who died first of course. 

Apart from the big cities, England seems to be criss-crossed with pictureque country roads and dotted with amazing hamlets and towns, each different from the next. Just going about our daily lives we keep stumbling on new places of interest. I could never live long enough to see it all.

- Lutterworth Town Council - Home Page


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## beanlord56 (Jan 24, 2012)

Douglasville, a relatively fast growing suburb a fair twenty minute drive west of metro Atlanta. The vast majority of my friends and family are here, my church is here (technically in Lithia Springs, but both towns kind of melt into each other), my school has a campus here, Arbor Place mall is here (though ever since Borders shut down, I have no reason to go there), and there's a local venue where, although rather expensive, some of my favorite bands play during the summer (I can't wait for Scream the Prayer V).

Historically, there isn't much here that I'm aware of, but my friend's mother writes historical columns about the area for the local newspaper and news website. There is an abandoned cotton mill, that is now falling apart with the roof gone and one wall collapsed. One thing I learned from the column was that there was a burial mound for a Creek "Princess" Anneewakee, though the weather has worn it down to nothing.

There isn't much else about Douglas County, Georgia. I don't think I'll ever willingly leave this place. Despite how boring I often think that it is, it's home.


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## Kyle R (Jan 25, 2012)

When I was born, as soon as the umbilical cord was snipped, I flew straight to the ceiling and clung to it, like a bat.

"Good Lord!" shouted the doctor.

"They didn't cover this in Med School!" shrieked a nurse.

They got me down by whapping at me with a broom. It was my first act of rebellion (against physics and believability).

My mother caught me and I calmed down, and resumed acting like a normal human baby. I spent my toddler years in Hawaii, but at three years old I decided it was time to explore the world, so I caught a flight to California by hanging on to the wing.

In California I fled the airport baggage handlers and found my way into the alpine woods, where I gained acceptance into a band of roving wolves. I honed my hunting skills and when I felt the time had come, I left my canine family to explore modern suburbia.

I attended public schools, several of them, roaming my way down the state of California, never staying in one location for more than a few months at a time. The nomadic lifestyle left me incapable of social commitment, so I would spend recesses and lunch breaks sitting off by myself in order to avoid making friendships -- or more so, in order to avoid breaking friendships -- because you can't feel bad about losing something if you never had it to begin with.

A few years passed this way, and I eventually decided it was time to return to my homeland. So I embarked on a new journey, swimming across the Pacific ocean. I learned to hold my breath for hours at a time, and I joined a pod of dolphins hunting mackerel and tuna. I even gained an arch-nemesis, a Great White Shark I called "One Eye", not because he had one eye, but because I knew he disliked the name. One Eye and I battled ferociously in the deep, open sea. Our arm/fin wrestling matches were epic, and we always argued loudly over our Hungry Hungry Hippo games. When I passed into the warmer Hawaiian waters, One Eye and I said our goodbyes, and even though we were enemies, I shed a tear for the loss, as he was, really, my first and only friend.

I hitched a ride on a sea turtle back to the shore of Oahu, where I rejoined my human family. In the evenings I fought crime, using bowling-ball-gymnastics and an electric-eel hula-hoop as my weapons of choice.

I sank into darkness in my teenage years when I discovered substances, such as chicken-noodle soup and Yoo-hoo chocolate milk. I became an abuser, and it wasn't until an acquaintance found me, curled up beneath a stairwell in a dark, wet alley, licking the salt from a Campbell’s Soup can, that I decided it was time to seek help for my addiction.

Enter the years of cloud smuggling, the lowest point of my life. I replaced my chicken soup addiction with the illegal lifestyle of smuggling cumulonimbus and stratocumulus clouds across the United States and Mexican borders. I made a lucrative profit until, greedily, I blew it all on one hand in a game of Texas Hold'Em Poker.

I had a Two Seven off-suit. The worst hand you can possibly get. I scratched my head, furrowed my brow, and pushed all my chips into the center of the table. I bet it all. Forty seven googolplex and nine dairy cows. It was a bluff, in every sense of the word.

The table cards showing were the Four of Clubs, the Ace of Hearts, and the Ace of Spades. I had absolutely nothing, except the table aces. But I wanted my opponent to believe I had another ace.

I stared him down with all the steel I could muster. I peered at him coyly, like a devil bat hanging from a ceiling. I glared at him with the eyes of a wolf, from my infancy in the Northern California woods. I postured nomadically. I chirped like an Orca. I even offered to get him a great deal on some rain clouds if he could score me some delicious noodles with chicken. When he began to waver, I threatened to assault him with spandex and a garden hose.

He didn't take the bait. He smirked and announced, "I call", and he slapped down the other two aces. He had Four Aces, an outrageous hand. I didn't even bother to turn over my cards.

I sulked away, aware my life earnings were now irrevocably gone. It was a turning point in my life, and I after crying and blowing my nose on a shocked stranger’s shirtsleeve, I lifted a manhole cover and took to the sewers, where I spent the next two years catching rats and training them to perform acrobatics.

When I felt the time had come, I travelled to Broadway through the underground pipes, and presented my show, The Amazing Sewer Rats, to city officials. They liked the idea, but suggested I come with them, to work out the details, in their comfy padded van. They'd even, they told me, provide me with a long-sleeved jacket to keep me nice and warm, because I was so important to them.

At first I agreed, but after seeing the jacket, I realized something was amiss. They hadn't asked me my size! Surely there was no way I was going to wear a jacket that didn't properly fit me. And so, with great determination, I fought them off, using Kung Fu and Jiu Jitsu, neither of which I actually knew, but accuracy was irrelevant because my flailing and yelling caused them to step back, startled and confused.

I took the opportunity to flee, climbing up the side of a building. I grabbed a screaming woman from an open window and carried her in my hand, while batting away bi-wing airplanes as I made my way to the top. When I reached the roof I placed the woman down and hurled myself onto the nearest cloud. I needed to escape, to get back to Hawaii, and as long as the weather stayed overcast, I had a clear field of stratocumulus to sprint across.

The miles sank away as I ran in the silent, crisp field of cotton-plume air. I fought off doppelgangers and monsters of Greek Mythology with a ping pong paddle, and when I found myself poised back over the familiar island chain in the Pacific, I parted a gap in the clouds at my feet and I immediately began to fall.

The air was violent, and falling through it was like tumbling through a herd of wild, screaming horses. In the distance a stork was releasing a baby in a parachute pack, so I leaned and steered toward it. I snatched the stork from the air and clung to it as we plummeted toward the spiraling, fast approaching land mass.

"Quickly, stork, hang on as best you can!" I yelled, and the stork clung to me as I flapped my arms and our descent began to slow until finally we landed, softly, in the middle of a sugar cane field.

I worked two years in those fields, harvesting sugar cane in the day and, in the evenings, battling giant Hawaiian Cane Spiders, the size of large dogs, with a bamboo staff and a blow torch.

After a close call when I overslept and found myself being cocooned in my sleep, I lit the entire field on fire, burning the devil vermin back to the hell from where they came. I pogo-sticked back to the city on my bamboo staff.

I rejoined my human family once again, and, through an electrical accident, found myself trapped in binary form in my computer's dial-up modem.

I waited patiently for the internet to be invented by Al Gore, and as soon as it was, I took to the forums, pleading for help. I soon lost my way in pornography sites and theological debates, and it wasn't until WritingForums.com came along that I finally decided, "Maybe someone here has the quantum physical engineering abilities to restore me to my human form."

I was wrong. But, I still like posting here. 

(Some parts may be fictional.)


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## patskywriter (Jan 25, 2012)

There's no way you swam across the Pacific Ocean.


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## KangTheMad (Jan 25, 2012)

I can hook you up with ten cans of chicken noodle soup if you can smuggle three cumulonimbus clouds into the house of someone I don't quite like.


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## Hawke (Jan 25, 2012)

Kyle: So... Hawaii, right? 

*grin* Brilliant, dude.

By the by, there's no way I'm following that.


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## Gamer_2k4 (Jan 25, 2012)

I live just outside of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a "small big city" of about 600,000.  I won't consider myself truly "home" until I'm living in a house with a family, but my interim home is the bottom level of a two-story house that I'm renting with a roommate.  It's nice enough, and we host enough events there that I feel like it's really "ours," but I'm not going to let myself be satisfied with just that.  Once I can, I'm moving up to something bigger and better.


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## Jinxi (Jan 25, 2012)

I live in sunny South Africa, in one of the biggest towns called Johannesburg. Life here is not as bad as it is made out to be in the newspapers - yes, there is a high crime rate and a countless number of unskilled, uneducated poor people, but it's home and has been for 23 years. Life in Jo'burg is generally very busy. Traffic is a nightmare and 90% of the people driving on our roads shouldn't be allowed to operate a microwave, nevermind a vehicle. I live in a little suburb called Edenvale. My fiance and I live in a complex, which is right down the road from the house I grew up in.

We have the most beautiful sunsets I have ever seen and our game reserves are a place of tranquility. Every now and then I crave the peacefulness of the reserve and my fiance and I drive about 2 hours to Pilanesberg (which is actually set in the crater of a long extinct volcano). Seeing animals roam in their natural surroundings creates a sense of calm for me, and the smell of potato bush at dusk will always bring a smile to my face.

We are looking to buy a new house after we get married, and I am looking forward to a fresh start.


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## thinkingaboutit (Jan 25, 2012)

I spent most of my childhood and early adult life in western Tennessee and western Kentucky (with short times spent in the middle parts of both states), but I spent much of my adult life in Trenton, New Jersey. I moved back to western Kentucky for several years, but have lived in the suburbs of Philadelphia, in a small town with massive traffic, for the past few years. Home for me is definitely a state of mind.


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## Jon M (Jan 25, 2012)

KyleColorado said:


> One Eye and I battled ferociously ...


I bet you did. Haha. Sorry. Mind = gutter.


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## Kyle R (Jan 25, 2012)

^ LOL!


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## dale (Jan 25, 2012)

indianapolis, indiana on the westside. a neighborhood i affectionately refer to as "little tijuana". it's not so bad, though.
mexicans are pretty friendly people. none of the yelling in the streets and high crime i've experienced in other inner city
neighborhoods i've lived. indy's becoming a pretty thriving city, really. i've thought of moving a few times, but then after
thinking about it awhile, i just can't find enough reasons to make me go. not sure if there's anyone other than vonnegut
from here in the writing world....at least well known.


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## JosephB (Jan 25, 2012)

Welcome to Atlanta!

And parties don't stop til' eight in the moanin'

[video=youtube;0yTdEIm_mLU]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yTdEIm_mLU[/video]


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## Like a Fox (Jan 25, 2012)

I was born in Melbourne, Australia, and have lived here my whole life. 


I grew up in Sherbrooke Forest, which is part of The Dandenong Ranges. It's about an hour South East of the city of Melbourne.










When I was 21 I moved away from the hills and closer to the city. I lived on Chapel Street for a year or two. 
I've moved since then but I still work here. It's a very famous street for shopping, cafes, bars and clubs. 






I recently moved into a house behind the biggest shopping centre in the Southern Hemisphere.






But I always just say Melbourne is home, because 'Melbourne' pretty much encompasses all these things.
And here's a pretty cool view of the city taken from Brighton beach.


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